If you want to be successful in both life and in business, you have to master yourself. If you’re not growing, guess what? Neither is your business. Take your life and your business to the next level by continuing your learning, attacking your distractions, and owning your morning! Click here to download your worksheet!
THE ART OF MASTERING YOURSELF
We are in a seven part series on mastery. What are the different areas of life and business that you’re going to have to master if you want to be successful? In this first video, we’re going to be discussing personal mastery, specifically how you master yourself and why is this so important.
I love what John Maxwell says. He calls it “the Law of the Lid”. He says that each one of us acts like a lid on our organizations. Our businesses will never outgrow us. We need to keep raising our level so that our business can follow suit.
CONTINUAL LEARNING
You need to focus on always learning new things.
What is it that you can learn that you don’t know? Is there a new skill you need to master? Is there a new habit you need to form? Is there something you need to learn to get better at what it is that you want to do? Do you need to learn how to be a better leader? Do you need to learn how to sell more effectively? What is it that you can do to increase your level of learning?
Whatever you do, never stop learning. Never stop growing. If you get to the point where you feel like you know it all, I guarantee you’re on your way down. There’s nothing good that comes from stopping your learning or from thinking you’ve mastered everything that you need to know. All that is is arrogance. All that is is pride. And as the old saying goes “pride comes right before the fall“.
ATTACK YOUR DISTRACTIONS
Look at your life. Look at everything that you’re trying to achieve and my guess is the things that hold you back are distractions. I heard an interesting statistic the other day. There was a study that was done and what they found is this: every year for the last four years, it’s gotten twice as hard to concentrate and to focus at work, meaning that every year, the level of distraction that we face has doubled for four years in a row. Now this year, it’s expected to triple, meaning that it’s only going to get three times harder over the next 12 months for you to focus.
There’s so many distractions and so many things that are vying for our attention. Whether it’s social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Pinterest, all these different things are out there going “hey! Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me!” Then we’ve got our cell phones, TV, email, and other people walking in and knocking on the door going “ya got a minute?” to worry about. All these things are fighting for our attention and fighting for our focus. If we want to be successful, what we have to do in terms of mastering ourselves is attack those distractions.
Identify Them
To do this, we have to start by identifying them. What are your distractions? What are the things that are getting in your way and what can you do to attack those distractions? What are the things that you can do to cut them out to render them almost obsolete in your life?
CONTROL YOUR MORNING
Your morning sets the tone for the rest of the day. If the first thing you do when you wake up is grab your phone and check emails, you’re screwed because all that’s going to do is put you into a reactive state of mind. Instead, what I want you to think about is how can you start to create a routine? How can you start to create discipline in your life so that you aren’t being reactive, but you’re being proactive so that you’re setting the agenda for the day? Don’t let everybody else do it. You need to control those morning hours.
What time are you going to wake up? What time are you going to go to bed so that you can actually wake up at that time? Everybody knows they should wake up earlier but then they go to bed at 1 am and wonder why they can’t wake up earlier. What are you going to do to start taking control of what time you wake up? Are you going to go to the gym? Are you going to read, meditate or pray? Are you going to control those hours in the morning?
You’ve heard me say it before: not all hours in a day are created equal. Your morning hours are way more important than your evening hours or your afternoon hours. Use that time to set the tone for the day.
SET ASIDE TIME FOR BGAS
These are your business generating activities. Your day is going to go to hell in a hand basket at some point. We need to make sure that after we’ve controlled those morning hours, part of what we’ve done is we’ve set aside time to do those activities that generate new business for us. Because if we’re always focusing on our business servicing activities, our BSAs, at some point we won’t have any business to service if we’re not generating new business.
Those are the four things that I want you to do to start mastering and controlling yourself. Learn. Control those morning hours. Attack those distractions and make sure that you’re always prospecting or doing something to generate new business. If you do these things I promise you this: you will have a more successful, more fulfilling business and life.
