One aspect of my role I absolutely love is executive coaching as it allows me to get up close and personal and help an individual work through their challenges, blockages, or opportunities in order for them to be the best they can be in whatever their field of endeavour.
Recently, I was exec coaching with one of my clients and we were talking about ‘burn out’ and how real it is in the workplace and most importantly how to avoid it whilst consistently playing your ‘A’ Game and performing at peak.
And what really sparked my interest was this…
The majority of ideas we talked about were no-brainers, and my conclusion was that the whole is greater than the sum of its part. Improve on these individual things by 1% and the small gains add up to remarkable changes.
So, here are my 15 tops tips which you can implement today…
- Question EVERYTHING you do on a daily basis. Is what I am doing right now worthy of my time? If not why are you doing it!
2. Learn from the past, prepare for the future but live in the present.
- Switch off all phones / tablets / gadgets when not in use. Don’t become a slave to the flashing red light reminding you when you have messages.
- Apply the 8 x 8 rule. Drink 8 x 8 ounce glasses of water a day to keep hydrated. Water helps transport nutrients to give you energy and keep you healthy. If you’re not hydrated, your body can’t perform at its highest level. You may feel tired, have muscle cramps or dizziness.
- Down time is fundamental to your wellbeing. And in fact, some of your best thinking will be done in the quiet space of your downtime, when you’re relaxed, and at peace. Don’t compromise these moments.
- Treat ‘appointments’ in your personal life with even more urgency and importance as you do business meetings.
- Take a good look at your office and work environment. Clean tidy and minimalist or cluttered, messy and dis-organised? Your internal environment (mindset, thinking and actions) will only ever be a reflection of your external environment. Cluttered office = cluttered mind!
- Undertake a clean sweep – sort your office, computer, filing, make a list of all the small things personally and professionally which you keep putting off and just get them done. You will be amazed how this frees up your head space for quality thoughts and action.
- Learn to say ‘NO’ to the unimportant things and then you will have more time to say ‘YES’ to the important and worthy things.
- Questions are the answer – the quality of your life is in direct proportion to the quality of the questions you ask yourself. What questions have you asked yourself today?
- Block in thinking time. It does not need to be long sessions – short sharp focused bite size sessions where you just STOP, REFLECT and THINK.
- Focus on your breathing. When you’re ‘stressed’ what happens to your shoulders and breathing? Shoulders = tense, Breathing = short, shallow breaths. The quickest way to change the ‘state’ you are in is to change your physiology. Simply put…how you use your body. And the quickest way to change how you use your body is change your breathing – switch from short, sharp, shallow breaths to long and deep and slow on a 30 second cycle. Do that 7 times and you’ll soon start to feel more in control, relaxed and back in the driver’s seat!
- Spend time celebrating the day’s achievements and what has gone well.
- Spend time reflecting on what still needs doing and can be improved and after this reflection time put it to bed. Don’t carry it around with you.
- And finally, I want to share with you a quote from James Patterson which is this…. “Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, healthy, friends, and integrity. And you’re keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls…are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.”
Improve on these individual things by 1% and the small gains add up to remarkable changes!