08 Mar Consistent Purposeful Action – Part 2
How Can We Establish Priorities?
Christopher Hart here for Transforming Lives Coaching and Consulting in beautiful sunny Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. So we’re coming to you this morning continuing our series called Lead Strong, how do we as leaders lead people in a very strong environment, how do we set that environment to be strong leaders so that we can influence, which is have the power to affect people’s character and actions, as well as help people get what they want when they want it. So we’re following up with our video from yesterday so if you haven’t watched that video and you’re watching today’s video please make sure you go back and watch yesterday’s video because this is Part Two and there’s even going to be a Part Three tomorrow.
So we talked about how do we work into getting people into purposeful and consistent action, and we looked at priorities. I believe the number one element to all lack of success is distraction, people get distracted. And why do they get distracted? I believe they get distracted because they put an equal level of priority to all tasks and that usually shows up in the way of what we call a ‘To-Do Task’ or a ‘To-Do List’. People make to-do lists and they just itemized things from top to bottom based off of top of mind awareness, not any sort of level of priority. So what we looked at is establishing some priorities in your life or in your business. Yesterday I showed you mine that are in my life, it’s God, health, family, business, fun, and wealth; and I shared with you that those are the priorities in precedence, God is first and foremost in my life, He drives everything. My health is next of importance because without my health I can’t do the things that I want to do in life. And then comes my family, my family supersedes everything else after that; and then my business. My business is designed for me to earn and work for money so that I can do the things that are important in my life, in the God realm, in the health realm and in my family realm, et cetera. And then after that it’s fun, I just found that at some point my life I was achieving at the level that I wanted to achieve but I just… there was something missing. When mentor of mine had evaluated my life and what I was doing he realized where is Chris showing up like how are you serving Chris? You’re serving everybody else, you’re serving your family, you’re serving your God, you’re serving your business, you’re serving your future, what about serving you and what drives you? And I realized that fun was the missing element. And then the last piece is wealth, and wealth is …my business is me working for my money and then my wealth is my money working for my future.
Those are my six categories of priorities. You can do that for your life or you can do it for your business. If you’re doing it for your business like what are the areas of absolute priority in your business? And so I asked you guys if you join me yesterday to do an exercise yesterday afternoon or yesterday evening to do it for yourself so that we can walk through the next steps. And the next step after identifying your priorities is understanding what vision you want for each one of those categories. See it’s interesting, I work with a number of people in business coaching and business consulting and I ask them, one of the first things I ask them is “Hey do you have a vision and a mission statement?”
“Oh yeah absolutely. You know that that’s number one, that’s key.” Anyway any sort of business one-on-one classes, you talk to people from the SBA (Small Business Administration), if you get any consulting from them, everyone tells you one of the first elements of establishing a business is creating that vision for your business. What is it ultimately you want to achieve for your business? And then from there it’s about a mission, like how am I going to achieve this?
You can take it a few steps further and add elements of values and beliefs and perspectives et cetera, we’ll just call that acronym an VBP. But when you’re looking at your life or business or sub elements of your life, whatever your priorities are, you then have to establish a vision like “Ultimately what do I want to achieve?” Like my vision for my life in the God realm is to live a Christ-like life, that’s ultimately what I’m striving for.
What do I want for my health? I want supreme health, I want age-defying health, meaning when all my measurements get measured and they come up with my … I don’t know they call it … catabolic age or something like that, that my catabolic age or whatever that terminology is. So I’ll be turning 40 years old December 16th and I want to roll into that day feeling the absolute best I’ve ever felt in my life. Why? Because I know most you guys are going to call me, text me, Facebook message me and say “How does it feel to be 40?” And my answer to you is “It feels freaking awesome. I’m in the best shape of my life.” So that’s my vision.
Visions And Goals
I’ve got visions for each one of those six categories, and then from there you have to establish some goals. You can establish some near-term goals like I did with my fitness in particular. You know one of my fitness goals was to bench press more than my body weight, and I weigh about 212 pounds, and I’ve got a coach… strength and conditioning coach I’ve been working with him for months now and he’s really pushed me and helped me to achieve and even exceeded those goals. So you know one of the awesome things about having a coach is that you get to exceed your goals eight weeks early like I was able to do with mine last week. So big shout out to Keith Hare. If you’re in the Myrtle Beach area and you’re looking for a strength and conditioning coach that guy is where it’s at, he drives results. So thank you Keith for that.
So back on point here is that you have to establish a vision and then you have to have goals, they can be incremental goals of like short term, they could be three months, six months, 12 months. And then maybe you want to even look at some lateralized goals like “What do I want for the next 12 months… three years, five years, 10,15, 20?” You can take it as far out as you want, but you want those goals to be congruent with the vision that you have for your life, just like my goal this year is congruent with my ultimate vision of supreme health, but more importantly I set out a goal for 2016 that on my 40th birthday I wanted to feel in the best shape of my life and I want my numbers, my catabolic age to be less than that of my physical age.
So when we start doing this what it does is it helps us get focused, it helps us understand what are the elements that I need to focus on in order to make that a reality?
Tasks Of Focus
So next step to that once we have vision and goals is understanding the tasks of focus, TOF, tasks of focus. What are the activities that I must focus on in order to make those things a reality? You see if I want to lift, chest press, whatever, more than my body weight, well there are some very key element things that I must focus on, bench pressing right. Bench pressing, introducing more and more weight; having a very specific routine. And fortunately I have a coach that helps me do that so I don’t even have to think about that, but he and I had discussions about what that looks like, I trust him and I just show up and I do.
In the God realm of my life to live a Christ-like life, there are some very key element things that I must focus on and those are my tasks of focus. Inside that are two key areas that we can nub this down to, I call them ‘critical tasks and vital tasks.’
Critical tasks, I believe there’s about three to five critical tasks that are critical to goal accomplishment. You get to define what they are, there’s no X plus Y equals Z formulaic way in which this is done. You look at your area of priority in your life or your business, establish that vision, establish some goals and then ask yourself what are absolutely critical. So we were talking in the last couple of videos about some business planning stuff in the industry of real estate and we had our economic model where we talked about appointments, agreement, and then contracts and closings, et cetera.
Well if I’m going to look at those elements of tasks, what is absolutely critical? Maybe I need to lead generate, I need to do some… I need to establish some follow up systems that I’m executing on a consistent basis, so I can define some very critical tasks, critical to goal accomplishment. And the way I look at them is if I do these tasks I massively increase my chances of achieving that goal, and if I don’t do them, I massively decrease my chances of goal accomplishment. So you know Wednesday is usually the day that I work out with my trainer and we do chest that day so if I feel sorry for myself on Wednesdays and I’m constantly canceling or I’m not going in there with a strong mindset and allowing my body to feel the best that it can so I can train the best that I can, then I’m going to massively decrease my ability to achieve my goal. Those are critical tasks that I focus on in that area of priority of my life.
And then the next one is vital, so we have critical and vital. And so when we look at critical, like I said there’s usually three to five, I try not to focus on any more than five. You may have six or seven, whatever the case is, don’t get wrapped up in the semantics of it. But I like to focus on no less than three, no more than five, it just helps me stay focused. Build your own model if you need to. But inside those five tasks there’s one, there’s one task that I believe is absolutely vital to your goal accomplishment.
We’re going to look at the business area that we talked about, setting appointments so that we can meet with people to get them to hire us and get the agreements… buyer seller agreements, get contracts, get closings, get money, et cetera. Well guess what? If I identify like lead generation and follow-up systems et cetera, et cetera, my vital task that I understand is like absolutely vital, it’s just like your vital signs, if you’re doing this you’re measuring “Hey I’m still alive, my heartbeat is still going,” that’s measuring my vital signs.
“Oh you have high blood pressure, you have a problem.” Or “Hmmmm”, you know flat lined, you’re dead. Those are vital, and in that area guess what? Lead generation to me would be absolutely vital, if I don’t do it … you’re dead. If I’m inconsistent in it or my results are going to track the health, if my heart beats like this on my vital signs, something’s probably wrong pal. Just like my blood pressure, systolic/diastolic they measure both of those, it lets them know if there’s a problem, if you’re on the path to dying or if you’re in good health. Well same thing, your vital tasks, if you’re measuring those vital tasks and you’re doing them, or if you’re doing them and you’re focused on them and you don’t let anything else get in the way other than your critical tasks then you should be able to determine are you flat lining, is your business hyper? Are you just kind of moving along?
So we have critical and vital tasks, and so when we understand what those critical and vital tasks are based off of our goals that are nothing more than a segment of the vision that we have for that particular area of our life or business and we understand how they all fall suit into prioritization, then and only then can we really start operating at peak performance and achieving at a high level. You see there was a comment yesterday on my video that I want to address. Someone asked me a great question, they asked me about my perspective of to-do tasks, and the perspective that the individual had… and this is not to call anyone out but I think it’s something we need to address… the perspective of to-do tasks, the individual said that as long as they’re in conjunction with your goals then there shouldn’t be a critical perspective on it, meaning me being critical on it.
But I want to be very clear about something, I am very very very critical on to-do tasks because I understand what to-do tasks are. When there’s tasks that are clearly and directly related to goal accomplishment, that’s critical and vital task, that’s completely different than to-do. To-do is “I got to take my daughter to dance after this video … I got to go get a haircut … I have to wash my car, change my oil, pick up my dry cleaning, get ready for a gala dance.” Those are all the things that I have to do today. They’re not critical or vital to any sort of goal accomplishment they’re just what we call the “whirlwind,” stuff that makes the world go around. And here’s the thing guys, if you’re just focusing on the to-do list stuff which is the whirlwind, makes the world go round, all you’re going to do is just chase your tail. So we want to get out of to-do list focus and we want to get into critical and vital task list focus based off of our goals in alignment with our vision that are clearly identified to a area of priority of our life.
Let’s Get Accountable
So hopefully this information brought you some value to either your business or your life today. The next video we’re going to cover is how do we get even more purposeful at great critical task, vital task. “Chris you know my back is out … I have no time, how do I fit all this stuff in?” Well I’m going to show you. I’m going to show you how you get uber purposeful in controlling yourself through time by controlling your time and not letting everything control you.
So thanks for joining me today. Just one quick reminder, just remember something guys, God loves you, so do I. Hopefully we’re bringing value to your life. Lean in, press in, start implementing some of this stuff, and if you have any questions please feel free to hit me up on the comments. You can private message me, or you can email me at chris@transforminglivescoaching.com.
About the author:
Over the course of 8 years, Christopher Hart went from an enlisted Private First Class to a Commissioned Officer-Captain. In 2005, Christopher chose to move on from his military career to focus on starting a family and embarking in the world of entrepreneurship. Christopher’s passion is now working to help others be the BEST version of themselves and helping them Lead others to the same!
To learn more about Christopher Hart or to get in touch with him regarding a coaching program you can email him at Chris@TransformingLivesCoaching.com
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