Leading The Week Off Right

22 Mar Leading The Week Off Right

What does Monday Motivation look like for leaders? 

Christopher Hart here from sunny Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and representing Transforming Lives Coaching and Consulting.  So here it is Monday morning and we are continuing our series called Lead Strong of how to build strong leaders in not only our businesses and our organizations but also in our life as well.

How Do We Set Priorities?

So up to this point we’ve done a number of videos just kind of walking the path of leadership, laying the foundation of understanding, and then how that path starts to be walked through various different elements of leadership.

Most recently our videos have discussed how do we lead people into purposeful and consistent action; looking at the how and the why and then how that breaks down into understanding what your priorities are, and from your priorities that you establish either in your business and/or your life we then identify a vision for that particular area that’s a priority; and then establish some goals.  And then once we establish those goals then we look at the elements of activities like what is it that we need to do on a consistent basis in order to achieve those goals.  And then the activities we looked at were identifying critical and vital tasks, and then the critical tasks is anywhere… I like to say no less than three but no more than about five or six tasks that are absolutely critical to the goal accomplishment.  And then there’s that one task in those three to five that I believe are absolutely vital, it’s the non-negotiable, like that one task, if you accomplish that task, could easily be the reason why you significantly increase your chances of hitting your goals.

So we identified those critical and those vital tasks and then we walked through how do we block time, like how do we start to control ourselves through time.  Well one of the first things we do is we take the amount of time that we’re going to allocate to either our week or our day, whatever period of time you’re focused on whatever area of your life, either a sub element of your life or your life as a whole.

And then we walked through how do those critical and vital tasks get put onto our calendar.  We identified a frequency, like how frequent are we going to do this particular task, and then how much time do we need to allocate to that particular task; is this going to be something that’s 30 minutes daily?  Is it two hours a day?  Is it one hour, twice a week?  That’s the time and the frequency component that we focus on.  And then once we understand all that, the critical, the vital task, the time and the frequency, then we can start putting those on a blank calendar because once they go into a blank calendar the reason why the calendar is blank is because there’s nothing competing with those tasks and as long as we have those critical and vital tasks on our calendar and nothing’s competing with them then wouldn’t it just makes sense that we can be uber purposeful at that point?  Because nothing’s competing with the things that are critical to goal accomplishment, vital to goal accomplishment.

What To Do And What Not To Do.

And then we looked at the elements of the whirlwind, like the to-do stuff, all that stuff that still needs to get done, and that’s just starts to fill in our white space on our calendar. So we walked that piece, and hopefully those that have been following these videos that you’ve been walking that piece for yourself in your own life or your own business and/or imparting and sharing these videos with others, the ones that you lead so they can do the same.

Today’s video is talking about, or is headlined Leading The Week Off Right.  So today is Monday and I believe Monday is the most critical day of the week, reason being is how you start your week is going to set the pace, it’s going to set the tempo for how your week pans itself out as well as what Friday looks like, for some maybe it’s Saturday; but what we’re looking at is how do we start the week off right?

First and foremost we understand and we’ve mentioned this in previous videos that all success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics.  You see what we understand about that with regard to our week is that there’s many people that wake up Monday morning and they go “Boo Hoo it’s Monday…ahh Monday!”  They’re on Facebook with their cup of coffee, they’re like, “I need a double mocha choko, whatever because it’s Monday.”

See right off the bat if you have the quote/unquote “Monday Blues” and you’re whining about Monday and you’re on social media complaining about Monday, guess what?  You’re not going to succeed.  You see it all starts up here so you’ve got to win the game up here before you ever win it out on the field, every champion will tell you that.  And so what does it look like?  It looks like starting the week off right in your head and understanding that “You know what?  Yeah Monday!  Today is the first day of the week.  Today is going to set the stage for the life that I’ve designed for myself.  I’m in control; I get to go do what needs to happen.  I get to focus on critical and vital tasks that once I do them Friday is going to look awesome and it’s going to make the weekend even better.”  Just that little shift in psychology can easily transform your ability to be successful.  So right off the bat when we say “Leading the week off right,”  what does it look like for leaders?  Lead by self, we talk about that in the levels of leadership, that’s  Level Two leadership, lead by self you, you’ve got to start within your own head, and then you have to implement that into your organization.  When you come to work today are your people moping around, “You know I watched the game last night …it went into overtime …boo hoo hoo.”  You know if you allow that as a leader, if you allow your people to mope around, guess what?  You can’t hold them accountable to their goals on Friday, that’s your fault.

What Is Your Monday Motivation?

So one of the first things I’ll tell you is whatever organization you’re leading, whether it’s yourself, your family, charitable organizations, et cetera, Monday is critical, and what’s critical about Monday is how you set your mind, your mind set. Why?  Because where you set your mind is where your sail is going to take you, just like in sailing right. The wind is blowing from the left and you set your sail into the wind it’s going to take you where the wind’s blowing.  If you set it on the opposite direction of the wind, basically the sail is going into the wind perpendicular, you’re not going to go anywhere, and that’s the whole “Oh it’s Monday… the Monday blues…boo hoo!”

Get excited, you’re in control of your life, and if you’re not then there’s some decisions that you need to make, and maybe I can help you out with that. But that’s not what this is about.  This is about understanding that whatever your circumstances are in life, whether you work for someone else or you work for yourself, or maybe don’t work at all, understand something, you should have some goals. You should hopefully have walked through the last couple of videos and understood what’s a priority in your life and you’ve identified the critical and the vital tasks that will lead you to your goals, that will allow you to experience the vision for yourself.  Well every Monday you wake up you get the opportunity to take control of yourself and go make that happen, you’re no longer a victim;  you’re no longer under the constraints of someone else’s mindset.  Someone else, some other miserable individual conditioned the world to believe Monday is boo-hoo, and everyone just follows suit because that’s just what we do, that’s how our program is shaped, our environment.  So we have to start there.

The second thing …second place we have to focus on is that schedule, we created a schedule, we walked through that in the last video of how we take our critical and vital tasks, time and frequency, put them on our calendar, fill in the white space with the to-do stuff, and we have that ready for Monday morning.  You see here it is, it’s Monday morning, that’s your boss this week.  If you haven’t pulled that out, if you haven’t created it, how do you expect to succeed this week?  Do you think success is just going to be given to you?  Sorry. I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news and I don’t lead by fear but there’s also reality of life, and the reality of leadership.  And the reality of success is nobody’s going to give you success.

Here’s the truth of reality of success:  People don’t want you to succeed so you have to be even more purposeful on how you need to succeed in your life, and that starts with having your schedule and looking at it today and going “Hey what do I need to do today that’s critical?  What do I need to do today that’s vital to me accomplishing my goals not just today but consistently over five days, six days, seven days, so that at the end of the week I go “Dang!  Man that was an awesome week.”

So you don’t become that person in church when someone goes “Hey man how’s it going?”

You’re like,  “Yeah its going okay.”  You see people say it’s going okay because they just live okay lives, they make okay decisions, they don’t have a plan, they don’t have a vision, they don’t have a goal, they haven’t identified what’s important in their life so they’re just kind of just chasing their tail, kind of like the Israelites in the desert waiting for that leader to show up, waiting for God to bring them Moses to lead them out of the desert.

See God gave us freewill guys and the free will is to do what needs to happen in order to live out His plan as well as what you’d like to see show up in your life.  That’s the great part about our lives, every day we get to wake up and make it happen.  What’s it?  Whatever you want it to be, and if you don’t define what it is someone else will.  You see you’re either living your life, your vision, your goals, or you’re living someone else’s vision, life and goals, and it starts on Monday.  And what that looks like is that calendar that’s defining your critical and vital tasks that’s going to literally walk you through the day so you don’t ever have to worry about “What should I be doing now?  It’s 1:00 o’clock, I’ve got about an hour and a half, I wonder what I need to do?”

What you need to do is look at your schedule and identify what’s critical and vital that needs to happen in that block of time because you’ve already identified it, now you just need to go make it happen.  You see leaders that’s what you need to do for yourself and that’s what you need to be doing for your people.  If your week starts, if you’re a leader and you have anyone under your tutelage, if someone is under your tutelage in an organization, a business or life, whatever, what they’re looking at you is you’re the person, you are the Moses…you’re the Moses that’s going to lead them out of the desert cause all they’re doing is walking in circles confused, you see you’re their leader.

How you can lead them is by walking them through these steps, allowing them the ability to have that schedule.  So you don’t need to tell them what to do, their schedule needs to tell them what to do.  The only thing you need to do as a leader is check every one schedule and make sure that their schedule reflects their goals.  And how do you know how it reflects their goals?  You walk them through those steps, they’ve identified their priorities, their visions, their goals, their critical and vital, time, frequency, all the things that we keep repeating.  And you just have to look at it and go “Hmm, you look like you’re going to have an uber purposeful week.”

Who Is Accountable?

Now we talked about some things that are going to show up, life’s going to show up, obstacles are going to show up, there’s forces out there that don’t want you to succeed.  So where your leadership shows up is that you lead them on a daily basis, there’s going to be some systems of measurement that we as leaders need to impart to condition our people, people just don’t have this and they go “Woo I’m just going to go be uber purposeful today and this week!”  We have to condition that.  We’re going to start talking about what does that conditioning process look like, that process of what we talked about accountability where it can start daily but at minimum weekly.  You see if you come into Friday and you don’t hit your goals then it should be nothing more as a leader you pull out someone schedule you go, “Alright your whole schedule identified all your critical and vital tasks what showed up?”  Remember accountability, skill set and mindset, is there a skill you didn’t have to accomplish this? Was it mindset?  Did you wake up on Monday morning going, “Oh boo hoo,” or did you wake up on Wednesday go… you have the sniffles?  “I got the sniffles, I’m going to stay in bed all day and I’m going to drink tea and catch up on my Walking Dead series.”

Or did you stay up too late watching Monday Night Football and Tuesday morning you going to sleep in a little bit extra late while someone else goes out and gets your appointments and then you wonder why that person’s successful?

See guys we can’t live like, we’ve got to be purposeful and we have to do it consistently, and how you do that is identifying what’s a priority in your life, creating a vision for that area that’s going to identify some goals, short-term, mid-term, long-term goals, and then to understand the critical and vital tasks and give them a time and frequency of how they need to be executed; and then blocking that time.

And then the last video we talked about who, like who do we block because people are going to show up throughout your day, they’re great people, they may have a purpose, they may have value in your life but some times during the day how and when they show up prevents us from being purposeful, so you need to block them at that moment.  Some people just need to be blocked altogether out of your life because they’re just sucking energy, they’re energy sucks.  Rate them on a scale of one to ten, ten you have a high suck factor, one you have a low suck factor.  If you can evaluate people in your life…and it’s not easy, it’s not one of those things that you can just sit down and be like “I’m okay with this person being a ten and I got to get them out of my life or spend less time with them because they’re the reason why I’m getting so much energy sucked from me and the reason why I’m not hitting my goals.”

Take What You Have Learned And Apply It NOW!

So those are some tips for you to how to start the week off right for yourself and as well as for leaders.  So leaders here’s the thing, if you’re walking into your office this morning, maybe Step One is going back and getting a hold of these videos, these last couple of videos and getting your people to watch them.  Take a step back and take two steps forward, you all think you need to run into your office and just start beating at the phones and running around like chickens because that’s what we’re supposed to do on Monday, but if you’re not focused, if you’re not purposeful, if you’re not goal-oriented an action-oriented rather than distraction oriented or whirlwind oriented, you’re going to lose this week.

So here’s what I’ll tell you, go back in your organizations, either review these videos or be the person that teaches them this stuff, give them time today, tonight, this week, to walk through these activities.  Maybe it’s next Monday you start doing these exercises, or maybe it’s today, maybe you say “Enough is enough.  Today is the day that we as an organization are going to start being a purposeful.  We’re going to do it consistently so that we can all finish out the year strong to set that stage of momentum that we need for 2017 that makes 2017 your best year yet.”  And it all starts with how you start out on Monday.

So hopefully this information brought you some value, we’re going to continue to build on it so stay tuned.  Typically around 8:30 every morning Eastern Standard Time here on Facebook Live we’re just talking about some elements that can make you a better leader for yourself and for others.  So hopefully this brought value to your business and your life and before we get ready to get our day started and really be uber purpose.  Remember one thing, you’re a child of God and God loves you and so do I.  Have a great rest of your day. God loves you.  Take care.

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