It’s important to look at how you spend your time to determine how to save time. One question to look at is how much time you spend putting out fires.

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Pause and reflect

Certain jobs seem to require more reaction than others. The closer you are to the customer, the more you may respond reactively. If your direct charges are on the front line, you may spend more time reacting.

In those cases, you need to allow for more reactive time as you plan out your day. However, bigg goal-getters try to minimize the amount of time they spend reacting.

So if a large portion of your day is spent responding to situations, pause and reflect. Ask yourself what you can do about it.

It’s possible that nothing can be done about it, but in many cases there is more in your control than you might think. It’s about moving from a reactive mode to a proactive mindset.

That’s the higher order of personal leadership. As a bigg goal-getter, you want more in your tool kit than just problem-solving capabilities. You also want to be a problem dissolver. Here are three ways to do that:

Elimination

The best way to dissolve a problem is to never have it in the first place. Look ahead and try to discover potential problems. If you think it’s likely that you will encounter that problem, dissolve it by eliminating it in advance.

Many future problems can be handled this way. For example, leaders who establish clear expectations for their people eliminate many problems before they ever happen.

Preparation

The next best way to dissolve a problem is to have an answer in mind before you need it. You may have thought about these problems upfront, but it’s more effective to prepare for its eventuality than to eliminate it in advance.

A great example of this is contingency plans. You have a path you’re going down and you’ve determined in advance it’s your best path. However, as new evidence becomes available, you realize that you need to adjust. Planning that adjustment in advance helps you respond quickly if the time comes.

Prevention

Some problems just can’t be anticipated in advance. However, bigg goal-getters dissolve them by solving the problem now and preventing it from reoccurring in the future.

We have a tendency to rush to solve a problem, but oftentimes, with just a little more effort, we can keep it from happening again. Take time to figure out why it happened. Reverse engineer your process to see if you can prevent it in the future.

As the saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The best time to start prevention is right after you’ve found the cure. You’re motivated then!

Use that motivation to your advantage to shift your thinking away from solving problems to dissolving them. It leads to bigg success!

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Thank you so much for reading our post today. Please join us next time as we discuss an emotion that leaders must control. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00432-070809.mp3

Related posts

Have A Problem? SOLVE IT!

Solve All Of Your Problems With This Ancient Chinese Secret

It’s important to look at how you spend your time to determine how to save time. One question to look at is how much time you spend putting out fires.

___

___

Pause and reflect

Certain jobs seem to require more reaction than others. The closer you are to the customer, the more you may respond reactively. If your direct charges are on the front line, you may spend more time reacting.

In those cases, you need to allow for more reactive time as you plan out your day. However, bigg goal-getters try to minimize the amount of time they spend reacting.

So if a large portion of your day is spent responding to situations, pause and reflect. Ask yourself what you can do about it.

It’s possible that nothing can be done about it, but in many cases there is more in your control than you might think. It’s about moving from a reactive mode to a proactive mindset.

That’s the higher order of personal leadership. As a bigg goal-getter, you want more in your tool kit than just problem-solving capabilities. You also want to be a problem dissolver. Here are three ways to do that:

Elimination

The best way to dissolve a problem is to never have it in the first place. Look ahead and try to discover potential problems. If you think it’s likely that you will encounter that problem, dissolve it by eliminating it in advance.

Many future problems can be handled this way. For example, leaders who establish clear expectations for their people eliminate many problems before they ever happen.

Preparation

The next best way to dissolve a problem is to have an answer in mind before you need it. You may have thought about these problems upfront, but it’s more effective to prepare for its eventuality than to eliminate it in advance.

A great example of this is contingency plans. You have a path you’re going down and you’ve determined in advance it’s your best path. However, as new evidence becomes available, you realize that you need to adjust. Planning that adjustment in advance helps you respond quickly if the time comes.

Prevention

Some problems just can’t be anticipated in advance. However, bigg goal-getters dissolve them by solving the problem now and preventing it from reoccurring in the future.

We have a tendency to rush to solve a problem, but oftentimes, with just a little more effort, we can keep it from happening again. Take time to figure out why it happened. Reverse engineer your process to see if you can prevent it in the future.

As the saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The best time to start prevention is right after you’ve found the cure. You’re motivated then!

Use that motivation to your advantage to shift your thinking away from solving problems to dissolving them. It leads to bigg success!

___

___

Thank you so much for reading our post today. Please join us next time as we discuss an emotion that leaders must control. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00432-070809.mp3

Related posts

Have A Problem? SOLVE IT!

Solve All Of Your Problems With This Ancient Chinese Secret

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As bigg goal-getters, we often want to change things too fast as leaders and even in our personal lives. We think we need to lose weight so we jump into an exercise routine and completely change our diets. It’s too much and we end up right back where we started.

We have to be especially careful with change when it affects others. Like in Chuck’s case, any changes he makes will affect one or more of his employees.

Two of our rules for change here at Bigg Success are:

“That’s the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t mean it’s the best.

“That’s the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t make it wrong.

Change is essential to make improvements in our lives and our businesses. We want to focus on the changes that will make the greatest impact given their cost. When we talk about cost, we mean your investment of time and money – two of the five elements of bigg success. 

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Get out the paint roller

We heard a suggestion some time ago from a person who had learned to manage change effectively. He said that when he takes on a new leadership position, the first and only change he makes is to paint a single wall of his new office.

He feels like he’s changed something. It relieves that pressure. Everyone around him can see that he changed something. In fact, they often ask, “Why did you paint that wall? Why that color? Why just one wall?” It makes them curious.

You may make a different, but similarly insignificant, change. By doing this, you’re really buying time to find out what is and isn’t working while subtly signaling that change will happen.

Once you find out what isn’t working, you can determine which changes to make in what order based on their impact on your organization … or your life!

What are your suggestions for Chuck?

You can share that with us by leaving a comment below, calling us at 888.455.BIGG or sending us an e-mail at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com.

Thanks Chuck for sharing your bigg challenge with us and good luck with your new gig! And we thank you for reading our post today.

Join us next time as we share a remedy for one of the most discouraging thoughts you can have.

Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00362-033109.mp3

Related posts

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Making Change Work

Does Haste Still Make Waste?

(Image in today's post by anitasweb)

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I have to tell you, Seth, that your book The Dip was very influential in my decision to leave radio to build my own brand. You talked about how the industry forgot they were in the relationship business, not just the radio business. That really helped take me over the top and I said, “Yes, I’m going to start Bigg Success!”

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I’m so glad to hear that and Tribes is going to help you even more because I talk a lot about the difference between having faith in a vision, faith in the future, or faith in the content about what you do and abandoning the rules or the religion of the status quo.

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What is a tribe?

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We love this book, Seth. We see some of the themes from your previous books and you pull it all together, which is fantastic. Why don’t you start by telling us what a “tribe” is?

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A tribe is a group of people that are connected by a common goal, a common language, and common rituals. Usually they have a leader and a movement – they’re trying to make something happen. A tribe is very different than a crowd. A crowd is just a bunch of people. A crowd is people coming to your Grand Opening Sale, people clicking through to your web site, or people looking at your ads on TV. Marketers love crowds, but they have to earn a tribe, which is a totally different thing.

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Because a tribe interacts with each other and that’s what starts creating the movement.

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That’s exactly right. Tribes are always bigger than the leader himself. We can look at some famous ones, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Clearly it was the movement and the tribe that made the difference, not the person at the front of the room. We see tribes in everything from marathon runners or triathletes all the way to the Red Hat Ladies, the fifty- or sixty-year old women you’ll see around the world at cafes or the women who have now taken up roller derby and do it in the evenings instead of watching TV.

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Engagement comes from quality, not quantity

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One of the things in your new book goes back to the crowd theme. It’s the quality, not the quantity, that matters.

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Exactly. What we’re seeing is there’s a guy named Gary Vaynerchuk, who has his own TV show about wine. Gary has a tribe. It’s only a couple of hundred thousand strong, so it’s tiny compared to what any TV network would want. But Gary has benefited enormously, both in terms of revenue and public appearances but also in terms of his impact on society and the people he wants to reach. It’s far more effective than if he had a spot on The Today Show.

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In your book, you point out something about Gary that I thought was very interesting. What he does is narrate his tribe’s passion. He doesn’t push it on them; he just leads the passion.

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That’s right. Almost every tribe was there before you got there to lead it. Almost all the things that human beings want to do, they’ve already figured out. What they’ve been waiting for is someone to connect them and give them a voice. My friend, Jacqueline Novogratz, runs the Acumen Fund, a very important philanthropic venture out of New York. She has trouble finding people who all along believed there was a better solution to the developing world. Once she finds them, all she has to do is point them in the right direction and they’re eager to get on board. It’s not about persuading the undecided; it’s about connecting the committed.

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Seth is also the founder of Squidoo, where you can find a special page about Tribes.

Next time, we’ll continue our conversation with Seth. We’ll learn what pushed Seth to become a tribe leader. He’ll also tell us about the power of one. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00253-102908.mp3

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Seth Godin on Tribes: Part 2

Seth Godin on Tribes: Part 3

We had some fun with sound effects on The Bigg Success Show today. You can read our summary here, but you might have more fun listening!

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With Halloween approaching, we felt we should warn you about a monster you may not know about. This monster lives off of your most precious resource – time. It’s downright frightening how much of our time can be wasted.

See if you can relate to any of these haunting situations:

Chatty co-worker

You’re working on that bigg project. You reach a point where you just seem stuck. Maybe getting away from your desk will help. So you get up to stretch your legs and grab a cup of coffee. You’re in the break room when that chatty co-worker walks in. Fifteen minutes later, you’re finally back at your desk.

You’ve been bitten by Count Clockula!

He lives off wasted time, sometimes using other people to feed his ravenous appetite.

E-mail alerts

You’re busy working at your computer. You see the alert that your friend just sent you an e-mail. You can’t resist. You have to see what it is. It’s a fun video. Well, you might as well watch it now. Wow, it’s funny. Better e-mail your friend. Five minutes later, you’re back to work.

Count Clockula got ya again!

He sucks your time away by tempting you with things that are appealing. They seem like more fun than the important things you need to work on.

Lost keys

You’re running late for work. You rush into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee for the road. You grab your laptop bag. Your keys! Where are your keys? You can’t find them anywhere. You look everywhere. Ten minutes later, you find them underneath yesterday’s mail.

Count Clockula strikes again!

By keeping you from paying attention to seemingly little things, he can suck away a lot of your time.

Misplaced files

You have a meeting in five minutes and you can’t find the file you need. Where did you put that file? Is it in this stack? No. How about this one? No. You keep looking. If you don’t find it soon, you’ll just have to go without it. Ah, there it is – at the bottom of that overflowing “In” box.

Closely related to the last issue, Count Clockula thrives on disorganization.

Meetings

You went to yet another meeting. The project leader was late. Then he didn’t keep the group on track. The conversation just floated from one issue to another without accomplishing anything.  

Count Clockula sinks his teeth in again. He thrives on dead time – where groups of people are completely unproductive. 

Media

You have a major report due in a couple of weeks. As you were doing some research for it, you found a great site full of information. You spent a lot of time there. Sure, it was still research, but it was more than you needed for the project.

Count Clockula flies again! Sometimes he overwhelms you with his charms.

Lack of focus

You don’t really have a sense of direction. Sure you think about your goals near the end of every year. But you don’t keep them in front of you like you should.

It’s the worst bite Count Clockula can deliver.

How can you allocate your most precious resource effectively if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish?

Word of warning

We’d be remiss if we didn’t warn you about one more thing. Unlike other vampires, Count Clockula doesn’t just come out at night – he’s out all the time. Beware!

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Next time, we’ll chat with Seth Godin about his fantastic new book, Tribes. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00252-102808.mp3

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