Secrets to Sustainable Success!

We live in digital time; our days are carved up by bits and bytes. We celebrate breadth rather than depth, quick reaction more than considered reflection. We skim across the surface, alighting for brief moments at dozens of destinations but rarely remaining for long at one. We race through our lives without pausing to consider who we really want to be or where we really want to go. We’re wired up but we’re melting down!

Most of us are just trying to do the best we can. When demand exceeds our capacity, we begin to make expedient choices that get us through our days and nights, but take a toll over time. We survive on too little sleep, wolf down fast foods on the run, fuel up with coffee and cool down with alcohol and sleeping pills. Faced with relentless demands at work, we become short tempered and easily distracted. We return home from long days at work feeling exhausted and often experience our families not as a source of joy and renewal, but as more demand in an already overburdened life.

We walk around with diaries and to-do lists, iPhones and Blackberries – all designed to help us manage our time better. We take pride in our ability to multi-task and we wear our willingness to put in longs hours as a badge of honour. The term 24/7 describes a world in which work never ends. We use words like obsessed, crazed and overwhelmed not to describe insanity, but instead to characterize our everyday lives! Feeling forever starved for time, we assume that we have no choice but to cram as much as possible into every day. But managing time efficiently is no guarantee that we will bring sufficient energy to whatever it is we are doing.

Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance!!

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Obvious as this seems, we often fail to take into account the importance of energy at work and in our personal lives.  Without the right amount of quantity, quality and focus and force of energy, we are compromised in any activity we undertake.

Every one of our thoughts, emotions and behaviours has an energy consequence, for better or worse.  The ultimate measure of our lives is not how much time we spend on the planet but rather how much energy we invest in the time that we have.

To be fully productive we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self interest.  As part of my 90-Day Personal Productivity Program we work on all 3 important elements of success:

1. Your physical health
2. Your emotional well-being
3. Your mental focus

As this is a video and blog post and not my comprehensive 90-Day Personal Productivity Program, I only have time to share with you a small snippet of the power of this program.  But I’m sure, even if you only implement this one new strategy, I’m about to share with you, it will impact on your personal performance significantly.

Create Daily Success Rituals in Your Life

Two of our rarest and most valuable states we possess are action and intentional repetition.  Why is this so rare? Because most of the things we do in life are unconscious from years and years of habitual activity; they are unintentional.  Most of our habits, routines and rituals have been with us since we were children; they have become our ‘hard wiring’.

You want to make sure that every time you make an effort you’re getting the highest possible return. In other words you want great leverage from your efforts.  The following technique will allow you to get great leverage!

Oprah Winfrey taught me this technique in her book Make the Connection where she speaks about starting every morning with exercise.  She calls it stoking the fire inside.  Another great book that also talks about health and fitness is Body for Life by Bill Phillips.  Bill talks about the most important meal of the day is breakfast because it sets the context for the rest of the day.  For example if you eat a really healthy, nutritious meal at breakfast you more inclined to continue that trend for the remainder of the day.  Or the opposite, if you eat junk food for breakfast when lunch comes you’re more inclined to say “well I started the day bad so I might as well continue down that path and then get back on track tomorrow.”

Oprah talks about starting the day with exercise and Bill talks about also starting the day with a healthy breakfast.  This is all about setting the context, setting the frame for the day.  The first things that you do in your day are your highest leverage opportunities.  Another great author Tony Schwartz who wrote The Power of Full Engagement talks about calling your morning routines “success rituals”.  The word “ritual” has a more powerful inference than habit, duty or routine. Remember: if you don’t have it in habit then you don’t have it! In other words if you’re not doing something regularly then you don’t really have it.

What’s going on inside your inner game, inside your heart, body and mind determines your leverage or lack of leverage in your life.  The highest leverage you can obtain comes from thought. What you think (consciously and unconsciously) directly impacts what you do (actions and behaviours) which directly impacts the results you get.  If you want to change your results, you need to change your thinking.

What I’d like you to do is think about the 3 key areas of life: the emotional, the physical and the logical and I want you to create a morning success ritual that renews, reinvigorates, replenishes, refreshes, re-charges and gets you fired up and strong on the inside!  One of the first things you may have to do is start adjusting your current morning routine which may include waking up a little earlier.  Remember: what you do first thing each day sets you up for the rest of the day.  You need to be able to allocate a minimum of 90 minutes but preferably 120 minutes to your morning success ritual each day.

Here’s is an outline of my morning success ritual:

• I wake up each morning at 8:30am and I immediately drink half a litre of water that is located in my ensuite (so I have to get up to get it!)
• I then go and start my exercise routine at 9:00am which involves 40 minutes of high intensity cardio followed by 20 minutes of weights and stretching.
• And lastly I sit down for 30 minutes to a low GI breakfast which is usually porridge, blueberries sprinkled with protein powder.

I follow this morning success ritual 6 times per week unless I’m travelling or have an early morning meeting which means the morning exercise is done later in the day.  I either take Friday or Saturday mornings off as my rest and recovery day.

This morning success ritual allows me to get centred and clear on how I want my day to go.  It’s counter intuitive that doing exercise can actually make you feel clearer and have more energy throughout the day.  The mind and body are connected in what is known as a cybernetic loop meaning the mind impacts the body and the body impacts the mind.  If you have a healthy strong body you also have a healthy and strong mind.

Your morning success ritual may be different to mine depending on your own personal morning commitments (kids!) and you may need to dramatically change the way you currently do things.  The key is that it MUST be in the morning. This may mean your ritual starts at 6am; it’s whatever it takes!

I’m not a qualified health and fitness professional but here are the all important steps I follow. NB: If you have concerns please seek advice from a health professional:

1. Drink water first up – you’re body is dehydrated and needs to be re-hydrated before anything else.
2. If you’re really sensitive and you need to eat something when you first wake up then make up a small protein shake.  Preferably do your exercise on an empty stomach; you’ll burn fat quicker this way!
3. Take care of your physical body by doing a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise in the morning.  The single best method of emotional renewal is to increase your heart rate.  As you work your body you are also working your emotions.  Doing exercise first thing in the morning gives you 2 bangs for your buck – you get fit and healthy and you feel more energized throughout the day.  Doing exercise later in the day or at night only makes you feel more energized and you’ll find it hard to sleep and wind down.
4. Find a first meal that really works for you.  Ideally it should be as organic and as raw as possible.  Research shows that organic food has double the nutrients or commercial food.  Blueberries are known as a super food. They have high healing properties that helps rebuild in your body; they clear free radicals, have anti-cancer properties and they have a low glycemic index (GI) count.  And lastly protein powder helps reduce hunger pains but just as importantly has many associated health benefits.

Book Review

If you enjoyed this video and blog post and would like to learn more; read The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.  The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available is not. This fundamental insight has the power to revolutionize the way you live. Go and grab yourself a copy of this book, you won’t regret it!

My 90-Day Personal Productivity Program

If you’d like to learn more about my 90-Day Personal Productivity Program then please provide me with your contact details by clicking on this button and I’ll send you a brochure outlining the program in more detail.

Here’s a snippet of what is covered each week:

1. Creating your success rituals
2. Controlling your inner butterflies and emotions
3. Achieving friction free focus
4. Building your focus muscles
5. 60/60/30 work solution
6. Routine rituals that really work
7. Getting out of the grey zone
8. Setting yourself up for success and making high leverage a habit
9. The higher game of productivity
10. Integrating your parts
11. Renewal
12. Your personal transformation

The single purpose of this program is for you to be at least TWICE as productive as you are right now

In Summary here is how the program works:

• For the first week you will receive 5 short “Fast Track” exercises (Monday to Friday, one per day).
• Each week thereafter you will be provided with a written Personal Productivity Session with a set of exercises to complete for the next 12 weeks.
• Each week, accompanying the Personal Productivity Session you receive a 30-minute personal mentoring session with me.
• The program is a total of 18 sessions over 90 days. Over this period, we’re going to focus on adding powerfully new “Success Rituals” to your life, so you AUTOMATICALLY start your days productive.
• If you will follow what I teach you in this program, I believe that it can make a PROFOUND difference in your business success, energy level, and personal satisfaction.

So until next week….. keep struttin your stuff!

Kylie Bartlett – The Web Celeb

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