beBetter 

Growing up, my brother, Mike, and I had a lot of interesting adventures. One summer, we secretly started building a log fort tucked way back in the woods behind our neighborhood. I’m still not sure who owned the land that we were squatting on, but we teamed up with a few neighborhood kids and soon our fort plans started coming to life. We spent several days sawing, chopping and building our fort, and after about two weeks, we had four walls standing.

Full disclosure, this is a combination of both venting and sharing.  It simply drives me crazy when I see person after person allowing email to manage their day and destroy the power of focus and their effectiveness.  Email alerts and checking email constantly all lead to poor time management and reduce our ability to be outstanding. Email has gone from one of the most effective management and time saving tools to one of our biggest distractions.  We have too much of it and no discipline in how we manage it. 

One of our partners sent me this picture of his deck during the blizzard last week in Washington, D.C., where they got over 30 inches of snow in a little more than 24 hours.  At one point, he sent a short video and it was snowing so hard you could barely see beyond his deck. 

He was anticipating a big snow fall so he started shoveling snow early on, hoping he could stay ahead of it. He really wanted to be able to get the cars out if and when they needed them. But the snow was relentless and never let up and feeling overwhelmed, he lost his focus on keeping ahead. I immediately related to this feeling of being overwhelmed, although our weather had been simply cold and windy. You see, I was feeling overwhelmed at work.   

Recently, a team member shared a funny story with me that also has a great life lesson for us.  

She had recently celebrated her birthday and took some PTO that week to enjoy her love of fishing off the Gulf Coast.  Sounds like a great plan to me.  Since fishing is her favorite hobby, she was extremely excited about getting out on the water. 

Some days I wonder if I even have a clue to what is going on. Nothing like a confidence builder to start today’s blog with, huh? But seriously, do you ever feel that way? Even if we are engaged and focused, with a constantly changing business environment, it’s easy to feel like we have no clue. 

The words “no clue” still ring loudly in my ears and on my behind as I recall the hardest paddling I ever had in school.

Recently, I had the privilege of heading out to southern Louisiana to go speckled trout fishing. I’ve always loved the great outdoors and there’s always been a part of me that feels free once I get in nature and “away from it all”.  

We had three boats and lots of eager fishermen. Now, reflecting on this adventure made it easy for me to see how important maintaining our focus on our objective of catching speckled trout was to our ultimate success. It’s uncanny how similar this fishing trip was to our disciplined focus on our journey of going from good to great.

Last week I introduced you to the ABC’s to Outstanding as we talked about controlling the “A” which is your attitude. Today, let’s focus on the “B.” It stands for Better Focus.

What’s the biggest risk of losing our focus? Wasting our time and our potential.

“One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular. ” - Tony Robbins

The fact is, we can’t multitask; our brains are simply not wired that way. Numerous studies have shown that when we are constantly interrupted, or are attempting to multitask, it will take up to 500% longer to achieve a specific task, and usually with less accuracy. But, if you focus with uninterrupted time, you can do things twice as fast. So, always create time in your day where you are 100% focused on your most important task. Why?

We are all seemingly perpetually busy. We feel stretched as our inbox at work and personal commitments challenge us daily. When we are stretched, we become overwhelmed, and even big projects slip through the cracks. I also know that when feeling stretched, I can let it affect my attitude and my demeanor. I start to hear questions like, "Are you tired?"
 
Certainly, as I have moved up in leadership, feeling stretched has been a constant companion of mine. I have a strong desire to spend time with everyone, and yet I know it’s impossible. Some days it seems that I am just running from one meeting to another without the ability to really stop and make a difference for someone on my team.

An organization’s strategic focus is similar to the sharpness of a knife. A knife is sharp because energy has been focused at the blade. So, the more focused the energy is at the blade, the sharper the knife, the higher the cutting power, and the stronger the knife. If energy is not focused at the blade, we end up with a dull knife, with diminished cutting power – a weaker knife. A dull knife may be good for spreading butter, but if our goal is to cut something tough, then we are going to experience a lot of frustration.

When we try to do too much, it is as if we are trying to sharpen too many knives in our limited time. We juggle between the sharpening of all the different knives, and in the end, not one knife is sharp enough to be useful. We can be much more effective if we spend our time and focused energy sharpening just a few key knives. The more we focus our energy on a few important things, the sharper our knives become.  

One of the crucial building blocks in leadership is RESULTS. This building block is very important, because it represents one of the things elite leaders must value very dearly: high performance. We will only build great teams if we pursue our journey of greatness by valuing high performance. 

It’s my experience that people confuse working hard and being loyal with high performance. “I work more hours than Miss So So and she got the promotion.” “I’ve been here longer than he has been, and he still got the promotion before me.” Have you ever heard any of this in the break room? Run away from that conversation, even if it means you are talking to yourself!