The Inner Edge

When you’re a highly motivated person who’s driven to achieve, you’re often looking for ways to accelerate your progress. Did you know you can also excel-erate the process?

“Excel-eration” is the result when you achieve your vision faster, better, and with more success than you currently do. Right now you do things well. What you need to do is excel.

The hard part is you really can’t excel-erate any more on your own. You need someone bigger, further along, and more experienced than you. Someone who can help you uncover answers you didn’t know you had, or lend you some of theirs when you run out.

There are two people who can do this better than anyone else:

1. Your Coach
2. Your Mentor

Your coaches and mentors give you an edge simply by being sounding boards with good ideas. But they also bring you insight, wisdom, knowledge, and opportunities. You get more than learning when you meet with those who support you in this way. Not just acceleration, but excel-eration.

Don’t have a coach right now? Haven’t got a mentor? Let’s go find you one of each. Go to www.TheInnerEdge.com and click on Worksheets and Audios for your FREE Guide to Exceleration. This two-page set of directions will walk you through the questions you need to find these two important people who can help you move right on into the fast lane.

 

One time I was on a flight from L.A. to Santa Barbara. As we ducked into the tiny puddle-jumper – not at all the jetliner I was expecting – the flight attendants eyed our gear and directed us to put our carry-on luggage on either the left side or the right. As she explained to a puzzled passenger, they were trying to balance the plane.

Balance the plane? I thought. Shouldn’t the engineers have thought of that?! The whole idea of an unbalanced plane freaked me out. I flew white-knuckled in nervous fear that my laptop should have been on the opposite side of the aisle.

I learned later that an airplane not properly balanced will fly poorly, or may not fly at all. As I read online (www.rcmagazine.com, if you’re interested):

If an airplane is nose heavy, it will be sluggish in pitch maneuvers, tend to dive in turns, and make for some pretty fast landings. If it is tail heavy, it will be extremely sensitive to pitch controls, and could snap at a moments notice.

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my airplane to be sluggish or sensitive in “pitch controls,” whatever those are. I most certainly do not want to be that way myself.

As leaders, if we don’t want to be sluggish, make dive turns, have a crash landing, or for goodness’ sake snap at a moment’s notice, we also need to balance ourselves.

Howard Putnam, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, used this advice himself when he created his leadership teams.

To stay grounded you have a very small team of people that are cross functional and that you trust. I always add four or five people that had totally different backgrounds than me. I tried to find the right people so that we could balance each other out.

If you want to learn how to balance your team, the best kind of balance is a “brain trust” – one in which you have people who are hardwired with a variety of skills. My favorite tool for understanding the way people think for the most powerful team is called Emergenetics, which you can find out more about from Emergenetics expert, Chris Cox, at www.amplitudetraining.com.

You can also use the image of “balancing your plane” to round out your life. If you give ten hours to work in a day, you can balance it out with quality time at home so rich that it means twice as much. If you give 110% of your effort to everyone else in your life, choose an area in which you’ll give 110% to yourself.

There are many, many facets to living and leading well. Embrace them all, all at once. Think of it as saving your life.

Did you enjoy this profile? You may be interested in the eCourse, Getting an Edge: 21 Ways World Class Leaders Share Their Secrets for Leading and Living Well. Each of 21 profiles just like this one comes in a separate email – once a day for 21 days. Click here for more information.

It’s a common recommendation for leaders to have a high quality team. But the concept of a team can be quite limiting for leaders who want to really get ahead. While a team can certainly be helpful, the real breakthroughs come when you turn your team into a partnership.

The main shift from a team to a partnership is in the focus. Your personal support team is about you – what you need to achieve and who will help you do it. A partnership is about the objective – the idea or project or results or outcome in which everyone on the team can play a role.

The strongest partnerships have common characteristics.

• Everyone on the team agrees on the goal or outcome.
• Everyone on the team cares about that outcome.
• Everyone on the team gets to use his or her strengths to achieve it.

You can think of the difference between a team and a partnership by comparing individual sports and team sports. In individual sports like tennis, golf, and track, one athlete is encouraged to find his or her personal best with the support of a coach, cheering fans, and fellow athletes they admire. In team sports like football, basketball, and soccer, many team members are all working at the same time together to score.

The benefits of a partnership are noteworthy. You have more ideas, but you need less effort to implement them. You have a greater variety of strengths, so everyone can contribute what they do best. You gain the camaraderie of the group effort, and in the end, you can get more done.

Exercise
To move from a team to a partnership, spend some time thinking about how to apply what you know of personal support teams to the groups of which you’re a part or the groups you want to form. The questions on the Your Partnerships worksheet in The Extension will guide you.

The ideas in this article are drawn from The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership and the accompanying eBook called The Extension. The eBook is designed to give you simple, engaging personal leadership exercises and activities to help you be a better leader, and lead a better life. Get your copy today! Click here for a Preview and to Order.

One morning as the anchors of the Today show discussed a breaking human interest story, weatherman Al Roker kept throwing in remarkably relevant statistics and factoids. At one point, the anchors turned to Roker and ribbed him about his superhuman knowledge. Roker turned to the audience and winked.

“We don’t actually need to know anything! We just have to have a control room!”

Although Roker was joking, he made a good point. He and the Today show producers whispering into his earphone know something many of us have yet to learn: no one person can know everything. Certainly no one person can run a whole show. And yet, that’s exactly what many leaders try to do, day after day.

Wouldn’t life be easier if we all had a control room – someone whispering in our ears what we need to know just when we need to know it? Whether it’s a producer delivering the details into a reporter’s ear, a coach yelling to his players on the field, the President’s personal advisor helping him make world-changing decisions, or the wise words of a mentor guiding you through a critical moment, the best leaders surround themselves with people who support them. You will, too, by building your personal team.

You might have aspects of this team in place. Friends, colleagues and mentors probably already support you in your personal goals and aspirations. Your next step is to learn how to strengthen that support into a complete, custom, comprehensive personal support team. With your personal team in place, you will find new answers coming to you from those who want to see you succeed as much as you do. You will no longer be one person with big dreams going it alone.

Building your Personal Support Team is one of the ideas I share with leaders in the book, The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership. To learn more, go to www.TheInnerEdge.com. You’ll find an overview of the book, endorsements by such thought leaders as Marshall Goldsmith and Stephen Covey, and more.

When you learn to build your most powerful personal support time, you will become a veritable force, championed by some of the best leaders around.

Imagine you had the best leaders in the world all advising you? You’d have access to the leaders who are most relevant to you now, who are experts in the kind of success you want to achieve and who have attained the highest respect and regard in their fields. Your every challenge, overcome. Let’s create that for you now. It’s called the Imaginary Advisory Board, and it can be yours with just a little imagination.

This idea originated with author Napoleon Hill. Hill was a protégé of Andrew Carnegie who spent twenty years studying wealth creation from such masters of fortune as Henry Ford, Charles M. Schwab, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. (Talk about a dream team!) His research culminated in the 1960 classic Think and Grow Rich. Even if your ultimate vision has nothing to do with wealth creation per se, the idea of Hill’s “imaginary advisory board” offers an abundance of possibility.

An imaginary advisory board is a group of people who can inspire and guide you toward your vision of yourself as a leader and in your life. The difference is they don’t actually exist.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They may exist or they may not, but unless you are extremely well-connected or capable of time-travel, the chances of sitting down with them for a conversation are slim either because you don’t know them or they because they’re no longer living. The members of your imaginary advisory board are typically:

• historical figures
• legends in their own time
• famous people in your field
• characters from fiction and non-fiction
• religious leaders
• ancestors.

Your imaginary advisory board might also include people with whom you don’t usually talk about your aspirations and achievements, but who represent the values you hold dear:

• spiritual guides
• your children and parents
• good friends past and present
• other people who have had a hand in shaping your life.

In this way you can gather in one place the characteristics you admire most – your mother’s wisdom, your bosses’ clarity, your mentor’s way of being direct yet empathetic – and use them to help you live and lead well.

Once you’ve assembled your “board of directors,” in your mind you can pose your questions to them. Think about what they’d advise. Think about how they would do what you’re trying to do, and learn from them. You’ll be amazed at the wisdom and creativity that comes from thinking this way.

At first, you may feel silly and even childish meeting with your imaginary advisory board. But this “board” will allow you to do something no other group can do: bring all of your values and aspirations into one place, personified by a significant someone. Even though you can’t be with them, you can still aspire to be like them.

To do this process more completely from the beginning, go to the website and download your FREE copy of the Imaginary Advisory Board Planning Guide. You’ll find it at www.TheInnerEdge.com – click on Worksheets and Audios (on the left) – and scroll down to find it.

What would you guess is the biggest enemy of a leader? Wasted time? Indecisiveness? Short-sightedness? Go ahead, try it. List the enemies that fight your ability to lead and live the way you want to in your ideal vision.

Now, what will you do to take away its power?

For Charlene Begley, the President and CEO Enterprise Solutions of General Electric,
the biggest enemy is wasted time. Listen to how she tackles time, wrestles it to the ground, pins it down tight and takes control.

Especially in these tough times, I’m huge on being very focused and setting clear priorities. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything. So I pick the three to five things that really matter, and I’m really disciplined about spending time on those things. I can’t do everything, so I have to make tough choices.

I literally sit down with the calendar and say, what do I really care about now? I care about our new products being launched on time. So I make that the priority. I create the time for the business teams to me on a regular basis with status. That’s where I spend my time.

I pick the things that matter to me and put them on my calendar. I never say I wasted the day, because I carefully plan my calendar. Time is my biggest enemy. I have three kids. Life is crazy. There’s never enough time in the day. So I manage my calendar. I mange the time I spend, and I set operating mechanisms to be sure I’m spending time with the things that really matter: employees, customers, my team, the key initiatives.

I am obsessed with my calendar. I take the time. I could tell you right now what I am going to do [six months from now]. It’s actually a little frightening, but it works! I have the whole year planned out. I still have to be flexible, but that includes putting on the calendar the things that matter to my kids. The school plays, the sporting events. I plan really carefully so I’m home when the things that really matter are happening, I’m there. And if I’m not, I plan the special occasions to make up for lost time.

Listening to Charlene, you can really get a sense of her diligence. Whether your biggest enemy is time, procrastination, busy-ness, a tight budget, a dysfunctional team, or any of the other terrors with which leaders grapple, how can you be equally aggressive in making sure you overcome it?

Did you enjoy this profile? You may be interested in the eCourse, Getting an Edge: 21 Ways World Class Leaders Share Their Secrets for Leading and Living Well. Each of 21 profiles just like this one comes in a separate email – once a day for 21 days. Click here to sign up for the course.

Overwhelmed? Can’t get ahead? Feel like you’re slipping further and further behind and that you may never catch up? I know the feeling, and fortunately, I have a great remedy.

It’s called Project 123, and it arose from a time I was redecorating my house.

My friend and decorator, Lesley Means of Simply Organized arrived one afternoon to help me redo a room. One room. We sat in that room, the living room, and talked about ideas. Before we knew what was happening, we had moved to another room (more ideas) and another (more ideas) and another (still more). In an hour we had whipped ourselves into a fervor of bathroom remodels and office reorganization and new paint on every wall. When she left, I closed the door, turned around, and thought, “What just happened? And where will we ever start?” It felt so overwhelming, I just walked away and left it all behind.

The next day, Lesley emailed me her project proposal. It said in big letters, PROJECT ONE: The Living Room.

Oh, yes. Project One.

The living room was my original motivation for calling Lesley. She remembered when I had forgotten. There was one priority. A place to start. Later, we could move to Project Two (the TV room) and Project Three (the home office). The way she crystallized our plans into a logical order, they all made sense again, and we tackled them one at a time.

When you get overwhelmed by all of the complex and multiplying tasks competing for your time, it can help to sit back and identify Project One, Two, and Three. George Leonard of Mastery captures the essence of this strategy well. He writes, “Ultimately, liberation comes through the acceptance of limits. You can’t do everything, but you can do one thing, and then another, and then another.”

You can use this strategy to choose one focus area or one action item to tackle along the way to your vision. Keep sight of which project you’ll grant top priority, and give it the best of your time. Then you can turn to the rest.

Exercise
Jot down a quick list of all of the projects you have going right now: Now number them in priority order. How would it change your efficiency if you could think of these as “Projects 1, 2, 3,” etc. and complete one at a time?

The ideas in this article are drawn from The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership and the accompanying eBook called The Extension. The eBook is designed to give you simple, engaging personal leadership exercises and activities to help you be a better leader, and lead a better life. Get your copy today! Click here for a Preview and to Order.

As a culture, we once had a reasonable relationship with time. Think about your parents and grandparents reflecting on their childhood; so often they reminisce that “life was slower then.”

Then we got on the fast track. The implication was that those who were going to “win” were the ones who were moving fast. “Faster” equaled more efficient, more productive, and therefore more successful. We practiced new techniques with our planners and PDAs to get more done in a day. “Fast” became synonymous with “better” – an association we have been paying for ever since.

Now we’ve moved from the fast track to warp speed. We keep trying to somehow fast-forward ourselves to do more and more, faster and faster all at once and all the time. In some cases the pace becomes absurd as we try to do more of what we’ve always done faster than is humanly possible. But there’s a limit to our capacity. Even if you see yourself as a Porsche in the fast lane of life, Porsches can only go so fast. At some point you’re going to crash. In order to avoid breaking down, we need to stop trying to go faster and faster and cross into a new way of thinking altogether. We don’t need to go faster from Point A to Point B. What we need is a portal. A trap door. A shortcut.

Physicists call it a wormhole – a way to link distant points in space that would otherwise take years, decades, or centuries to travel even at the speed of light. To get the image of a wormhole, imagine a worm traveling over the skin of an apple. To get to the opposite side, the worm can traveling the entire distance around (the long way), or he could take a shortcut by burrowing through its center (the short way). To date, wormholes are more science fiction than science, but the image can help us rethink what’s possible with time.

Maximizing Time is one of the ideas I share with leaders in the book, The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership. To learn more, go to www.TheInnerEdge.com. You’ll find an overview of the book, endorsements by such thought leaders as Marshall Goldsmith and Stephen Covey, and more!

You, too, can become a time traveler, slipping through time using shortcuts that lead almost instantly to a new way of life. To do that, you’ve got to shift your thinking. It’s time to get off the “fast track” and learn to find the shortcuts.