There are plenty of aggravations these days that are out of your control. The effects of the economy, and other people’s flaws are obvious examples.

But for many of the problems that eat up your time and energy, you may have a hand in causing them yourself. This is not blame, this is good news! That means you can quickly do YOUR part to have more success with less stress.

Think of a chronic frustration or an acute challenge you are facing. Ask yourself if you are ‘causing’ it in any of these ways:

1. Your lack of clarity at the beginning sets up problems downstream. For a recent speech I had to write, I didn’t get a clear idea of the topic from the organization and I allowed myself to start without a clear idea of what I wanted to say. I ended up writing 3 drafts of it until I became clear, wasting a lot of my time and energy. It would have been better to require myself and the organization to be clear before I started.
2. You create problems in your mind that don’t exist objectively. Kathy is a senior woman in a global consulting firm. She came to me when she couldn’t leave work behind, didn’t go for a bigger position, and didn’t have balance in her life. Even though in reality she has an intimidating boss, high-stakes projects, and upcoming reorganizations, objectively speaking she is fairly secure in her position and well liked. It’s only in her mind that she believes her self-criticism is justified, and that she could be fired suddenly. Because of these fears she overworked and could rarely be ‘off’ from work. She came to understand that her whole behavior pattern was set up to not re-experience the pain and hardship she faced when her Dad abandoned the family early on. When she connected the dots she saw that her fears about others’ judgments weren’t objective and developed a realistically positive evaluation of herself. She learned to speak confidently to her boss about expanding her role, and each day she leaves feeling that she’s done ‘enough’ and sleeps well through the night.
3. You weren’t aware of the root cause of earlier forms of the problem, or chose to pursue only band-aid solutions, and now the problem is much worse. A business owner recently came to work with me, he is wicked smart yet overwhelmed with work and earning 40% less than he wants to. At first he thought it was a staffing issue and brought in a consultant to find the right people. He thought it was a time management issue, and set up schedules. He entered a business coaching program to grow his business. Together they helped just a little bit, but still he was miserable. What was the real culprit in his problem? Early in our coaching, he discovered he was creating the chaos because of his deep belief that he isn’t worthy of success. So first order of business was getting rid of his negative voice. Now that he believes in his worth, our efforts to get the right people in place and manage time better are finally paying off — in the form of more money and more time!

What are your ideas about how you might be ‘causing’ your problem?

In what situation in your life are you ignoring early warning signs of a bigger problem, or settling for band-aid solutions that don’t get at the root cause?

If you have a vague idea you are causing your problems but don’t know how to fix it, simply respond to this email and my assistant Ann will schedule a brief consultation between us. I will tell you exactly what you need to do to end creating your own problems and instead start creating your success and happiness. My online programs and coaching packages personally guarantee you will ‘get out of your own way’ and get the result you came to me for.

As you know, you have approximately 60,000 thoughts a day,  but a single one can pull the plug on your productivity for the whole day (or week).

For example, I had a client who who sold insurance.  He got a referral to meet with the person who heads a big union.  Can you imagine? He would  get to sell insurance to thousands of union members?  KaChing!

He scheduled into his calendar a time to follow up on the referral and prepare a proposal. What happened when the reminder came up on his screen?  He said to himself,  “Its going to take too much time to put together all the pieces of the proposal today”.   (NOTE: This is code for: “I’m not clear about the task so I don’t know how to get started AND I don’t believe I can do a good job on this”).   I asked him what would be the first thought he had if the union representative called and asked for a meeting this afternoon.    He said “part of me would be excited,  the other part would be thinking:   ‘They are probably smarter than me, why would they want to meet with ME?’”   So he let his staff interrupt him all day and didn’t make the call or do the proposal.  That was the thought that pulled the plug on his productivity.

(BTW,  I call the question I asked him the “Oprah” test:  If Oprah’s show called for you to be on tomorrow,  are you ready??  If not,  you’ve got some work to do!”)

Another example:  I had a client who worked as an underwriter at a bank.    She would look at her ‘to do’ list,  it would state, “Write a memo on x policy and send it to boss for review.”   When she saw that item, she’d think, “Mm boss is going to think my work on this shows I don’t know enough” so her solution was just to put off doing the work.   When she would start to work on it,  she sometimes had questions,  but she wouldn’t ask her boss/mentors because she thought, “My boss might think I’m stupid if I ask that question”.    She ‘got by’ doing the basic work but didn’t feel confident or that she was making a real contribution. A single thought pulled the plug on her productivity each step of the way.

What is your single thought that pulls the plug on your productivity?
If you haven’t had the kind of productivity you want it is because you haven’t had a Productivity Mindset.   What is a productivity mindset?

Its a way of thinking that guides every thought, every action and every reaction you have from the moment you wake up until you go to bed.  Each moment of the day will present you with a ‘fork in the road’; to be productive or not.  You will have a thought in response to that opportunity.  There are certain ways of thinking that will set you up to be productive and other ways that will derail you and keep you overwhelmed and unclear.    If you have confidence in the value you provide (or at least are in motion to upgrade your mindset and your skillset) then you will do work that moves your career forward.   If you don’t have that confidence you will pull the plug on your productivity.

Within an hour or two from now, you will already have an opportunity to make  a choice to have the confidence to be productive, or not.  What choice will you make?

FYI,  coaching the insurance guy developed a Productivity Mindset.   Four weeks later, the union gave him a piece of business that put $15K in his pocket.  They are now negotiating a deal 3 times that size.

And my client at the financial institution? After our first meeting she said,  “I always had somewhat of an “I can’t” attitude,  but since our first meeting I have been working feverishly and have been really focused.  I took an extra initiative and did a daunting project – this is the first time in years I contributed to the knowledge base for everyone in the department.  My boss said, “Wow,  this is GREAT” and thanked me.  I now know I’m contributing,  not behind the 8 ball.  Its been life changing, really.”

This is the beginning of a series of blogs and videos helping you to ‘get out of your own way’ and develop a Productivity Mindset.

_____________________________

Sharon Melnick PhD is a psychologist/coach/speaker who empowers talented and successful people to “get out of their own way”. Informed by 10 years of research at Harvard Medical School, she is a leading authority helping corporate employees and solo professionals get the confidence, focus, and inner security they need to be have control over their lives. Everyone who works with her finally becomes the person they’ve wanted to be and makes the contribution they were put here to make. To discover why you have not been as productive as you need to be, and how you can come home an hour earlier having accomplished your most important work, grab your free videos at www.ProductivityMindsetMastery.com

Your assistant makes mistakes and has an attitude. You can’t get your colleagues to take you seriously and follow your ideas. Your boss uses a tone, changes his mind all the time, or doesn’t go to bat for you,

You and your spouse get stuck in communication dead-ends?  You have drama in your dating.  A family member continues to be needy and frustrating.

The best way to keep your relationships supportive of your goals and not distracting or draining is

DON’T REACT!

Reacting is your effort to try to get the person to stop being the way they are.  It lets the other person get you off track from who you want to be and the results you want to create. Reacting makes you lose time and you waste your focus being upset about what they did.

Of course you know you are not supposed to REACT, but its not always easy!

What makes it hard to not react is that your brain has evolved to respond in stressful interactions in ways that are unproductive.  It hijacks you to:

- Personalize: To respond you have to explain why the person acted the way they did.  You will ask yourself what does the other person’s behavior mean about me?   You might “put words in their mouth” and think they are saying you are “not good enough” or your job or client relationship is not secure.  You will worry about how the situation “will affect you”.

- Focus on the Problem:  Our nervous system evolved to respond protectively when large predators were running at us.    That’s why when someone is annoying, we tend to focus all our attention on getting them to stop acting the way that’s making us feel out of control (hint: rather than focusing on what you CAN control so you don’t have that panicky feeling of not having control)

- Negative Forecast:   To save energy and respond quickly, your brain will use shortcuts and default to well-worn grooves in your thinking.  You will believe the person is going to act the way they’ve “always” acted in the past (even if they don’t always act that way).   You will believe your worst fear will happen (e.g., homelessness, lose their love, feel forever guilty) and then act as if it already has.

The factor that causes you to have these unconstructive responses is feeling that things are “out of your control”.   The best antidote to not reacting is to control what you CAN control.

The first thing to do is get the thinking part of your brain back in charge, rather than the emotional part.  One way is through “Reverse Breathing”, in which you breathe slowly in through your mouth and out through your nose, experiencing a cooling sensation over your tongue.

Instead of Personalizing, try to genuinely explain the person’s behavior as stemming from their own limitations or from a “benefit-of-the-doubt” explanation of their motivations.

Instead of Focusing on them as the Problem, see the problem as part of an overall system that happened between the two of you, and focus immediately on generating solutions and ways to prevent it from happening in the future.

Instead of Negative Forecasting, focus on at least one thing YOU can do on your own (either in the moment or at a later time) to have control over preventing your worst case scenario.

Many of us are feeling overwhelmed because we face a profound sense of uncertainty. We tend to deal with that uncertainty by trying to cover all our bases and go in lots of different directions, i.e., “throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what will stick.” When I used to coach financial advisors to help them figure out their niche we used to call this the ‘spray and pray’ approach! In some ways it makes sense given that none of us can predict what products and services will best appeal in a changing landscape. But beware that it is causing you to pile on work and cause yourself overwhelm.

Of course it would be better to be really clear about your priorities than to overwhelm yourself. To do this, you have to be able to think clearly and creatively and come up with an innovative idea, See the big picture, have an open mind to the possibilities, Stay focused on your purpose and goals, then trust yourself and stay the course. Whew, I’m exhausted!

Would it be ok if i showed you a way to have all these benefits in 1-3 minutes?

Here is some cool information about how your body handles stress that will help you come up with the right money making idea and pursue it til it succeeds.

The answer is that you need to balance your nervous system.

You have two parts to your nervous system, there is the part of your nervous system that helps you focus (its called the Sympathetic nervous system). It was originally developed so we could be alert for the ‘water buffalo’ and large predators who were charging at us. It causes us to focus all our attention on the particular problem at hand, it provides short term solutions, it helps you muster the energy to do whatever it takes to get out alive in that dangerous situation. It causes you to overfocus on “me, me, me” and protecting yourself.

This is the part of your nervous system that is active when you are pushing yourself all day long – more client opportunities, more presentations to finish, more trains to catch, more obligations to fulfill, etc. Another interesting thing about the sympathetic nervous system is that it works based on comparisons with things that happened in the past. It always keeps you focused on how things have been, on what has happened in the past and whether it is happening again now.

You need your sympathetic nervous system to give you that “get up and go” but you can probably appreciate that it does not provide you with the full set of skills you need to have creativity and thoughtfulness that will allow you to survive for the long term. You need to balance it with the other part of your nervous system.

The Parasympathetic part of your nervous system was developed so you could have a restful alertness. It allows you to sort through a lot of information, put your emotions aside, and think clearly. It allows you to have perspective to see the big picture, so you can see overall trends. It allows you a state of well being that reminds you of what your true purpose is. It enables you to have recovery so you can go out and push again.

If you feel overwhelmed, like you are ‘running on fumes’, it is because you are being run only from your Sympathetic Nervous System. If this is the case, you are depriving yourself of the access you need to your intuition and cutting yourself off from your creativity. You are focused on tasks rather than seeing the all moving parts in context and determining how you can do things in new ways.

Give yourself the gift of using the full set of resources you have available to you so you can have clarity about the best 1 or 2 directions to pursue to their completion, rather than feel like you are going in a million directions at once.

Your mind follows your breath. Here is a reprint of my last blog post in which I described a breathing technique that will help you balance both parts of your nervous system. Note, if you want to just quickly access your parasympathetic nervous system abilities, one way you can do that is to breathe in only through your left nostril (cover your right nostril) for 1-3 minutes.
Three Part Breath:

The idea is to breathe in, hold your breath, and breathe out for an equal amount of time. Try 3 or 5 seconds for each at first, and try over time to get up to 8 or even 10 second cycles.

For example, Breathe in and count in your head to 5, hold for the count of 5, and exhale for the count of 5.

When you do the breathe bring your two hands together so that all 10 fingertips are touching, and place them in front of your belly. (This may be done under the table if you are in a meeting)

Try this at least once a day for 3 minutes (though you will notice the effect in under a minute). Many of my workshop attendees report that this instantly helps them feel calm and creative in the midst of their busy day.
If you want skills that will give you the edge to stay calm, focused, and clear thinking while your competitors are overwhelmed, attend a live demonstration of my techniques in NYC, click here to register.

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