Thank you to all of you who applied for the complimentary Strategy Session I offered last week. It was awesome to talk to a large handful of you about the challenges you are facing.

Since I couldn’t speak with all of you personally, let me fill you in on a theme I heard a lot: You KNOW what you SHOULD be doing, but you aren’t doing it. You tell yourself that you “really need to” do something to turn your situation around, and are baffled why you don’t. Each day you do the same things and sink deeper into your stressful situation and personal misery.

The first step to taking action is knowing what your block is. One way you can start to get clarity is to set aside time to do the project that you know you’ve been needing to do. Write it into your calendar, protect the time, and have serious intent to carry it through. When it comes time to do it, notice what images come to your mind. You will have a mental picture that will reveal your block.

Read on so you can ‘listen in over my shoulder’ as I give you examples from the Strategy Sessions this week how your fellow list subscribers got unblocked and started taking action.

1) A salesperson knew he needed to make more phon calls but couldn’t even though he was near being fired. When he imagined picking up the phone to call prospects, he expected a response of no interest because he had heard this so many times. His block was that he expected his efforts wouldn’t work. So we wrote out a whole new script giving a valuable free benefit to the prospect right up front and compelling the prospect to schedule a follow up meeting. The next morning the salesman used the approach and made a hefty sale.

2) A middle manager at a big state agency needed to do a high-visibility audit done, but he couldn’t get started. His blocks were self-doubt and self-centered thinking. He was worried that the final deliverable would be judged unfavorably and that the recommendations of the audit would be politically unpopular. We changed his focus so he saw the audit as an opportunity to clean up corruption in state agencies, help millions of state consumers get better rates, and protect the environment. He stopped making the project about what others would think about him and started making it about what he could contribute. He was immediately motivated to get started.

3) A woman investment banker wants work life balance but keeps staying late at the office. She knows she’s not happy but didn’t know what would make her happy. Her block was not knowing. We identified that her priority is a successful relationship that leads to marriage. But she didn’t know what her passions were, she didn’t know how to meet men of caliber, and she didn’t know how to have successful courtship. So we started with an exercise that reconnected her with her longtime passion of education, which led to a smile! Then we made a plan to start getting on Boards of organizations in the educational reform field where lots of male investment bankers serve. She was ready to rock n’ roll!

Tip: The first step to taking action is to know what is getting in the way of you doing what you know you should be doing.

Schedule a good block of time to do what you know you need to do on your calendar and then see what mental picture comes to your mind. That will give you a clue what your block is. Please leave a comment about what you find out…

More next week as I give you some tips on getting over your own perfectionism..

If you are piled on with work, it’s likely that you could benefit from more clarity in 3 areas.

1) Not clear about your ‘business model’

You probably know what the ‘outcome’ is that you want, but you may not be clear about the strategies to get there.  In other words, the person who is the boss (whether YOU are the boss in your own business or you report to a boss in an organization) is not clear about the business model.

Business owners come to me and say “I want to earn ___  (fill in the blank, let’s say $250K).  When I ask, ”What is your business model?,” I often get a blank look.   If you are not clear about your business model you will ‘throw spaghetti against the wall’, or try to do anything and everything that will bring in revenue or save on costs.  Is your model to have 25 high paying clients at $10K each?  Or, 100 people paying you for a $2500 service, or 1000 buying a $250 product.   Do you have a justification for your answer based on market research combined with your unique strengths?

If you work in an organization, often strategy is not well thought through at a higher level.  Here’s an example of how gaining this kind of clarity can be useful:  I coached a senior person at a fashion company where the frontline workers were buried with work and morale was plummeting.  My client spearheaded a meeting with the cross functional senior team and worked out a formula to clearly decide which designs they would pursue, and which redesigns, adhoc changes,  offshoots,  they wouldn’t.  Workload at all the junior levels decreased by almost 50% within a month.  If you are in an organization,  are you aware of a clear strategy that is being implemented, and if not, can you ask your boss to help walk you through it?

2) Not clear about your function or your most highly leveraged activities.

As a business owner, you may be caught in the trap of doing everything yourself,  and thinking that you can’t afford someone else to do the things you are not good at.  That keeps you in a cycle of trying to do everything and not having time to do the marketing that will help you grow enough to hire a virtual, or in-person, assistant.  Can you name the 3 activities that directly earn you the most money, and if so, what you are doing to preserve your time for them?

If you work in an organization,  are you clear about what the essential function is that the organization pays you to do.  I know, I know – What’s problematic these days is that you are often doing 2-3 people’s jobs. Have you identified what strengths you have that make you invaluable in your current role?  Are you making the best use of your strengths, and if not, can you ask about re-sculpting your role, getting needed training, or delegating to people who work for you?  What decisions are you empowered to make? Which decision would be the most effective for you to make?

3) Not clear about your priorities

Simply put, you may be doing work that others have created urgency around but is not YOUR priority.  Your priority is to fulfill the functions you have identified in points #1 and 2 above, and to do so in the order of their due date and biggest impact to other people.

If you are in an organization and have competing priorities, the work that is due for the person who has firsthand control over your position and bonus has top priority

4) Not clear about how to handle difficult interpersonal situations,  like how to say no or push back on your boss.

You may know that you are being asked to do ‘too much’ by your boss.  Or you may be saying yes to other’s demands and not preserving your energy for what you identified in #2 above – because you are not clear on what your own value is.

To push back effectively with a boss or client,  you want to get clear on what you can and can’t say.   There are 3 legs to any project you are asked to do:   Time – Resources – Scope.  What you can do is negotiate the terms of any of these.  For example,  if you are asked to do something very quickly,  you can say yes but ask for more resources or to reduce the scope.

Often the issue is your own need to say yes when you mean to say no.   That means you are not clear about your own value; you think you have to say yes in order for other people to like you or want to do business with you.  Watch for solutions for this in an upcoming blog on people pleasing

Please leave a comment about your challenges with work overload.

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.

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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