Train Your Brain For Success

by Roger Seip

  One is the thermometer game. I'll take my goals, break them down as I just described, and then I'll take the goals and subgoals and make them into a thermometer, with 0 at the bottom and whatever the number is at the top. The game then just becomes to see how fast I can fill up the thermometer. Does that sound silly? Maybe, but it sure is effective. Your very powerful, very visual, very simpleminded subconscious understands “fill up the thermometer” in a way that works, and is fun. Try it out.

  My other favorite is the small rewards game. Here you set up benchmarks along the way to your ultimate goal, and when you get there, you get a small reward. For example, in my sales goal that I talked about before, at 20 percent of it I agreed (with myself) to get a new pair of glasses. At 30 percent I agreed to take my wife out for a really nice dinner. At 50 percent my reward was a new suit. Nothing succeeds like success, and we just perform better when we can clearly see what we're working for. Your rewards can be whatever you like—a charitable donation, a piece of jewelry, a long weekend, a spa treatment—just make it something that you would really like. Try this out next time you've got a goal that seems a little out of your comfort zone. Reward and congratulate yourself at specific points along the way, and just see how much more momentum you build.

  Reinforcement and Bonuses: This chapter has been Memory Optimized™ for your benefit. For your brief lesson and some great bonuses, visit www.planetfreedom.com/trainyourbrain with the access code in the About the Author section. Enjoy!

  Component #2

  Being Fully Present: Using Time as It's Meant to Be Used

  Chapter 10

  Common Myths of Time Management and How to Use Time as It's Meant to Be Used

  How many of the following days have you experienced?

  The day where you were extremely busy all day, but then at the end of the day wondered what you really accomplished.

  The day where you were extremely bored all day, and at the end of the day wondered what you really accomplished.

  The day where you were at work all day but could only think about what was happening at home; then as soon as you went home you could only think about work.

  The day you really planned to work on an important project all day, then spent the entire day dealing with one interruption after another, and the day just slipped away.

  The day that was spent in boring meeting after boring meeting, and just slipped away

  The day where you just spun your wheels and got frustrated.

  If any of these sound familiar, pay attention, because these days will keep happening to you until you do something different. It's likely that you are suffering from some common misconceptions about how time functions and how we function in time. Some of these misconceptions stem from how we're wired, some stem from how society conditions us, and some of them just are. Either way, here are the most common myths of time management, and how to reframe your understanding.

  The Myth of Balance

  Think about the important areas of your life, the overall categories that demand your attention, time, and energy. You have the following categories, in no particular order.

  Physical—caring for your body, health, and physical space.

  Mental/emotional/spiritual—caring for your mind/spirit.

  Financial—caring for your money.

  Professional—taking care of business.

  Family—taking care of those who are closest to you.

  Community/social—taking care of the people you care about who aren't family.

  It's a lot of places to direct your energy, and many people come to our workshops because they want to achieve “balance.” I tell them:

  The desire to achieve “balance” is your first problem.

  Balance doesn't exist in our society, and even if it did you wouldn't want it. We're talking about time here, so let's consider what perfect balance would look like. There are 24 hours in a day, so a perfectly balanced life would mean that each of the six areas listed above would get exactly four hours per day, no more and no less. “Well, that's ridiculous, you have to take a longer time horizon than one day,” you say. Okay, let's look at a balanced week. Every week has 168 hours, so a balanced week would have:

  28 hours of exercise and/or sleep.

  28 hours of reading, prayer, meditation, and/or learning of some kind.

  28 hours of investing/financial planning.

  28 hours of work.

  28 hours of quality time with family.

  28 hours of quality time with friends and/or community.

  See what I mean? A life of balance would actually suck. So stop fretting over your own lack of balance—embrace it! You don't actually want balance in your life, what you want is harmony. Harmony means that you accept that your life will be unbalanced—it's your job to simply make it unbalanced in the way that works for you. It's a much more natural way to live.

  The Myth that Time Can Be Managed

  People use the term time management all the time. Famous gurus and entire companies have been built to teach people how to manage time more effectively. Many of those gurus or companies teach great stuff; much of it has impacted me tremendously. But if we are to break records in our lives we need to be clear. Napoleon Hill cited “accurate thinking” as one of his 15 Laws of Success. So to be perfectly accurate, time cannot be managed. It just keeps rolling right along. You can't fire time, you can't give time a performance review and alter its behavior, can't change time's bonus structure to get more effort out of it. You can't manage time, so stop trying!

  Instead, focus on what you can manage. Keep in mind the C.I.A model of thinking. C.I.A means that in life there are things you must:

  Control

  Influence

  Accept

  When we learn to accept the things we have no control or influence over, we take away resentment. When we control the controllables and influence the influenceables, our lives take a quantum leap forward. The flow of time is one thing that we all have to accept. How we act, how we prioritize, and how we focus are what we either control or influence. Manage those and you are dealing with time as you are meant to.

  The Myth of “Enough” Time

  How many times have you ever said to anyone, “I just didn't have enough time,” or “There's not enough time”? Once again, this is a common phrase that is patently false. It's important to understand that thinking in terms of “not enough time”—the thinking itself—is a trap. When you think in terms of “not enough” anything it creates what's called a scarcity mentality. A scarcity mentality, all by itself, can drain your energy to a point that is difficult to overcome.

  Here are two ways of debunking this myth.

  1. Mathematically: As we discussed, there are exactly 168 hours in your week. No more, no less. Consider the richest person on planet earth—how many hours does he get per week? Exactly 168. Now consider the poorest person in the poorest country on earth—how many hours in his week? You got it—168. Nobody gets any more (or any less) time than anyone else. So the whole concept of “enough” time doesn't even compute.

  2. Experientially: Come on now, you don't actually need me to keep throwing the 168 hours number around, do you? You know from your own life the whole concept of “not enough” time is just a story. I was with a client recently who is a full-time minister, runs a catering business, and has six children. When we discussed this concept of “not enough” time he had a visible a-ha moment. I asked him what had just happened in his brain, and he said, “I just realized that I either have or make time for everything that's important to me—everything.” And the same is true for all of us. We either have or make time for every single thing that's important to us. The real deal with “not enough” time is that we allow things that are not really important to us—TV, video games, booze, drama, oversleeping, other people's problems—to become important to us in a given moment.

  What Exactly Is Time Management Then?

  So if the concept of balance, of not enough ti
me, and in fact the whole concept of time management itself are just myths, what the heck are we talking about here? How you deal with your time is in fact one of the most critical components of a record-breaking life, so let's revisit something that was mentioned in our discussion of the CIA model. If you want to get great at using your time effectively, you'll really be managing:

  1. Your priorities—You and you alone must decide what's most important to you.

  2. Your focus—You and you alone must determine where you put your attention at any given moment.

  3. Your activities—Ultimately, you and you alone must decide what you do with any given moment, hour, day, or week.

  In Chapter 11, you'll be taught a specific, step-by-step process for bringing your priorities, your focus, and your activities into line. For now, let's understand a little more deeply.

  Understanding Importance versus Urgency

  We often get trapped into focuses and activities that make us feel good for the moment but don't actually get us very far. A big part of why is that we get caught in the tyranny of the urgent.

  Any activity that we engage in has two components: its importance and its urgency. It's critical to understand that these are not the same. Importance answers the question, “How much impact does this have on my life?” Urgency only answers the question, “How soon must this happen?” These are totally different and separate questions.

  President Dwight Eisenhower is credited with first naming this way of understanding our actions. In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey made this model well known, but it's known as the “Eisenhower Matrix,” and it's essential to understand it. It looks like Figure 10.1.

  Figure 10.1 The Eisenhower Matrix

  I'm hardly the first person to point out the obvious conclusion, which is that you want to spend as much time in Quadrant 2 as possible, but I'll take it a step further. Quadrants 1, 3, and 4 will actually kill you, just in different ways and at different speeds.

  Quadrant 1

  Here you find activities that are both important (high impact) and urgent (need to be addressed now). These are life's emergencies. If you've ever spent a day in Quadrant 1 you ended up tired, but it was a good tired. You successfully put out fires and came through in the clutch. You had a pressure filled scenario to deal with and you came through! You feel like a rock star when you succeed in Quadrant 1, and herein lies the big trap. Living in Quadrant 1 can be highly addictive, and if you spend too much time there you will eventually fail. Either you'll get into an emergency that you can't handle, or you'll just burn out. Quadrant 1 is exhilarating, but it's very stressful. It's really helpful to be able to succeed here, but it's not a healthy way to live.

  Quadrant 3

  You know that there are things that simply suck up your time and energy with little to no reward. This is Quadrant 3, what Covey called the “Quadrant of deceit.” In Quadrant 3 you get fooled into thinking that what you're doing is important, but at the end of the day you realize that you didn't get anywhere. A day spent here leaves you feeling tired and empty.

  In today's age of instant access, it's very easy to waste an entire week, month, or your whole life in Quadrant 3. If you do not learn to establish boundaries and then enforce them, if you don't learn to say “no” to certain activities and people, here's what happens:

  Interruptions and other people's problems will consume your life. Your entire life. And it will happen because you let it happen.

  Fortunately, it doesn't have to happen. Getting clear on your goals, implementing the Two-Hour Solution and then taking care of your mind, as you'll learn about in Chapters 11 and beyond, will keep you out of this trap, but you must be vigilant. If I'm overselling this so be it; I've just seen too many people waste years in Quadrant 3. Stay out of it.

  Quadrant 4

  Quadrant 4 consists of activities that are neither important nor urgent. They have little or no impact on your life, and nobody cares if you ever do them. Things like mindless channel surfing, mindless game playing, checking your credit score for the third time this week, or any number of simple time wasters live here. I don't feel the need to describe this one in detail because you know when you fall into this trap. All I will say about Quadrant 4 is that this one will kill your career, your health, your relationships, your finances, and your ambition—and you won't even enjoy it. When you find yourself in Quadrant 4, do anything else. Just get moving in some direction other than the one where you're currently heading.

  Life in Quadrants 1, 3, and 4 will kill you one way or the other, so let's look at the only quadrant that's ultimately an investment of time rather than an expense.

  Quadrant 2

  These are activities that are important but not urgent. The things that really make the big difference in your life usually start with deadlines that are far away, or (more commonly) there just is no deadline. Things like physical exercise, spending quality time with family, setting goals, reading, praying, and so on are the activities that really impact and enrich our lives, and you'll never finish them. You'll do them forever, and you'll want to because they feed you rather than drain you. A day invested in Quadrant 2 leaves you feeling like you really did something great for your life. You'll have more energy at the end of the day than you did at the beginning.

  It's been said that what is truly important is usually not urgent, and vice versa. The trap we fall into is that our brains are not wired to respond to what is important—our brains are wired to react to what is urgent. To make matters worse, we live in a culture that reinforces this reactive approach. Add it up and it means that if you are to invest your time in things that are actually important, you will need a system.

  That's where we're going next.

  Chapter 11 will teach you the Two-Hour Solution, which is a comprehensive approach to creating your schedule. Implementing the Two-Hour Solution will definitely take time out of where it's killing you and put it where it will lift you up. Before we leave this chapter, however, let's get the foundation of your time usage system in place.

  Your system begins with the right questions.

  The Most Important Time Management Questions

  Want a two-minute action step that will boost your time usage for the rest of your life?

  Write the following three questions on a notecard and place them in a prominent spot.

  1. What quadrant am I in right now?

  2. Is what I'm doing right now moving me toward my goals?

  3. Is this the best use of my time right now?

  That's it—just three questions on a notecard—does that seem too simple? Don't be deceived, these three questions are incredibly powerful for training your brain, and regardless of the answers, the questions themselves create no-lose situations for you. All of them do the same powerful things for your brain that the three Smart Reading questions did. More on the power of good questions in Chapter 14, but these three are fantastic. Mainly, they heighten your awareness—you cannot escape a trap you don't know you're in. Just by heightening your awareness, you automatically direct your RAS to start working for you. When you identify what quadrant you're in, you automatically activate your brain to look for a more productive path. When you ask if your current activities are moving you toward your goals, you automatically become more aware of your goals. When you ask if your current activities really are the best use of your time, you automatically become more aware of what the best path would be. The best news is that when you ask, even if your answers are unsatisfactory to you, the questions themselves make your time usage more effective. Ask yourself just these three questions a few times a day for a week and you'll notice that you make healthy adjustments to your activities much more quickly. Do that consistently for three weeks and you'll develop positive momentum in every area of your life.

  So once again—if you haven't done so already, get those three questions on a notecard right now. Better yet, make one for your office, one for your home, and one for your car. Put them up on
e time, and heighten your time awareness forever.

  In summary, it's really easy to get caught up in myths and incorrect premises about the time we have. Everyone gets the exact same 168 hours each week. You can't manage time, but you can manage yourself—your activities and your focus. When you take charge of that, your life improves dramatically. Chapters 11 and 12 will show you specifically how to do that.

  Reinforcement and Bonuses: This chapter has been Memory Optimized™ for your benefit. For your brief lesson and some great bonuses, visit www.planetfreedom.com/trainyourbrain with the access code in the About the Author section. Enjoy!

  Chapter 11

  The Two-Hour Solution: How To Create a Record-Breaking Schedule

  Have you ever found 20 bucks in your dryer? I love it when that happens. Even though I am fully aware that the money was already mine, I didn't know it was there until I found it. So it feels like I got an unexpected blessing from the universe!

  With that in mind…

  Would you be willing to invest two hours each week, if that investment were guaranteed to give you back 10 hours in that same week? Loaded question, I know; if you answered no you wouldn't be reading this. But I'm serious; that's what this chapter will do for you if you'll implement what you learn. If I were only allowed to teach one practice that would dramatically boost a human being's performance and enjoyment of life, it would be what's in this chapter. It's called the Two-Hour Solution, and it's the lynchpin for someone who wants to break records. For me it's the wellspring from which a life lived on purpose flows.