How much time off do you want? What’s your revenue target? Your relationship goals? What would have you do a happy dance 12 months from now? The problem is, a lot of entrepreneurs don’t experience that happy dance because they’re chasing a ton of goals and feeling scattered.
Listen in as I cover:
- Why keeping only a handful of critical goals is key to focus.
- The joy of being scattered, and…
- The COST of being scattered
- Being out of integrity with yourself
- How long it takes to become twice as productive
The quality of our relationships is the quality of our life.
– David Wood
To find out more about Mark & Victoria and view the full episode, go to https://powertipspodcast.com/ep-145-double-revenue-by-focusing-on-less-with-david-wood/
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– TRANSCRIPT –
David Wood: [00:00:00] What would have you do the happy dance 12 months from now and write down those goals. Now, if you find that you’ve got 20 goals, which is quite common, oh, I want everything because we don’t want to miss out. Then choose the three that matter most and put the rest in a drawer and you can pull those out of the drawer once you’ve knocked off one of those goals on that list.
Victoria Downing: [00:00:25] Then you constantly are replenishing to keep a small number of important goals in focus.
David Wood: [00:00:31] Exactly. But if we try and do 20, again, we’ll feel busy and that’s great and we’ll be entertained, but we’re just, you know, what really matters does revenue matter? And if so, how much?
And by the way, for most people, that’s a very important goal because it helps with all the other goals. The second goal we usually look at when people join my Samurai program is how much time off do you want? How much time off do you have now? And then what does that number look like 12 months from now?
And then. Hopefully, I really hope my clients will come up with some goals related to their relationships because I find that the quality of our relationships is the quality of our life. So maybe you want to be 50% closer to your kids or build 50% more trust with your partner.
Mark Harari: [00:01:22] David you used the word just a few moments ago, scattered being scattered.
What’s so bad about being scattered. Is it what’s I guess what I’m trying to say, like what’s the cost of being scattered at work?
David Wood: [00:01:35] It’s only bad in relationship to your goals. So let’s say you got plenty of money and you’ve got plenty of time off and you’ve got plenty of intimacy and love and your health is amazing.
It may not matter that you feel if you’re feeling scattered, as long as you don’t mind that sensation of being like, whoa, what am I working on? But if your goals really matter to you, then being scattered is going to just slow you down. Let’s suppose you want to double your revenue over the next 12 months.
Well, if you’re scattered, it’s more likely to take two, three or five years instead of one. Let’s suppose you do have a goal to have more time off. Maybe right now you’re working a 40 hour week. You’d like to work a 20 hour week. Well being scattered is just going to slow you down. Instead of taking 12 months to get to that goal of 20 hours a week, it might take you two years or three years or four years or five years.
So that’s one of the costs. The other cost is stress.
Victoria Downing: [00:02:40] How do you mean?
David Wood: [00:02:41] If you aren’t clear on your goals or you are clear on your goals, but you take actions that are not aligned with those goals, then you’re out of integrity with yourself and that creates stress. So today, for example let’s come back to the micro level.
So instead of looking 12 months out, let’s just look at today. I wrote down my goals this morning, I’ve got six or seven. I wrote out a time map. This is how much I’ve got for each. And this is I’m aiming to finish them all by 2:00 PM. If I do something that’s not on that list. I’m now out of integrity with myself, and I’m going to feel a little bit stressed because part of my brain is tracking that this is what I’ve said is most important today.
And yet here I am responding to emails. What the hell happened? I went off the rails and it starts to create a little stress in the body. So come five o’clock I’m going to want a beer, to counteract the stress that I’ve created by simply being out of integrity with myself.
Victoria Downing: [00:03:49] So how long does it really take to change our habits to go from? You know, cause that’s an exciting things to coming up with all those new ideas all the time and new ways to make money and new, you know, how long does it take to change your mindset from that to peaceful and focused.
David Wood: [00:04:05] I love that you said that. And I think it’s worth double clicking on that.
It is exciting. It’s kind of fun to check email and go through it and see what’s going on. And then you’ve got a voice message and then you’ve got text messages and then the kid’s knocking at your door and then your partner needs you. Like this stuff is very entertaining. That’s why I think it’s really important to stress that if that’s your goal, entertainment, then keep doing that, I think that’s fine.
How long does it take to change your habits if you’ve decided that you really do want focus because you want to achieve your goals faster? It usually takes my clients a few months. So what happens is we start with, all right, let’s work out your goals. That’s week one, and then week two, we get to how productive are you.
And that’s where we start to find out where people fall off the horse, we might say. So I’ll have a client say, well, I set my sprints in my calendar. I put my blocks aside, but then I got distracted and busy with other things and I didn’t actually show up for those dates with myself. Right, okay. So there’s where you fell off the horse this week.
What’s it going to take for you to actually show up with the dates that you’ve made with yourself? And so we do that over a series of weeks and usually by the end of three months, they’ve got a lot of solid habits, which totally change how they work.
