People don't often see the bigger perspective in their minds like they should be seen. And they end up doing things they shouldn't be working on in the first place. But seeing past the barriers of clearly seeing might not be a walk in the park. But, it's not all that difficult if one learns to focus their mindset and manage their time, like identifying your top priorities. When people break past these barriers, they can be more productive.

Emily Sander, currently a C suite executive in corporate America, founder and primary coach at next level coaching. She works with business leaders and entrepreneurs working on their prioritization and time management to make them more productive. She wrote a book earlier this year called Hacking executive leadership. Now, she joins the podcast to talk more about the practical things of managing time and developing a mental mindset to build a foundation that will enable one to go forward. 

Strengths 

The first big concept is to play to your strengths, identify your strengths, play to them and get other people or processes or automation, or help for the things you're not good at. You can identify what you're good at by asking yourself what comes naturally to you? What do you like doing? What do you lose time doing? What are you known for? And then delegate higher or build a process to the rest. Playing to your strengths is important for two main reasons. You get further faster in what you're doing because you're good at it. And secondly, if you spend time doing things that are not in your area of strength, you waste time there because you're not as good, but you also wear yourself out and tire yourself out when you get to the things that you're good at. So, it's almost like a double compounded negative, and you're stacking it against yourself.

Zones

The green zone is positive, and the red zone is negative. If you're in the green zone, you are energetic, enthusiastic, forward-thinking, feel like you're on your game, have good ideas, and contribute well. Conversely, if you're in the red zone, you're downtrodden, you're anxious, and you're working out of a place of fear. And you're spending your time ruminating about the past and what went wrong there or worrying about the future and what might go wrong there. If you think about where you're spending your time and your mental time and energy, in the purest sense, it doesn't make any sense to have red light thoughts in the red zone. You're wasting your time. You are wasting your time and mental energy spending it there. So, if you go into your day and your week and into whatever process you have with this lens on, you'll be able to make decisions that support that. So, if you have that visual in mind, clear the decks, mechanism, and highway. So, you can go fast, stay focused, and have greenlighted thoughts, and you don't have to start and stop. And that's going to help you keep you in that good mental space.  

Twelve Arrows

In his book essentialism, Greg McAllen talks about how many things you are putting your energy to? It’s about a great graph and a circle. And in one version of the circle, 12 arrows is going out of it. You can think of 12 arrows pointing out of the circle, and they go a short distance because the arrows represent energy, and the circle is you. And if you're giving your energy to 12 different things. And you can only get so far. But if you have that same circle and only have one arrow, it goes further. And you're able to make more progress when you - the circle, are giving your energy to one thing. For instance, when people are asked what is important, they come up with seven a dozen things. But when asked why these things are important? It gets much fewer....