Crushing the Clock

Feeling stressed? Know you’re not alone. We all inevitably have stress in our lives, and we need to manage stress in healthy ways while also staying productive. On today’s podcast, Daria Tsvenger joins us. Daria is a mindset coach and has also studied cognitive neuroscience at Stanford University. Daria has a unique program called The Dream Sprint, a personal growth challenge that people gain clarity and pursue their dreams.

The Problem With Stress

Stress is a state in our bodies. It's a primal response that occurs in our brain whenever we face some kind of change. If the changes are sudden, our stress levels rise higher. Our brain wants things to stay the same; stress is the brain’s response to change. Thankfully there is a healthy way to handle stress. 

How To Handle Stress

Resilience is the best way to handle stress. And resilience is like a muscle in your body. When you train a muscle, you do the same activity over and over. So the next time you do the same activity, it is easier for you to do because your muscles are trained. The same concept applies to your mind. The more we process change, the more we develop resilience. 

Moving Past Mental Blocks

We all face mental blocks, things that stop us from doing the things we want to accomplish.

And it might not even be the same challenge that stops us. Daria recommends the “big perspective exercise” where you take into account how long your life actually is. 

On average, a human being’s life expectancy is around 80 years, which comes to about 4,000 weeks. Once you are able to realize how many weeks you’ve already been alive, and approximately how many more weeks you have to live, you’ll likely start to see that your time is limited. You know you don’t want to waste your time. This creates urgency and allows you to move past any challenges so you can take action. 

Becoming More Confident

Many people struggle with confidence. But what is confidence really? It is when you're able to keep the promises that you gave to yourself. Every time you break a promise to yourself, you become less confident. So the best thing we can do to move forward is to set micro goals. Micro goals add up and enable us to keep our promises to ourselves. 

Next Steps

Wherever you are today, I want to challenge you to take the next small step that will lead you to where you want to go. Daria’s Dream Sprint program could be a great way to get some support and accountability as you move forward. We all need support and encouragement. Once you have those, you also have hope. And hope is a very powerful thing. That’s why I make this podcast. So I want to encourage you to keep taking intentional small steps as you are on your journey.

Many business owners are caught in a difficult cycle of overworking and getting frustrated when setting up their businesses. It's often one of the most challenging aspects of entrepreneurs. However, there are many ways to cut through this chaos and take back that freedom.

Peter Mohr, a business coach and host of the Simplifying Entrepreneurship podcast – talks about how to go through the process of taking back that freedom. Specifically, he joins the podcast to talk about how entrepreneurs reduce frustrations and set up the right framework for your business. Essentially, making one feel that you are the owner of your business and not the other way around!

The six C's to momentum starts off with clarity, you need to be clear about what you want to do. Because clarity brings you confidence, we don't move ahead without confidence. So if you're not feeling confident, you got to rewind a little bit and build more clarity. And once we have the confidence, we're looking to build competence. And competence often happens when you look into the strengths of your team and the things that you have at your disposal. Sometimes it's an outsource partner, or whatever the case is. As the old concept goes, you don't always need to know how to get something done; you need to know who can help you get it done. However, entrepreneurs seem to get tied up often because they're spending all their time trying to figure out how to do something instead of spending half that time finding out who can do it for them. 

And once you found the cooperation within, you've built your competence, confidence, and clarity, and then we're building capacity. And once we start building capacity, well, that's when things get exciting. Now I'm feeling the momentum. You can feel it sort of building up within your team within your organization within your mind as a leader. And once you start feeling comfortable and others see that's not in the model. And once you start feeling comfortable around this, you can be creative again. Because we lose our creativity when we're in a situation of frustration, or we lose our creativity because we don't have the confidence actually to think we can get through. That's why it's a wheel. That's why it starts to run because as you get the system, it just kind of rolls through, and you gain that momentum. And it's really exciting when you can have these little frameworks and systems that pull you through, for it just works a lot better that way.

A big piece of business is setting up that alignment process whereby you can delegate things to someone else. So when you have that, and you're outsourcing essentially, either to somebody on your team or outside of your team, those accountabilities, all you need to do from a leader's leadership side of things is to have it systematize and the processes in place. You don't need to make all those decisions. And as leaders of your organization, the biggest piece of the puzzle often is just making the decisions. But you don't have to make the decisions at the low level of your organization. Let other people tackle that, for that is their unique ability, that's their centre of strength, and it's freeing you up as the leader to make the decisions on the things that aren't already systematized that aren't already processed, that aren't already set up in that way. Because everybody in your organization wants to have a certain amount of authority, they want to own certain things. It would be best if you learned to trust the people you're with and give them that trust so that they can run with the jobs they need to do. And you're not micromanaging in there. 

One of the biggest things business leaders deal with is the five Ps. The five P's...

The importance of health is nothing new. However, as individuals keep chasing time and try to get things done in a fast-paced world - health becomes a much lower priority. It's mostly something to set aside until our body says otherwise. Although this is mostly true for most people, many still want to balance nutrition and productivity.

Nate Palmer, coach and the best selling author of the book Million Dollar Body Method – talks about these areas. Specifically, he joins the podcast to talk about how you can embrace efficiency with the right focus, training, and nutrition. And essentially taking your fitness to the next level.

Often, people think of nutrition in one of two different ways. It's either, "What do I want to eat right now? Or how do I lose weight?" However, these things are disparate entities, and it would be better to have them combined like, "What should I eat, feel the way I want and execute on the things that need to get done?" Because changing that question can change how you view nutrition and just kind of the world around you. For example, macronutrients proteins, fats, and carbs are all different levers. They're all different ways of communicating with your body. And once you know, what each of them does, it will help you with the mental acuity of sitting down and doing that deep work that needs to be done. 

When we focus on energy, health and weight loss come, but if we focus on weight loss, we lose the energy and put ourselves in this stagnant place. We deprive ourselves, and then we inevitably backslide. There's a reason that there's a 95% recidivism rate in weight loss, which means that 95% of people who lose weight gain it back, and then someone has gained more for good measure. It is because when you're in scarcity, when you're always deprived, it becomes a mental roadblock, and you're never going to escape that. Like maintenance is sustaining stuff, and it's the most important because if you can't sustain it, then why even do it in the first place? If everything you're putting on yourself is like "can't", "won't", "don't", and "off-limits", then you're going to get stuck in this negative cycle. Because if you have a scarcity mindset, then it's hard to live a life of abundance. But if you have an abundant mindset, where you can eat whatever you want to, then it's also a different mentality. It's just shifting your vision to make those decisions based on what you want and not necessarily what you're hungry for in the moment.

The number one thing is to understand your proclivity. It's like deciding to choose something or do something. And once you take it away and make it a little bit harder to access, then sometimes, something like that can be a big change rather than having something like out on the counter. And if you can set yourself up for success by separating yourself from that, you can create that self-confidence. Like you are mentally tough enough to keep yourself from doing what you want at the moment. And this snowballs into a positive mental state about food without having to deprive yourself. But one thing when it comes to those moments is being able to delay that by planning. Having a plan to get in that moment can make you enjoy those things guilt-free.

People need to start considering that training and nutrition are as important to our success as personal development, reading, meditation, and other things. Because health is at the baseline, it's like the building blocks. So, make sure that your fitness and nutrition are solid and in place, even if they're both a little...

Our guest this week is Aaron Walker. He has started several businesses throughout the years, but his current endeavor is "View from the Top."

Aaron shares some fantastic things, including:

• How he started is first business
• How he retired several times, the first time at age 27
• How he recovered from a tragedy
• How he helps men grow themselves and their business through his mastermind groups

Aaron has generously shared several things for you to download:

• Personal Assessment
• What Do I Want?
• Steps to a Productive Day

Just go to http://viewfromthetop.com/success

People continue rushing to the finish line as there are so many things to get done with so little time. But the question is, is there really no time at all, or are we only focusing more of our energy on less important things? 

Mark Sieverkropp, a blogger, coach and co-founder and former director of Happen-ings at Happen To Your Career. He is also a personal friend and was my first co-host of the 24 Faithful podcast. Specifically, he joins the podcast to share more about the Pareto Principle and how to apply this principle to almost every aspect of our lives to achieve the highest efficiency. 

It's a foundational idea that not everything you do is equal. And not everything you do is of equal value because people think that everything they do is equal and need to get more done. It's basically the idea that if you only have a certain amount of time, what would you do that's most valuable? However, unless you find that 20% and look for them, you'll miss out on the idea and the process. The 80/20 principle, essentially, points out, in theory, that you can work one day in a week and get this like 80% of the results that you typically do in one day or a week because that's 20% of your week and 80% of your results are going to come from that 20%.

How do you find the 20%? When it comes to either products or services or the things/tasks you're doing, it's the things that directly and proportionately contribute to bottom-line revenue. So, what are the things that will make the biggest difference? Because honestly, people do many things that have no value, and the key is looking at those things. Because everything else is kind of is important, and it contributes, but it's not nearly as important. So, it's that idea of not only knowing it but then finding what those 20% things are. When you focus on that 20% and emphasize that, you're still going to find time to get those other important things done because these things will find their way in to get done anyway. 

If you don't do the important things, at first, you run out of time, and you don't get to them. And many people find themselves doing that because they are not intentional with their time. We spend too much time surfing Facebook or rearranging our office space. And those things can be valuable, but if we don't leave time for connecting with people, those won't happen. Most of the time, the 20% are things that you enjoy doing, but there are times where those 20% things are the things that maybe are a little bit scarier or a little tougher. And as humans are good at saying well, doing things later and then later never comes, and doing those types of things that are easy, and make them feel like they're accomplishing something, but don't contribute to the bottom line. 

The four most important things, as far as getting those things done, are focus, accountability, encouragement, and recalibration. First is the focus, and it's a huge one, and it is this idea of focusing on the most important things. The second is accountability like you need people to keep you accountable. You need somebody that knows that you're going to do something and ask you about it and make sure we do it. The third is encouragement. Having somebody who can encourage you, support you, and keep you motivated, can remind you why you're doing those things is massively important. And the final one is being willing to recalibrate, like being willing to adjust, because if we don't have that ability to adjust, it makes it hard. And that's where you start to feel bad and get down on yourself when you mess up. Or you don't do as well as you want because you feel like all is lost. 

People are constantly battling trying to finish things more quickly, but at the same time, swamped with more work. So getting more things done in less time is almost like an impossible feat. Adding to this stress, we also have to try to balance both personal and work life. But as people constantly fight to find this balance, experts argue that implementing the right strategies is the best solution to all this pressure. But what is the right strategy for you?

Paul Casey, founder and CEO of growing forward, a leadership and life coaching business – talks about this in his book maximizing every minute. Specifically, he joins the podcast to share more about 101 tips and tools on time management for your work and personal life.

1. Filtering your time commitments through the lens of your core values and your vision, whether a one-year or long-range vision.
2. Choosing your top three priorities for tomorrow before you're done with today.
3. Accomplish your priorities early in the day to avoid procrastination. 
4. Block out appointments with yourself. 
5. Finish one task before starting another. 
6. Follow your biorhythm so that you're most productive in your energy sweet spot of the day. 
7. Delegate or outsource anything that only you must do. Try to stay on the most important things of your day. 
8. Utilize strategies and boundaries to limit the negative side effects of side trackers. 
9. Building margins and breaks into your day.
10. Lead your meetings. 
11. Share your priorities with other people.
12. Do reviews regularly, whether that's a daily review, weekly, quarterly, or annual review.

People want to dive into the tips and tricks right away, and they skip over this very fundamental point, which is managing your life around your values and your vision. And instead of just giving the people you love and the most important things to you the leftovers. You have to get those values in your calendar and literally block those out first, and then let the rest of your daily schedule around those. The second piece of that is your vision. And this is your long-range vision of where you want to be someday, like where do you want to be one year from today in all the categories of your life, your wellness, your relationships, your marketing, all those different kinds of things, give yourself a target to shoot for. And backtrack from that into setting goals that will get you there. Those things have to go into your calendar first.

Josh said that afternoons are runaway trains. If we don't frontload our priorities into the morning and take that thing that we set as a priority and drag it into later, then the afternoon comes, and you don't have enough time to get your priorities done because there's no margin-left. But if you get it done early in the day, it starts off this snowball of productivity. Whereas if you drag it to the afternoon, you get the three things done out of ten but usually not. And then you procrastinate yet again. And it goes into the next day. And you've double-stacked tomorrow and made that day undoable.

People think multitasking is going to be great because you are spinning all these plates simultaneously. But research shows it's a bad deal, and it's like messing...

Ready to boost your productivity to new heights? Today’s episode features USA Today Bestselling writer, Russell Nohelty. He is not only an author, he also runs three companies. Clearly, Russell has to be very productive. And in this episode, he’s going to share with you how he does it. Best of all, his approach is actually very simple. 

Russell uses The One Thing approach which was made popular by author Gary Keller. The One Thing focuses on moving one domino or boulder at a time. If you focus your attention and energy on one specific area, you can move past the one challenge that is in your way. And then once you push that domino over, you create momentum. Then you move on to another domino. Most people don’t have one clear intention. They are just very busy. But being busy does not mean you’re being productive. 

For example, Russell wanted to be a USA Today bestselling author. Not so much for the acclaim, he wanted to have this behind his name so get more clients and reach more readers. It took about two years of pushing all sorts of different boulders and working with people to push that boulder over. But he pushed that boulder down in 2018, and says that it felt great. 

Russell uses time blocking during the week to take care of the tasks that are most important. Every block of time is labeled as green time, yellow time, or red time. Green time is when you are working on things that are moving you towards your goal or working with customers. Green time is when you're making money. 

Yellow colored time is focused on activities that are indirectly related to Russell’s income. For example, customer service, shipping something, or doing payroll. Lastly, there’s red time. These activities have no bearing on making money. Some of these things include eating lunch, going to pick up your kids from school, or going to a doctor's appointment. While all of these things have no bearing on making money, these tasks are still essential. 

It is very important to work when you are most productive and have high amounts of energy. Russell says that while he doesn't have any kids, he has two dogs that are very, very needy. They want his attention most between about 6 am and 8 am, and 5pm to 7pm. Because of that, he knows that he is most likely to have a problem with distraction during those times. With this knowledge in mind, he does not schedule his green time during those hours. 

For even more info about Russell’s approach, I recommend listening to the podcast. It’s a great interview. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. 

To further connect with Russell check out The Complete Creators blog and podcast. This content helps creators build better businesses and then make the best work of their life. And don’t forget to check out his author website which features his fiction work which focuses on fantasy, sci-fi and supernatural stories.

What is confidence? What doesn’t it look like?

You can find millions of photos shared on all types of social media. But is this really what confidence looks like? Or is it a way of sugarcoating the hard truth that confidence is more than just a photo snap? Yes, people have described confidence in many ways, but to truly understand it might be more than what people already believe it to be.

Dr Nate Zinsser, a former high school MVP turned author, speaker and consultant- talks about the confident mind. Specifically, he joins the podcast to share more about how you think affects you and that you have the free will to decide how it should be.

As described in the book, the confident mind follows your confidence in the sense of certainty you have about yourself or a particular ability. It allows you to express that ability and demonstrate that confidence more or less unconsciously without having to talk yourself through it or analyze what you're doing step by step. It proceeds more or less naturally; you think about how you are when you do something as simple and as common as tying your shoelaces.

There's a lot of times where people get to the point where they're good at something, and to become second nature, they don't realize the skill level that they have. And so they end up devaluing it. We have a habit of devaluing, emotionally discounting, and taking so many things that we do well for granted. It's remarkable how many athletes and other performers talk about their experiences. And when it comes to light that they've worked very hard, they've developed certain capabilities and demonstrated these capabilities on many levels, yet, they don't allow those memories to create a sense of energy and optimism and enthusiasm for their future. They've just emotionally swept them under the rug. 

Your sense of certainty about yourself is, in fact, the expression of all the thoughts that you have about yourself, all the thoughts you have about that particular ability, and all the thoughts you have about the situations in which you exercise that ability. Like a bank account, depending on what you put into it and what thoughts suck it down. There's your balance for the day, for the moment. That's your level of confidence at any given time. And there are certain thought processes that we go through which attack that mental bank account and draw it down our habits of self-criticism, worry about the future, envisioning various catastrophes as opposed to the kinds of deposits that we can make when we look back at our both long term and short-term memories and kind of filter out moments that have created in our lives, a powerful sense of energy and optimism and enthusiasm for ourselves. And we identify the beliefs about ourselves in the present that are indeed energizing. And we create through the proper use of our imagination, scenes, movie clips, beautiful photos, beautiful stills of accomplishments and actions, and we need to take those thoughts to build up the bank account. 

Once an individual reaches a certain level of confidence, they're going to stay that way forever. That's not how it works. Confidence is rather fragile, depending on which thoughts you choose to maintain and which ones you care to discard. And if we, as we've been talking, emotionally, discount, disregard take for granted - our progress and success will not even bring our mental bank accounts to balance down. And again, opponents, competitors, just the imperfect nature of the world we all inhabit, things will go wrong. And so, you have to be very good at

Are you falling short in meeting your goals? Or maybe you feel like something is just missing. 

On today’s episode, I chat with Roman Marinov about goal setting. Roman is a relationship coach who has been trained in Tony Robbins’ coaching program. He also is offering a free 30% discount on coaching for anyone who mentions Success Road Podcast listeners. Just mention the show to him. 

A great example is to think of a plane. A plane needs to know where it's going. It needs to know his destination. Otherwise the plane will waste time, and fuel. It might get lost or even be going in the wrong direction. And that's what goals are for us. Goals are our destinations. That’s why goals are so important.

Roman uses a straightforward framework that consists of a quick meditation. Then he asks individuals to share their goals in four specific categories which include personal, financial, adventure and contribution. This entire process comes from the book Awaken The Giant Within.

And so they give Roman those goals, he writes them down. And then the next step is he asks why these goals are important to them. And the next step is getting very, very specific, creating specific action items for each goal and the deadlines. That's the process.

Roman recommends reading Awaken The Giant Within and following the framework described in the book. The very first step is taking five minutes to write a goal in each category without filtering yourself. For example, if you're working in the financial category of goal, so someone may write “I want to make this specific amount of income.” Following the framework is key, and sticking to it by showing up everyday.  

If you’re struggling with achieving goals, Roman recommends focusing is on the future. Believing something will happen and what it will feel like when it happens. This provides a form of motivation. Roman uses visualization in the morning and evening to stay on track. 

Roman recommends reading the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, because Covey goes into depth about this topic in the book. 

In some cases, putting some of your money at stake can help too. You could tell a friend, “If I don't complete complete this goal by the specific deadline, use this money however you want.” And if you accomplish the goal, you get the money back. That's a pretty easy way to hold yourself accountable.

We will all fail at meeting our goals sometimes. We all have to readjust our goals too. This is all just part of the process. You set new goals, and then you create a plan. Whether you are starting a new goal or just need some help with a current goal, Roman offers a free complimentary coaching session for all new clients. In addition, mention Success Road Podcast for a special 30% off discount. 

Best of luck as you pursue and achieve your goals. Feel free to contact me, Joshua Rivers, and tell me some of your wins. I’d love to hear them!

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. 

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.

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.  

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....