Working towards your strengths

- [Speaker] In our workshop we actually do the mini assessment, where people look at where they're strong and where they're challenged. I don't find people have difficulty understanding their strengths. Most people understand that they're pretty good at something. The leveraging of that becomes a different challenge, and acknowledging it becomes a different challenge. Most of us don't want to acknowledge that we're good at it, because I'm an egoic, you know? So, we know we're good at it, but we don't want to talk about it, you know, with anyone.

When you think about work place and what you bring to the table, you'll probably be acknowledged, appreciated, and promoted based on those strengths. So we tend to leverage those more heavily in that environment. We tend to lean on them quite a bit. We also, and this is individual, We also can sometimes neglect what the challenge is, because we are focusing on, you know, utilizing our strength.

Really smart leaders recognize their weaknesses and their challenges and find people that fill those in for them. As you think about the individual and kind of where this whole driving world we live in, we find that with one area that people are challenged in, we usually ask them to find and pick where in the space of say body, mind, heart, and soul are you most challenged. What we're finding consistently is that people are challenged when it comes to their mind.

And their level of distraction that occurs in their day. Over and over again we're doing and seeing research around the inability for people to focus for long periods of time. Science says it will take your brain 23 minutes to refocus on a task, when it's been interrupted. Now if you think about that and think about how many times you're interrupt yourself or you get interrupted in the course of an hour, we're finding over and over again that people are not able to do quality work, because they're constantly trying to refocus on something when they've been interrupted from something else.

The old science said there were seven parking spaces in the brain. We can hold seven thoughts consciously. Now that's been reduced it's only four parking spots, and the way we're going it could eventually be two. I mean, we don't even have the capacity to hold on to four ideas at once, so we're talking about having people look at things a little bit differently. What happens if you wake up in the morning, and the first thing you do, instead of look at your phone, is ask yourself, "What are the top three things I need to get accomplished today?" Maybe it's two.

Maybe it's one, but what are those things? And before you do anything else, ask yourself, "How do I want to be today? What's the experience I want for my day?" And so you've got those two focus points before you even get out of bed. When you get out of bed, again, instead of looking at your phone, you want to do five minutes of exercise. You want to do five minutes of meditation. You want to do something to sort of set yourself before you get into your day. And then go to the office. Your first two hours.

What are the most important things you need to get done? Do those first. In that process you will feel like, "I got the big things done." Then take an email, phone calls, meetings, all the other things. You will feel much more productive. You'll feel like you accomplished something during the day. And you'll also feel like your brain is retraining itself to have more focus in your life, which is, as I said before, one of the biggest challenges we're seeing.