I’m sure you’ve seen great athletes and entertainers perform at their highest levels. They do something that most business people rarely do: they practice. Practice is considered a time waster in business. I think it’s due to a common belief: “I don’t have time to practice, there’s simply too much to get done.”
Just imagine expecting your career to get better without practice. If you accept your belief about not having time, that means NO time to work on your game, your business, your processes, your skill sets, and more. You’d remain static and end up discouraged or exhausted.
To counter this “no practice” dynamic, we teach entrepreneurs in the VIP Coach program how to add weekly practice as an essential element that their earning power and free time depend on completely.
What does business “practice” consist of? Four things:
Preparation
Delegation
Reparation
Optimization
How important are these activities to you? They’re vital to your success and continuity in growing your business, and to having a happy life. Taking the time to “practice” and work ON your business (not just in it) may feel like it’s pulling you away from necessary actions, but in reality it’s setting you up for longer-term success. This is the Law of Short Reverse in action.
Also described as “the slingshot effect,” this is the principle of stepping backward to launch yourself forward. Just as you draw back a slingshot or as a quarterback steps back from the line before making a pass, sometimes you have to relinquish ground to prepare for a major move forward. By making a “short reverse” – that is, stepping back to evaluate areas of your business that need improvement, determining best-fit team members for delegation, building systems, etc. – you’re actually preparing to take big steps forward, even if it feels like you’re backpedaling.
Two activities that compose a leader’s best work are innovation and optimization. Innovation happens best when you’re with clients, asking them what they want most from you. Indeed their comments will tell you the secret to creating a unique process in the marketplace that no other competitor can match. This is because, instead of studying your competitors, you’re tapping into your best clients’ opportunities and preferences.
When you gather these gems, you begin to crystalize new capabilities to bring to your current and new clients. New sales and opportunities then become available. This activity of building capacity is like adding a new fixture to a race car. You go into meetings prepared and you increase your chances for a higher result.
Preparation isn’t just making an agenda or mastering a talk track, it’s mentally rehearsing answers to expected and unexpected questions. I call this capacity “clock speed.” When you have options in your hip pocket, like Karate Kid ready with countermeasures, you’re able to lead conversations and keep them value driven.
Preparation is also about connecting with meaning and context around important upcoming conversations. You might marinate on the human beings you’re about to meet. What is their biggest danger? What is their current reality? How about their strengths? What are they trying to do?
Using empathic listening and sincere interest, you begin to act based on how the other people are positioned. Value creation always begins with what makes a person emotional and what has meaning for them. It evokes the contribution you sense is necessary from you, and the intention you have to actualize it.
Delegation isn’t a hallway process where you hand out assignments in a drive-by manner. It’s about precise communication. We teach our coaching clients how to be ninja delegators. They love replacing themselves because it’s about bringing others into their personal gifts as they meet the leader’s support needs.
Do you know your support needs? You have activities that don’t energize you and don’t embody your superior skill sets. These activities, if continued, are dangerous – time and energy sucks that drain your innovation and passion to grow. You must continue to put wooden stakes in the vampires that suck your time dry. Step one is to make a list of these items. Second, identify the most favorable candidates that will resonate with taking such items off your plate.
It’s important that you delegate in the direction of voluntary energy. I became aware of this when one of my assistant coaches began asking me if she could do the same task again. I knew I had her unique ability active in the work I was delegating.
When you delegate, communicate a purpose, process, and payoff. Explain why the task is important to you and your organization, and anchor it to a bigger picture or outcome. Show how the steps in the process work, then have the other person show you the steps so they retain the process better. Next, come to terms about a payoff that matters to the other person. One of the most significant payoffs is getting them closer to working from their unique ability.
You depend on gathering quality information from your back office. During maintenance days, staff meetings are critical for getting a pulse on your people, your metrics, and your current reality. As a workgroup, identify 7 to 9 impact areas that your future will depend on most. These could be areas like closing new business, customer service, marketing drip, social media storytelling, hiring top performers, or alliance practices. You get the idea…
Then consider who in your organization is most influential as a “watchtower” for keeping these processes and structures trending positively and on track. It behooves you to check in with each member of your team (even for a quick 15 minutes) during your maintenance day to make key adjustments and position your most important delegation efforts.
All of us have messes in our business path. These are items that need repair and cleanup. When we depend on compliances that break down, we interrupt our performance. When we procrastinate on doing our taxes, they become more consuming later on. Messes need immediate action. Whatever you’re tolerating or putting up with is asking for attention.
What is backlogged? What are you constantly running out of? What needs cleanup and repair? What environments are not supporting you – your office, home, car, anything you depend upon to get things done and operate optimally? Where should you create a super reserve of anything you run out of often?
So in a nutshell, identify three tolerations, three environments, and three backups or reserves that you can proactively clean up to increase confidence and reduce fear.
How many maintenance days should you have per month? Eight!
When you take these days, you begin to experience greater free periods, untied to details and decoupled from burdensome worries and thoughts. Your family begins to notice how much more present you are than before, and you begin to anticipate how you want to feel on your free days, which drives your intensity to prepare, delegate, clean up, and optimize. Your maintenance days are the bridge to building a fantastic life as your business grows.
And as your income heightens, you have these days squared away to meet the demands of all the new responsibilities and details dropped on you as a result of new business. You’ll get ahead by having the people, systems, and structures in place already before the details ambush your energy, time, and resources.
