The Now Habit at Work E-Book

Neil Fiore

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 180

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Increase productivity, efficiency, and full-brain power when you apply Now Habit strategies to your business What if working harder, stressing more, and putting in more hours aren't the secret to success? What if truly effective managers, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople simply use more of their brain to make creative decisions, work in the zone, and live more fully in the process? The Now Habit at Work gives you a hands-on manual enabling the resilience and focus of champions-the ability to bounce back from set-backs, to believe in yourself, and focus on solving problems rather than seeing only obstacles. This one-of-a-kind program offers * Tools to enable superior quality work that creates work-life balance * Strategies to maintain focus and self-confidence * Tips to conquer stress through effective time management and goal setting * Daily exercises to ignite motivation in yourself and others to tackle projects with creativity and ease Filled with practical examples that are throroughly tested and easy to implement, The Now Habit at Work will have you increasing your mindfulness while reforming old habits and reducing your stress. You'll be amazed at how soon your new habits will be inspiring and motivating those around you to new levels of productivity!

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

Your Choice: Work Effectively or Just Work Harder

Unique for Business Readers

Early Lessons of a Young Entrepreneur

Unleashing Your True Potential

Time Management Quiz

To Improve Time Management and Goal Achievement

Chapter 1 - The Seven Essential Strategies

The Seven Essential Strategies

Principle One

Principle Two

Principle Three

Principle Four

Principle Five

Principle Six

Principle Seven

Chapter 2 - Time and Life Management

Set Time Limits to Be Efficient

Get Things Started—Immediately

Just Keep Starting

Manage Your To Do List

Use Deadlines to Create a Three- and Four-Dimensional Path Back to When You Start

Get Feedback Early to Overcome Perfectionism

Tips for Making More Time

Chapter 3 - The Language of Effective Self-Management

Choose to Be Where You Are. Choose Reality

Choose Your Job Every Day

Plan Your Escape

Choice Can Change Your Attitude and Your Behavior

Watch Your Language: Push or Pull Motivation

Which Is More Effective: Asking “Why” or “How”?

Catch Yourself Doing Something Right

Choose What Not to Do

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

What Metamessages Are You Communicating?

The Language of Stress or Safety: Stop Beating Yourself Up

Chapter 4 - Effective Communications

The Power of Active Listening

Effective Communication Exercise

Communication Guidelines

Communication Styles and Preferences Differ

Learning Styles

Chapter 5 - The Power of Focusing

Creating a Magnetic Vision

Chapter 6 - The Power of a Compelling Mission

Write Your Own Mission Statements and Commitments to Yourself

Focused in One Breath: Leadership Mission, Vision, and Focus

Mental Toughness: The Focusing Techniques of Peak Performers

Chapter 7 - Ignite Your Motivation

Three Great Motivators: Pain, Expectancy, Ownership

Lack of Motivation

Tricks to Get Yourself Motivated

Chapter 8 - Effective Goal Setting

Typical Goal Setting Creates Unrealistic Goals

What’s Keeping You Stuck?

Effective Goal Setting: Moving from Want to Action

Bottom Line

Wish Upon a Star

Effective Goal-Setting Quiz

Chapter 9 - Managing Procrastinators and Difficult Employees

Procrastinators Use Ineffective Self-Talk

A Manager’s Challenge: The Difficult Employee

Negative Attention versus Positive Incentives and Recognition for Positive Action

Managing the Problem Employee

How Can Managers Defuse Violence?

Respect Your Employees and Minimize Difficulties

Treat Your Employees Like Customers

Training, Support, and Control over Work Improve Employee Satisfaction

Conclusion

Appendix - Simple Solutions to Complex Problems

Index

Copyright © 2010 Neil A. Fiore. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Fiore, Neil A.

The now habit at work: perform optimally, maintain focus, and ignite motivation in yourself and others/Neil A. Fiore.

p. cm.

Summary: Increase productivity, efficiency, and full-brain power when you apply Now Habit strategies to your business. What if working harder, stressing more, and putting in more hours aren’t the secret to success? What if truly effective managers, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople simply use more of their brain to make creative decisions, work in the zone, and live more fully in the process?

The Now Habit at Work gives you a hands-on manual for building the resilience and focus of champions—the ability to bounce back from set-backs, to believe in yourself, and focus on solving problems rather than seeing only obstacles. This one-of-a-kind program offers

• Tools to enable/inspire superior quality work that creates work-life balance

• Strategies to maintain focus and self-confidence

• Tips to conquer stress through effective time management and goal setting

• Daily exercises to ignite motivation in yourself and others to tackle projects with creativity and ease

Filled with practical examples that are thoroughly tested and easy to implement, The Now Habit at Work strategies will help you increase your productivity while reducing stress and replacing old habits with effective practices. You’ll be amazed at how soon your new habits will inspire and motivate those around you to new levels of productivity! (Provided by publisher).

ISBN 978-0-470-59346-2 (cloth); ISBN 978-0470-88114-9 (ebk);ISBN 978-0470-88119-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-0470-88120-0 (ebk)

1. Self-confidence. 2. Employee motivation. 3. Labor policy. 4. Time management. I. Title. BF575.S39F.7—dc22

2010012331

For all my clients who learned to believe in themselves and taught me that positive change is possible even when the odds against it seem insurmountable.

Introduction

Have you ever noticed that work has not inspired many positive songs or books? After “Whistle While You Work” from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, you get “Nine to Five” by Dolly Parton, and one of my personal favorites, “Take This Job and Shove It.” The all too common message we hear is that work is drudgery and should be avoided. At the same time, we are told to work harder and longer and to accomplish more with fewer workers and resources.

We all could use more positive songs, positive psychology, and positive attitudes for making work easier, faster, and more fun. This book aims to do just that, with strategies for working more effectively, efficiently, and energetically.

I know that it’s counterintuitive to think of work as fun, but even when the task is boring, your brain loves to problem-solve. There’s something exciting and interesting about the movement of your brain from not knowing to knowing. Why else would you attempt the New York Times crossword, work on Sudoku, play chess, read mysteries, or try to learn to dance Salsa?

While some may never think of their job as fun, in this book you’ll learn strategies to make any job less of a chore and more of a creative challenge that lights up and involves more of your brain.

Your Choice: Work Effectively or Just Work Harder

If you’re familiar with my book, The Now Habit: A Strategic Plan for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, you know that I value guilt-free fun as a motivator to start early on high-quality, focused, efficient work.

In spite of my commitment to guilt-free play, I have a very strong work ethic. I have had jobs that were unpleasant and backbreaking (midnight shift at Railway Express unloading boxcars), easy but boring (supermarket checker), and over the last 30 years, fulfilling and creative (therapist, speaker, and author). Regardless of the job, I actually enjoy working, solving problems, and accomplishing something. But I don’t believe in working hard or struggling from a limited part of my brain when it’s more fun and effective to access the right brain and subconscious genius. I prefer working with my whole brain, shifting from not knowing to knowing something new, and gaining the cooperation of all my resources through effective self-leadership communication.

Caution: This book could change your mind about having to work hard. It even may convince you that you have a natural motivation to work more efficiently and effectively while enjoying your brain’s creative problem-solving ability.

Unique for Business Readers

This book brings to you business applications of the exciting research findings in the fields of neuroscience, cognitive behavioral therapy, and peak performance strategies. With these methods, you can take charge of, direct, and integrate “lower brain” reactions, emotions, and energy toward the achievement of your goals.

By applying the effective self-management strategies, you’ll achieve in just weeks what usually takes years of expensive training and executive coaching—the ability to observe and manage your usual negative patterns and replace them with optimal solutions.

You’ll shorten your learning curve by applying what I’ve discovered from my own trial-and-error learning and from my work in coaching hundreds of executives, entrepreneurs, and managers.

Early Lessons of a Young Entrepreneur

My experiences in business negotiations and entrepreneurship started very early in life with disadvantages that Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers: The Story of Success, contends turn into advantages later in life. Your experience may be different from mine in the details but similar in the valuable lessons learned.

I was raised in a working-class family in a blue-collar ghetto in Jersey City, New Jersey. I thought every family bought only old used cars and kept extra bald tires in the trunk. It was normal for us.

Coming from a large Italian-American family, one thing we didn’t have to worry about was getting enough to eat. Homemade ravioli and fresh fruit and vegetables were plentiful. But even as children, we knew that money was scarce and that whatever food and comforts we had were won by hard work. This was especially so during the years my father was sick, laid off, and then working part-time while incurring mounting medical costs.

When the nuns told us to ask our mothers for 50 cents a week to be in the music teacher’s play, I endured pressure and ridicule rather than ask my mom for the money. I couldn’t endure the look of sadness on her face whenever I had to ask for something she couldn’t afford to give.

My sister, brother, and I learned not to ask for much and to pitch in where we could. We tried to bring in a bit of small change by cashing in soda bottles and by earning tips for helping people who came to the nearby cemetery to plant flowers on their relatives’ graves on Memorial Day. We’d fill our watering can and use the tools from my father’s garage to help plant their flowers.

George Handley owned a greenhouse and grew and sold plants. He noticed our ragtag group of industrious kids and hatched a plan to cut his costs by recycling the flowerpots. Mr. Handley showed us how to turn the pots upside down and tap them to release the plants without breaking the pots. He then offered to pay us for the various sizes of pots—a quarter of a cent for the smallest, a half cent for the next size, and one cent and two cents for the larger sizes. My brother, sister, cousins, and I eagerly gathered the rescued pots and presented them to Mr. Handley, only to discover that our labors failed to produce much income.

At 11 years of age, I felt disheartened that I had let down my crew and angry that we had not been paid a fair wage. Over the next few months, I conspired with my gang to hoard and stockpile hundreds of flowerpots in my father’s garage. As Easter grew near, Mr. Handley’s greenhouse was full of lilies, geraniums, and irises, ready for potting. But Mr. Handley’s men couldn’t find a flowerpot anywhere.

When he finally asked me about our contract to supply him with pots for his flowers, I told him we had plenty of pots but that we wanted double the price, a half penny for the smallest and four cents for the biggest. His workers couldn’t keep from laughing as they watched Mr. Handley negotiating with an 11-year-old. Finally, I was able to proudly announce to my team that we had earned $5 apiece, a total of $25.

If you’re like me, you may have suffered from some childhood disadvantage that taught you to persevere, overcome obstacles, and pursue your dream. You, like me, may have had a form of dyslexia or attention deficit disorder (ADD) before they diagnosed such things in grammar school. So we who are relatively successful today have learned to turn lemons into lemonade and disadvantages into advantages, to compensate for disabilities, and to develop our own methods of learning and retaining information. It’s not unusual to discover that successful people have had to overcome many obstacles on the journey to achieving their goals.

Painful lessons learned early in life are never forgotten and can be used to forge a powerful determination to succeed. You never forget the hard-won business skills that come with persistence and the pride of negotiating a good deal for your people.

What business skills do you have that you may take for granted because they started so early in life and under difficult circumstances?

Unleashing Your True Potential

The Now Habit at Work is not just another book about time management or overcoming procrastination. This book offers CEOs, managers, small-business owners, and work-at-home entrepreneurs—who are already busy and productive—the tools for becoming more efficient, effective, and balanced.

While you may have some problems with procrastination, perfectionism, and feeling overwhelmed, you most likely are the type of person who is already motivated to work hard for your business or your company.

In fact, if you’re in business today, you may tend to be a workaholic with too much to do, always working or thinking about work—even on vacation, if you ever take one. And yet, in spite of all your hard work, skill, and intelligence, you may not be as productive as you could be. With so many distractions from calls, text messages, e-mails, and the Internet, there’s not enough time in the day to focus on your top priorities and still have time and energy to really enjoy your family, your home, and your passion for music, golf, tennis, or NASCAR.

In this book, I want to give you the effective self-management strategies and tools that will put you in charge of your time and your life. You’ll discover that it’s possible to work smarter on the projects that really contribute to the bottom line, put in less time, and double your productivity. You’ll learn how to access the business mastery skills of producers that permit you to stop procrastinating on living and to perform optimally.

Time Management Quiz

To help you get a sense of what time management skills will benefit you most, take a few minutes to see which of these scenarios fits you. Notice which of these statements best describes your attitude about time and your current time management behavior:

1. You start working on projects early—often the same day—and are rarely late for a flight or a meeting. You decide when to leave so you can anticipate problems and arrive on time. You are seldom anxious about deadlines because you start—at the very least, making some notes—on top-priority tasks almost immediately.

2. You delay starting on projects and often feel rushed and anxious about deadlines, even though you usually meet them. Nevertheless, you wish you had a “little more time” to do them right. You are sometimes late for flights and meetings by a few minutes and arrive breathless and worried.

3. You often feel overwhelmed, out of control about time, and are frequently late on projects and calls. You try to finish one more thing before leaving. You think of yourself as a procrastinator or workaholic who “works best under pressure.”

4. You’re often frantic about deadlines and are frequently late by more than 30 minutes. You fail to adjust for traffic conditions when planning. You try to juggle several tasks at once and seem to lose sight of the big picture and the essential, top-priority projects.

5. You’re unaware of time and refuse to be controlled by time or deadlines. You never think about start times, so deadlines often take you by surprise. You’re often late by as much as an hour because you’re easily distracted by e-mail, calls, and other projects. It’s difficult for you to make the decision to let go of some activity you don’t have time for.

Scoring

If you identify with:

#1 and #2: You’re doing quite well. But if you feel chronically rushed and anxious about deadlines you’ll find that a few time management techniques and some coaching could rapidly lower your anxiety and put you in control of your time.

#3 and #4: You could benefit from adopting a new perspective on time, learning to focus on top priorities, and making some positive changes in your attitude and behavior.

#5: You may initially resist the need to learn time management skills, but no doubt you and those around you suffer the consequences of your difficulty in acknowledging that there’s a limited amount of time. Coaching is highly recommended to end denial and to ignite the motivation to learn time management skills that will make your life easier, more productive, and more efficient.

To Improve Time Management and GoalAchievement

• Ask yourself, throughout your day, “When can I start for 15 minutes on my top priority?” Pay particular attention to Chapter 2 on getting started.

• Back-time from your deadline to the present to get three-and four-dimensional views of the path to your goal and ask yourself, “When can I start today?” See Chapters 5 and 8 on overcoming feeling overwhelmed and setting effective goals.

• Schedule plenty of guilt-free play. Put into your schedule your sleep, meals, meetings, leisure, and social events. Know that you are not procrastinating on living and thus resenting your work. See Chapter 2 on committing to leisure time and work-life balance.

• Ignite your motivation by creating a sense of expectancy about your future and using your compelling vision to break through inertia and get onto motivation in Chapters 6 and 7.

• Commit to protecting your career, your body, and your life from all toxic substances, habits, fears, and relationships. See Chapters 3 and 4 on effective self-management and executive communication skills.

• Apply the language of effective self-management from Chapter 3 and Managing Procrastinators, Chapter 9, to become a more effective manager of yourself and those employees who need your leadership to overcome procrastination.

Hot Tip

The hot tips offered throughout this book are the result of years of practice and research that could save you a significant amount of time. Mark which ones trigger a response of recognition in you. For example, when you set a time to start on a top-priority project, don’t give up if you are distracted by low-priority but seemingly urgent projects. Make note of your favorite distractions and keep fighting to show up and get started in spite of them.

1

The Seven Essential Strategies

The single most important characteristic of good managers is that they protect their employees—protect their time, protect their dignity, protect their career potential.

—Robert Townsend, Former Director of American Express and Author of Up the Organization

The Seven Essential Strategies

I know you’re busy, so let me start by giving away the essential secrets for performing optimally at work. Here are seven basic principles for working efficiently while minimizing distracting and destructive habits. While many of these concepts have been around for several millennia, not many know how to access and apply them to work and career situations. With some practice, you’ll be able to make these strategies work for you within a few weeks. Start today; challenge your old beliefs, habits, and defaults; and begin to replace them with what has proven to work for peak performers in every field of endeavor.

Principle One

Shift from your current habit to corrective action. The fastest way to change is to link your current behavior to corrective action. In many cases, this can mean doing the opposite of what you’re doing now.

Avoid wasting time criticizing what you’ve done wrong. This only adds emotional trauma to an already confused mental and physical state. Instead, point yourself toward the correct behavior. To be an effective manager of yourself and others replace “Why did you spill the milk?” with “How do we clean it up?”

You’re probably a more effective manager than the coach who gave me my first sailing lesson. While our small boat was heeling over and taking on water, he chose that moment to ask, “Why are you doing that?” I thought that was a really dumb question to ask during an emergency. I realized that if I took the time to do the psychoanalysis necessary to answer that question, we might all drown.