Michael Hyatt's Blog, page 28

Feeling Overwhelmed? Here’s Your Action Plan

Leaders thrive on getting things done. The problem is that there’s more to be done than any one person can accomplish. That can leave you feeling overwhelmed, even paralyzed. Ever found yourself procrastinating because you couldn’t decide what to do next? 

There’s a better way.

The Simplest Way to Generate a Major Breakthrough

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits,  recently tweeted, “Most people need consistency more than they need intensity.” In my experience, especially as a business coach, that’s true.

Last year, for example, one of my clients experienced a significant revenue shortfall. It had a dramatic, negative impact on his cash flow and almost destroyed his business.

Initially, he focused on trying to find a big, dramatic solution—the Hail Mary pass that would turn the situation around and win the game. He tried one thing after another. Nothing worked.

At that point, he reached out to me. I asked him, “What is the one consistent behavior you could implement (or re-implement) that you know would lead to a turnaround.” 

Without hesitating, he said, “I need to make three sales calls a day, every day, five days a week.” 

I then asked, “Why do you think that will work?” 

Again, without hesitating, he said, “Because it’s just math—and it’s something I know I can do. If I make fifteen calls a week, three of them will become customers. It will take several weeks to make a big difference, but it will work.”

Some business coaches focus on intensity. They advise you to take “massive action” in order to get the results you want. This can be helpful occasionally , but, in my experience, it’s usually better to focus on consistency, just as my client did.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you have a goal of writing your first book—or, if you are already a published author, your next book. If you wanted to focus on intensity, you might rent a remote cabin for thirty days, kiss civilization goodbye, and write eight hours a day, every day for thirty days. I wrote my book, Living Forward, with Daniel Harkavy that way.

This approach worked, but here’s the problem I experienced:

It required a huge block of dedicated time, and
It required a massive amount of motivation, so
It was easy to procrastinate.

For most changes I want to see, I find it’s better to focus on consistency. This is generally much easier and leads to the same result over a slightly longer period of time. James Clear again: notes, “Rather than trying to do something amazing from the beginning, start small and gradually improve . . . One percent improvements add up surprisingly fast.”

Here are a few examples:

Instead of writing a 50,000-word book in 30 days, how about writing 500 words a day for 100 days?
Instead of going on a two-week juice fast to get in better shape, how about eliminating sugar and processed carbs from your diet?
Instead of waiting to start your business until you’ve quit your job, how about pursuing your endeavor three hours a week as a side gig?
The intensity approach is more flashy and dramatic. It makes for a good story. But slow and steady wins the race. 

Few people have achieved more than Warren Buffett. At 87, his net worth is valued at $86.5 billion. But his achievements were built one step at a time. It took him 35 years to reach $1 billion, and another 30 more to top $50 billion. Buffett said, “It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results . . . I don’t look to jump over seven-foot bars; I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.”

As in Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise and the Hare,” the race is not always to the swift—or, in my experience, to the intense.

Here are three steps you can use to employ consistency rather than intensity to achieve your goals.

1. Get clear on your goal. Regardless of your approach, you have to start with clarity. Vision always precedes strategy.

2. Identify the right behavior (i.e., a habit). The right behavior is one that, if successfully implemented, will enable you to achieve your goal. Don’t make it too difficult. It should be relatively easy. The trick is in being consistent. You want the compounding results to work for you.

3. Track your progress. You can make a tick in a paper planner, or create a recurring task in your task manager. Reinforce the habit by recording your progress.

4. Enlist an accountability partner. This could be someone who wants to achieve the same goal, a formal coach, or just a friend who is willing to support you. I’ve used all three with great success.

And just to close the loop, my client experienced a complete turnaround in his business. It didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t flashy. He was clear on what he wanted and just focused on making his sales calls. Little by little, he made the progress he needed to get things back on track. That same approach can work for you.

Next-Level Strategies for Weekly Planning

Leaders like to plan their work and work their plan. The problem is that real-life gets in the way. Interruptions, distractions, and unforeseen problems can make a trainwreck of your week even before it leaves the station. By Friday, you can feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and wonder, “What did I really accomplish?” There’s got to be a better way to plan your week. 

How to Stay Mentally Fit

Last year, my business revenue grew 62 percent. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it presents a whole new set of problems—problems I didn’t face last year.

This is where many entrepreneurs and business leaders get stuck. Let me explain.

The key to rapid growth is innovation. You develop a new product offering, marketing strategy, or operational break-through. As a result, your business scales rapidly. This happened to us. We introduced a new business coaching program and dialed in the marketing strategy for our planner business.

These innovations didn’t just happen. They resulted from making time for deliberate thinking, not just by me but by my teammates as well.

But this is where it’s easy to get derailed. When you grow rapidly, you outstrip your resources—especially time. If you’re not careful, you slip into reactive mode. When that happens, the time you previously dedicated to thinking evaporates. 

If you are going to scale in a way that is sustainable, quarter after quarter, year over year, you have to stay mentally FFIT. That stands for frequent, focused, intentional, thinking. 

Let’s unpack that.

Frequent. The faster you’re growing, the more time you must dedicate to thinking. This is easier if you make it a regular habit or bake it into some ritual you have already established.

Focused. Solving complex problems is—to borrow a phrase from Cal Newport—deep work. This requires single-minded focus, which you achieve by dedicating an entire “session” to solving a single problem.

Intentional. A certain amount of thinking happens unintentionally—while at the gym, on a commute, or even in the shower. But the thinking that solves thorny problems or creates ground-breaking solutions doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be done deliberately.

Thinking. One problem (among many) with the “hustle fallacy” is that it lures you into believing that doing is the key to progress. Certainly, doing is important. But the more your business grows or the more you advance in your career, the more important thinking becomes to your success. Solutions well-conceived are half achieved.

So, how do you stay FFIT? 

My FFIT-ness Routine

I used to think I could do this by scheduling “think time.” For the past year, I had my assistant schedule a two-hour block on Friday afternoon for me to engage in thought work. I have a few friends who swear by this methodology. And it reportedly works well for top execs like AOL’s Tim Armstrong and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn. But it didn’t work so well for me.

The reason is that it was too easy to cancel or push the appointment to the next week. It was a classic case of the tyranny of the urgent, where urgent tasks take precedence over important ones. 

Recently I incorporated my think time into my morning ritual. That ensures that my thought work is frequent. I do this in two parts.

First, I focus on outside input. This is the focused part. This starts my thinking in a particular direction. 

You can’t draw water out of an empty well. This is the value of reading, listening to podcasts, and attending conferences. You need a source of outside information to stimulate your thinking.

I do this at the gym. While I’m physically working out, I’m also mentally working out. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts. Often, I stop the recording to just ponder what I’ve heard. And sometimes it triggers a new framework or an insight into a problem I am trying to solve. Regardless, this gives me a solid 30 to 50 minutes of exposure to new ideas.

Second, I write for one hour. This is the intentional aspect of my thought work. 

I do this five days a week, Monday through Friday. Nothing focuses my thinking like writing. As the saying goes, “Thoughts disentangle themselves passing over the lips and through pencil tips.”

There are a couple of advantages of doing this after my workout. For starters, I’ve just stimulated by brain by exposing it to new ideas. I typically leave the gym with two to three new ideas. In addition, because I’ve increased the blood flow to my brain, I’ve put myself in the best possible condition for creative thinking. Researchers have found that exercise facilitates information processing and memory functions, releases hormones help brain cells grow, helps make new neuronal connections. 

This practice gives me a chance to solve my biggest problems and come up with my next innovations. And as a content creator, it gives me the opportunity to develop additional ideas and products.

This may seem like a lot of time to dedicate to thinking—and it is. But I’m not alone in this. Warren Buffet said, “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think.” He added, “I do it because I like this kind of life.” I do too, because I know it’s essential for me if I am going to keep growing. Also, since adding this practice to my morning ritual, it seems effortless. This is the value of habits and rituals.

What would it make possible for your business if you practiced frequent, focused, intentional thought? Maybe you could try my routine, or something similar? Why not experiment with it for a week or two? If it doesn’t work, you can try something else. Either way, you’ll be one step closer to staying mentally FFIT.

Bonus Episode: Start Using Your New Planner Now!

As a high-performing leader, we know you love using productivity products like the Full Focus Planner. But any new system can seem overwhelming at first. Honestly, our planner can seem that way at first. With so many features built in, it’s hard to know where to start. You may wonder if you’re actually getting the full value from this amazing product. 

Tired of Making No Progress on Goals? Try This

Leaders are driven to achieve. The problem is that our intense drive can backfire. We sometimes set unrealistic goals or timetables, which are impossible to meet. Not that we don’t kill ourselves trying!

When that happens, it’s easy to feel exhausted and discouraged. Why does everybody else seem to make rapid progress? Is there a way to get unstuck?

Want an Abundant Life? Change Your Thinking

8 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Be Scared by Scarcity

Sometimes when you are running, things really come into view. A few years ago, I had been considering two different kinds of thinking that lead us in very different directions as I jogged.

One way of thinking that I considered—which many call scarcity thinking—usually leads to failure, fear, and discontent. These are the sort of limiting beliefs that I have come to warn people against.

A Better Way?

The opposite of scarcity thinking is abundance thinking, which gives us a shot at success, joy, and fulfillment. These more generous ideas have much in common with the liberating truths I have used to help leaders drive out doubt and overcome significant obstacles.

A Tale of Two Thinkers

My friend Robert Smith, author most recently of 20,000 Days and Counting, is a great example of abundance thinking in action.

Robert is one of the most generous people I know. He always greets me with a big smile, a hug, and an encouraging word. I leave his presence energized, feeling great about being me.

And I have noticed that he is like this with everyone. He treats employees, vendors, booking agents, publishers, and others as if they are his best customers. He routinely invests in their success.

It comes back to him in a thousand ways.

One of my former clients—who we’ll call Charlie—is just the opposite, and a perfect example of applied scarcity thinking.

Charlie exhibits a hoarding mentality. He never picks up the check, even if he asks you to lunch. He constantly complains about everything. When I was working with him, I always left his presence drained and diminished.

And he is like this with everyone, I learned. His employees roll their eyes when you mention his name, but don’t dare say anything that could get back to him. They live in constant fear that their livelihood and well-being are at risk.

Not coincidentally, the success that their boss craves always seems to elude him.

More Than Enough vs. Never Enough

When I got home from running I wrote down this list of polar opposites, with Robert and Charlie in mind:

Abundance thinkers:

Believe there is always more where that came from.
Share their knowledge, contacts, and compassion with others.
Default to trust and build rapport easily.
Welcome competition, believing it makes the pie bigger and them better.
Ask themselves, How can I give more than is expected?

Are optimistic about the future, believing the best is yet to come.
Think big, embracing risk.
Are thankful and confident.




“

Abundance thinkers believe there is always more where that came from.

—MICHAEL HYATT

Scarcity thinkers:

Believe there will never be enough.
Are stingy with their knowledge, contacts, and compassion.
Default to suspicion and find it difficult to build rapport.
Resent competition, believing it makes the pie smaller and them weaker.
Ask themselves, How can I get by with less than is expected?

Are pessimistic about the future, believing that tough times are ahead.
Think small, avoiding risk.
Are entitled and fearful.

Change of Heart

I don’t think I’ve overdone the contrast here. Robert and Charlie are just that far apart, in how they behave and in the results of that behavior.

But I don’t think for most of us it’s that cut-and-dry. We have a little bit of Robert and a little bit of Charlie in us. I know I do.

We ought to strive to grow as abundance thinkers, to be more like Robert and less like Charlie in our careers and in our lives. Proverbs reminds us that as a man “thinks in his heart, so is he.”

The Upside of an Experimental Mindset

Leaders create change. The problem is that not everybody wants change. You’ve probably faced the frustration of having your team be less than enthusiastic about a new initiative. That’s when you hear all the familiar lines: “We tried that before.” “It’ll cost too much.” “Why do we need this, anyway?”

It’s exhausting. But there is hope!  Here’s an easy way to get people onboard with a new initiative. It’s so simple, you’ll wonder you you haven’t thought of it before now.

3 Forces That Shape Character

How Media, Habits, and People Hold us Back or Drive us Forward

Charisma may be useful in attracting a following, but it is largely useless when it comes to achieving a long-term, positive impact on the people and organizations we lead. For this, we need character.

In helping people build their platforms, I frequently meet people whose public image is better developed than their personal character. They are one person on stage and another when the spotlight is off.

It is this fundamental lack of integrity that undermines their effectiveness and, left unchecked, can destroy their legacy.

Effective leadership is an inside-out job. This is why it is so important to give attention to developing our character. Yes, talent is important. So is education and experience. But in the end, it is our character that makes or breaks us.

In my experience, character is shaped by three forces. If we want to develop our character, we need to give attention to each of them.

The input we consume. Computer geeks are fond of saying, “garbage in, garbage out.” The same is true with our inner life. One of the best ways to grow is by reading books, listening to podcasts and other audio programs, and attending conferences.

But the opposite is also true. Watching endless hours of mindless television, viewing pornography, or uncritically ingesting the worst of popular culture erodes character.

This is why we must be attentive to the input we consume. It affects us in deep and profound ways. It is the raw material out of which our character is formed.

The relationships we pursue. Jim Rohn taught that “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” If this is true—and I believe it is—we have to be more intentional about the people we choose to associate with.


If you want to lose weight, hang out with people who make good diet and exercise choices.
If you want a better marriage, socialize with people who have healthy ones.
If you want to make more money, associate with people who are successful.

Conversely, dissociate from people who reinforce your worst traits. Even the Bible warns, “Bad company corrupts good character” (see 1 Corinthians 15:33). None of us can afford relationships that pull us down.

The habits we acquire. These are simply the consistent ways we think, speak, and act in different situations. They are largely unconscious, which is what gives them their power—both positively and negatively.

Good habits lead to good outcomes:

If we develop the habit of praising our spouse in public, for example, it contributes to a healthy marriage.
If we develop the habit of positive thinking, it can help us cope with adversity.
If we make healthy food choices, it can increase our energy, improve our productivity, and extend our lives.

But bad habits can have the opposite impact, too. If you make a habit of complaining about your boss, it can come back to bite you. That’s why we have to be intentional about building good habits and breaking ourselves of bad ones.

“

In the end, it is our character that makes or breaks us.

—MICHAEL HYATT

Nothing is more important to our effectiveness as leaders than the cultivation of our own character. Why? Because ultimately we will replicate who we are—for good or for bad.

How to Fail Better

Leaders are achievers. But nobody bats 1.000. We all experience failure eventually. That can be discouraging—even humiliating! That’s why most of us react in one of two ways. Either we globalize our failure by thinking we won’t ever succeed. Or we sweep the loss away quickly and forget it. 

But what if there was a better way to fail?