Re-Position Your Actions

WHAT YOU DO; and WHAT YOU DON’T DO - THE ULTIMATE TEST!

My alltime favorite refrigerator magnet says “If Nothing Changes, then Nothing Changes”.  What a great summation of this week’s theme about the importance and power of re-positioning - your expectations, your words, and your actions. 
 
To get a different result in your business and your life requires change.  Today we focus on re-positioning your actions.

“”Not-to-do” lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance. The reason is simple: what you don’t do determines what you can do.  Tim Ferriss (Author of “The 4-Hour Workweek)
 
Take Smarter Actions - 10 Critical Focus Areas
The power to change your business and your life rests in your the actions - the ones you take, and the ones you don’t.  If you take SMARTER ACTIONS, you generate more POWERFUL RESULTS.  ThinkTQ - a Colorado based company that is dedicated to helping people learn, remember and master the skills necessary to produce outstanding results - both personally and professionally says that peak performance is determined by your:
1) Physical and mental ENERGY level
2) Sense of purpose and MISSION
3) Identified and written down GOALS
4) PLAN to achieve your goals
5) Unrelenting focus and ability to PRIORITIZE
6) Ability to create powerful team-building SYNERGY
7) Systematic ORGANIZATIONAL skills
8) Ability to OPTIMIZE time
9) Ability to consistently take bold ACTION to break away from the pack
10) Positive ATTITUDE - and not permitting that attitude to go negative

Your Don’t Do List - 9 Habits to Change
Here are nine stressful and common habits that entrepreneurs and office workers should strive to eliminate as identified by Tim Ferriss - author of “The 4-hour Workweek” (maybe we all ought to pay attention to these - who wouldn’t enjoy a 4-hour workweek). Focus on one or two at a time.
1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers
Let it go to voicemail, and consider using a service like GrandCentral (you can listen to people leaving voicemail) or Simulscribe (receive voicemails as e-mail).
2. Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night
The former will  tend to mess up your priorities and plans for the day, and the latter just gives you insomnia.
3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time
If the desired outcome is defined clearly with a stated objective and agenda listing topics/questions to cover, no meeting or call should last more than 30 minutes. Request them in advance so you can best prepare and make good use of the time together.
4. Do not let people ramble
5. Do not check e-mail constantly — “batch” and check at set times only
6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers
There is no sure path to success, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone. Do an 80/20 analysis of your customer base in two ways — which 20% are producing 80%+ of my profit, and which 20% are consuming 80%+ of my time?
7. Do not work more to fix overwhelm - instead prioritize
If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important.  The answer to overwhelm is not spinning more plates - or doing more - it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.
8. Do not carry a cellphone or Blackberry 24/7
Take at least one day off of digital leashes per week. Turn them off or, better still, leave them in the garage or in the car. I do this on at least Saturday, and I recommend you leave the phone at home if you go out for dinner. So what if you return a phone call an hour later or the next morning?  News alert - You are not the president of the US. No one should need you at 8pm at night.  So someone doesn’t get a hold of you after hours - what bad happened?” The answer? 95% of the time - absolutely Nothing.
9. Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should fill
Work is not all of life. Your co-workers shouldn’t be your only friends. Schedule life and defend it just as you would an important business meeting.  Never tell yourself “I’ll just get it done this weekend.”  E-mailing all weekend is no way to spend the little time you have on this planet.

Change your actions as a 3rd key strategy to re-position your business and your life!
 
DAILY PRAYER  
Lord let us heed your Word in James 2:14-26:  What use is it, my brothers, for a man to say he “has faith” if his actions do not correspond with it? Could that sort of faith save anyone’s soul? If a fellow man or woman has no clothes to wear and nothing to eat, and one of you say, “Good luck to you I hope you’ll keep warm and find enough to eat”, and yet give them nothing to meet their physical needs, what on earth is the good of that? Yet that is exactly what a bare faith without a corresponding life is like - useless and dead. If we only “have faith” a man could easily challenge us by saying, “you say that you have faith and I have merely good actions. Well, all you can do is to show me a faith without corresponding actions, but I can show you by my actions that I have faith as well.”  In Jesus name, Amen.
 
Stop doing some of the old, change and start doing some new.  Re-position your actions - TODAY!
 
Grace and peace multiplied to you.