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January 2009 Newsletter: Squeezing
more juice Imagine the scene. You’re a world class sportsman or woman who’s won an Olympic gold medal after years of sweat, practice and competition. You’re elated and exhausted. It’s the day after the race and your coach asks you: “How are you going to do this 4 seconds faster next time?”
When I went to Brinley’s workshop last week for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) ‘Leading IT Through Tough Times’, I was intrigued when a former executive of Siemens made the connection between business and sport. He talked about his conversations with Matthew Pinsent, the Olympic and World Champion rower about cutting four seconds off his race time between Olympics. He pointed out: “Saying you’ve done all you can is not an option for a top athlete, nor for those who want to lead businesses through a recession.”
Many of us who are working flat out to win business contracts and deliver them are wondering how to squeeze that bit extra from ourselves. The pressure on business has a knock-on effect to other areas of life. I’m hearing tales of overwhelm and exhaustion from business and private clients who don’t know where that extra juice is going to come from.
I returned from the workshop in London to the dark and cold of my local train station. My husband’s first comment as he held the car door open for me was: “Just heard about the planning permission. They’ve turned it down.” The drawings for our house extension now lay useless on the floor by his desk. And my prospects for a light new living and working space stretched out into the dim distance once more. How would we squeeze in the extra living space given the limitations of the plot-size and boundaries with our neighbours?
An Olympic rower can’t magic up extra limbs to power his boat faster, any more than we can stretch the walls to accommodate space for the grannies and grown up kids who like to hang out with us. Such dilemmas as we face in sport, business and our homes involve going back to the drawing board and finding a different perspective.
While it’s fun to think up yet more new and imaginative projects, the key to success under pressure is in paying attention to details when you think you’ve already done everything you can. Brinley’s advice to executives in recessionary times is to look for savings from the work already done. Find new ways to work with what you have. Go back over plans and projects with a fine tooth comb. Check the processes and you’ll find ways to get more out of the current situation. For example, can you buy power at off-peak prices to run non-critical systems out of hours, find parts of a process that haven’t been fully adopted, or delay some work for a while, picking up on it later? Maybe, there are even a few steps in a process to add in, that will cut time in the long run.
So if you’re in business, instead of worrying about new projects getting cancelled, now’s the time to go back and look at the resources you have and decide if you’re really using them to the full. Where’s the tiny amount of slack? Did you ever go on a training course or have a mentor, yet never get round to implementing all the good ideas you came up with? Or have you got a customer database you’ve never contacted to tell about your latest products? Are you getting the best deal from the utilities or still paying for services you rarely use?
On the home front too, re-visit your plans without rejecting them completely. Can you get greater mileage from what you already have? Clothes or books to recycle in some way? In the case of our delayed building plans, my husband suggested we all cut our belongings by 10% in order to create more space. What an unexpected turn of events: at last, we might get storage space in the garage. And my eldest daughter announced it’s time to leave home again, after all.
Talking of re-visiting…let’s just remind you of the Guaranteed Success Formula. This applies to any area of your life or work – it’s from chapter 3 of Building Self-Confidence for Dummies and we’ve shared it before. It goes like this:
In any project or plan, it’s easy to lose momentum. Persistence and flexible thinking make the difference. The winners, as our Olympic athletes and business leaders will agree, keep going noticing the results they get and continually adapt until they get the results they want. And for all of us, that means squeezing more juice when we think we’re already finished.
Have fun and let us know how we can support you to win.
Brinley & Kate
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See the extra chapter "Ultimate Confidence: The Power To Get Any Result You Want" available exclusively through www.yourmostconfidentself.com.
For additional resources visit: www.yourmostconfidentself.com
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