Every day in a leader’s life is dynamic and you just don’t know what the day is going to look like and what type of people you’re going to meet and how are they going to behave. Amongst all the tasks and the distractions that you and I have, I think the major thing is how do I be productive?
You’ve got to realize that productivity is not about time management or work management. All these productivity tools that you are going to use or are using are soon going to fail you because productivity has nothing to do with time management or work management. It has everything to do with your energy management. And so you must be able to hack your mornings.
In these 21 years of coaching executives and these are very high end executives and CEOs with whom I get an opportunity to help them through their day and their work and really stand out and become iconic, one of the things that I have always taught them is how to hack your mornings.
And why I teach this is because the way our days are packed, you’ve got to know how to hack your morning.
So here’s the thing. When you wake up in the morning, your brain is operating at some 10.5 wave cycles per second. Now that’s the time when your subconscious mind is most impressionable. So whatever you read and whatever you hear is what gets, you know, is what gets deep in and sinks inside of you during those 1st 20 minutes that affects your day.
And for most of us, the first thing in the morning is we read. We read what? We read the work emails and we want to answer them. We want to see what happened in the other side of the globe while we were sleeping, what happened in the US with our teams or what happened in India with our teams.
And then we get onto the chat messages or we get into reading the news and hearing it. And so you’re already pigmenting your day in stress and anxiety and to be honest, you are setting yourself up for failure. So there is no way you can be highly productive when you are stressed because in that condition. It’s going to impact your meetings. It’s going to impact your everyday decisions that you make. It’s going to impact your overall thinking.
Take a close look at your morning routine. That’s where everything begins. Productivity has a lot to do with your morning routine.
I teach a process in my coaching sessions, I teach a process which is called self optimization technique, which most of these executives who I coach, they practice it through the day. Because you see the first 20–30 minutes of your morning. And here’s the science behind why I’m saying that the self optimization technique is so important.
The first 20 to 30 minutes of your morning, what you do, and if you do it the right way here’s the big deal. If you do it the right way, it helps to spike your cortisol. So it helps to spike your cortisol in the morning, and that helps you to be more alert and more enthusiastic. And eventually, as you apply this process, which I teach, your body produces the melatonin that it needs at night to make you sleep well.
So if you’re sleeping well and you’re waking up and doing the right things, and you practice it the entire day, what you have eventually done is you’ve trained your brain to manage your energy level. And once you know how to manage your energy level, I assure you, you can be as productive as you want, regardless of the pressures of your work, regardless of the circumstances, and regardless of the people behavior.
The self optimization technique is a huge part of my book — Win the Leadership Game Every time, You can order your copy today from amazon worldwide.
