This week’s Thursday Thanks goes to Pam Slim and Escape from Cubicle Nation. Pam is a great coach, with a great niche: helping corporate refugees to escape cubicle hell and start their own businesses. She is also incredibly sweet, when she was in town for a conference, she met with me for coffee and gave me bucket-loads of great free advice on the coaching biz. Lastly, she wears great Southwestern jewelry, and I appreciate that because I do, too (but hers is better)

If you are yearning to be free from corporate serfdom, check out Pam’s site, her book, her classes, everything, and she will get you on your way!

Many of my clients come to me for help with time management, staying calm under pressure, so they can show up powerfully and boldly as leaders, and I help them to do just that…and right now is one of those times when it is also necessary for me to step up my game, to improve my systems, to take some risks to wade into the pool of resistance and just get things done. My clients can tell when I am walking the talk, and when I’m not, so I do this for them as much as for me.

This isn’t college anymore. You don’t want to stay up all night writing the report and pulling together the sales presentation. The stakes are too high, you want a first-rate product with no glaring errors, your body won’t let you get away with this anymore, and your family will miss you. No. Red Bull and coffee are no longer essential ingredients to finishing the project. Chunk it down and complete a few pieces every day. In the process, make sure you eat well, get sleep, spend time with people you love, and rest. Race car drivers take time to replace their tires during a race in order to prevent a blowout, you can too, it will actually help you finish faster!

What will you do to take care of yourself physically, emotionally, administratively? How will these help you stay on track?

Read Round I of this series here ROUTINES

Read Round II here PAIN & GAIN

Read Round III here ACCOUNTABILITY BUDDY

Read Round IV here LEAN ON YOUR VALUES

Read Round V here PLANNING & TRACKING

Read Round VI here JETTISON PERFECTIONISM

A colleague once told me that the key to writing productively is to be able to write “a shitty first draft.” Why? Because creating something that is already perfect takes a lot of energy, and it’s slow and painful, when it works at all, and it often doesn’t. Getting interesting but imperfect ideas out, modifying the content,  then revising for flow, editing for style and punctuation, and tweaking it one last time, actually goes a lot faster because you are only focusing on one aspect of it at a time. Typically, we only see the finished product, and it is usually quite good. We don’t see the numerous revisions that brought the product from “interesting” to “good” to “amazing.” We don’t see the overflowing wastepaper basket that made it possible. Whether we are writing a report, designing a process flow, creating a marketing program or whatever, we get much more done if we allow ourselves to let go of perfect and create great stuff which we will rework later.

Read Round I of this series here ROUTINES

Read Round II here PAIN & GAIN

Read Round III here ACCOUNTABILITY BUDDY

Read Round IV here LEAN ON YOUR VALUES

Read Round V here PLANNING & TRACKING

Today I would like to thank Seth Godin, author of Lynchpin, Tribes, Purple Cow and many other wonderful books on life, marketing, art and courage. His writing is easy to read and inspiring. He has a knack for creating and articulating powerful concepts that speak to the front brain, while addressing the fears and dreams that swirl in our emotional core as well, presented in brief, clear language and metaphor. I love his work and my life is enriched by it. Go buy his books, you will be glad you did!

For last week’s Thursday Thanks on Morgana Rae of Financial Alchemy, click here

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Long term projects can be hard because we can’t see the finish line, but we have to keep moving if we want to get there. Imagine what it was like for the craftsmen who built cathedrals in the middle ages, they knew they wouldn’t live long enough to see the project finished! So, we break down our project into discrete tasks that can be (realistically) done in the time available, and we track our work. If you are writing a new sales training module that will have 40 parts, break the parts down and assign them to specific days / sessions, and track your progress. That way, when you are feeling like you are spinning your wheels and getting nowhere, you can review your tracking sheet and see that you have completed three modules in the last ten days, and you know what your next task is so you can sit down and do it. For that matter don’t wait until you feel bad to review your progress, look at it fairly often so you can see that each day you are getting closer to the finish line, that feels great. When all else fails, just think of the one next concrete task you can get done, then do that.

• List out five – ten tasks that will move your project forward.
• Now give each one a due date and work towards hitting it.
• Put it in your planner or calendar or to-do list or whatever you use.
• Be sure to mark it off when it is complete.
• Review as needed!

Read Round I of this series here ROUTINES

Read Round II here PAIN & GAIN

Read Round III here ACCOUNTABILITY BUDDY

Read Round IV here LEAN ON YOUR VALUES

Jason Seiden has a great post here about low-hanging fruit. Basically, he says, low-hanging fruit is uninspiring.

‘I go apple picking every year with my family, and every year, I hear the same refrain: “Daddy, I want that one, up there! Can you put me on your shoulders? Pleeeeaaaase?” My kids don’t want to pick low hanging fruit, they want to pick the best fruit, wherever it happens to be on the tree, and—no surprise here—it usually ends up being up near the top, where fewer people can reach.’

I gotta agree, and yet that is a phrase we hear in meetings all the time, it seems to be code for “what is easy? what is low-risk?” Yet the easy, low-risk stuff is seldom the good stuff. Anyway, great metaphor for how corporations think. I don’t know about you, but I want to feel inspired, and climbing to the top of the tree for the big juicy apple is more inspiring than looking at low-hanging fruit (that others have probably already passed up…for some reason).

’nuff said, carry on, and be inspired and inspiring!

OK, this is another new series. Every Thursday, I will say thank you to someone, at least one someone, who has been particularly helpful or generous. This week’s Thursday Thanks goes to Charmed Life Coach Morgana Rae (on FaceBook here), for

1> Administering a much-needed a**-kicking when I was whining about struggling with marketing;
2> Giving me A TON of great ideas on how to market my services;
3> Just being an amazing coach and awesome person. She has helped a lot of people create wealth for themselves, doing it her own magical way.I have read a lot of her stuff, it’s great!

Thanks Morgana, for all of the help, and for inspiring this new series of blog posts.

In your core, who are you? Are you smart, capable, driven, creative, what? Jot down a few words that describe your best self . Now remember that, look at it, repeat it to yourself, when you get down. Remind yourself that you are the guy or gal who tripled sales with a new approach, who never gives up, who loves to present to clients, who takes the best care of new customers, whatever works for you.

Similarly, think about who benefits from your work, be that clients, family, team, the community, people who need your product, etc. Who is that? When you get discouraged, think about them, remember that there are people out there whose lives will benefit from the completion of your project. They need you! It’s important!

Read Round I of this series here ROUTINES

Read Round II here PAIN & GAIN

Read Round III here ACCOUNTABILITY BUDDY