Take Back your Time

It might seem to be very basic and cliche that time is money, but of course we all know so and we all try to get our priorities checked throughout the day. Most of us have daily and weekly planners, have set their priorities at work and in life, and work accordingly to achieve their oriented results; the question here is, where do 80% of us fail? Why is it that last year’s resolutions are still hanging somewhere either in our minds, or at the best case on a piece of paper in some drawer, we even forget where we put them.

The answer is simple, it was once said: ”in order to get something you never had, you have to do something you never did”; what we fail to do is the not only the objective planning of our time, but also, the execution of those great plans. It’s known that on paper, all plans look great, astonishing and achievable, theory is easy, but practice is what makes it perfect, and this is the hard part.

Poet Carl Sandburg metaphoric description of time as money count said: “Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you”.

I read once a quote that said, time is the most valuable gift you can ever give to someone, indeed, it is, add to this, time cannot be bought, cannot be sold, it can only be given; so your decision on how to spend time is really a make it or break it to your life, your daily consumption of minutes and hours will reflect greatly the style and norm of your life, and it definitely makes you the person you are today.

  Some questions would reflect this on the spot, for instance:

How are you spending time at work?

Well again, we revisit that tiny little “comfort zone” of ours when evaluating time, we are what we repeatedly do, and we tend to get indulged in our daily “subconscious” routine of time wasters, and myths about tasks and importance and priorities, this majorly results from our wrong perception of priority setting and delegation.

Vilfredo Pareto’s famous 20-80 rule, is the rule of priorities that I encountered about 15 years ago, and ever since I apply it on basically everything in my life; it said that by focusing your attention on the top 20 percent of all your priorities, you would get an 80 percent return on your efforts, answering the question again “How are you spending time at work?” will reveal now what is going wrong; the amount of time you spend on others priorities, tasks to be routinely done, and of course time wasters that are all around you.

One of the major time wasters, statistically, is social networking; Facebook is the most frequently used social media platform with visitors spending an average of 6.75 hours each month browsing through its pages. Tumbler and Pinterest users spend about 1.5 hours on the media per month, while Twitter, Instagram and Google Plus visitors spend 21, 17 and 3 minutes respectively. Social networking increased from 2.7 hours to 6.9 hours over the period ranging between 2006 and 2012, while watching TV on the Internet increased from 6.3 hours to 23.1 hours. As for phone, email and mail, people used to spend 5.7 hours in 2006 but the numbers have dropped to 4.8 hours. Watching TV offline experienced the biggest drop from 71.1 hours to 59.4. When it comes to socializing in person, the time decreased from 22.8 hours to 21. Taking care of household members also decreased from 15.9 to 15.3 hours.According to surveys, only one third of workers plan their daily schedules, and only 10% of those follow through and complete what they have planned. According to time management expert Alec Mackenzie, surveys show that most executives don’t get to their most important tasks until mid-afternoon. Actually, most of the low-priority tasks get in the middle of their days schedule, and they do them to tend to get a sense of accomplishment about their days.

The above indicates the amount of time an average worker would spend on social media only, not to forget the social activities, office gossip and other interruptions and time wasters.

If you look at it from a higher perspective, we already abuse half, literally half, of our time not only by the above time wasters, but most importantly by the amount of time we spend doing things that are not only non value added, but also activities that limits our evolution.

I refer to taking back time here as to pause, think and decide on what activities you will cut off spending time on, activities that are considered to be in the loop of our daily rituals, the amount of time spent on TV, Video Games, Social Media, etc… and on the other hand, the people we interact with, the friends we surround ourselves with, the environment we indulge in. think of:

• ·        What am I spending time on daily?
• ·        What could be a better alternative for spending the same amount of time?
• ·        Who am I spending time with?
• ·        What’s in it for me? Fun, intellect, emotional satisfaction?
• ·        What and who stimulates me?

After answering the above, you’d realize the time wasted, on activities, people and thoughts, from your daily life, the same time that you can invest in; the most important question here is again:

what’s in it for you?

Integrity: part of "Decisions Make Destinies"

To be truly honest with others, you must first be impeccably honest with yourself. You must be true to yourself. You must be true to the best that is in you, to the very best that you know, to your potential,  off-sides, and limitations. Only a person who is living consistent with his or her highest values and virtues is really living a life of integrity. Think of it, how many people around you have this issue of lack of buy-in to what they say, which is basically driven from their acts on the other hand. When you commit to living to your values, you will find yourself continually raising your own standards, continually re-defining your definition of integrity and honesty.

We all have small lies, no one is perfect, I know is some situations we all flaunt things that are against our beliefs, and we think that we are doing the right thing because this is the norm; well if you come to think of it, it is indeed the norm, but it is not NORMAL though! Simply not walking your talk makes this gap between your self-image and your self-ideal grow bigger, hence decreasing your self esteem and letting go your values.  You can tell how high your level of integrity is by simply looking at the things you do in your day-to-day life. You can look at your reactions and responses to the inevitable ups and downs of life. You can monitor the behaviors you normally take on in and you will then know the person you are.

The way to demonstrate high integrity is high-quality work. A person who is totally honest with himself or herself will be someone who does, or strives to do, excellent work on every possible opportunity. The totally honest person recognizes, sometimes unconsciously, that everything he or she does is a statement about who he or she really is as a person, and that makes the difference between a regular job done, and an extra mile walked.

Two colleagues can have the same job description, doing exactly the same tasks, one of them however, always exceeding the expectations of the stakeholders, being it the clients, the superiors or the fellow employees, and the other is just doing what he is asked to do; it makes the whole difference. Throughout my training and coaching workshops and seminars, I meet both kinds, and I am always asked about what makes one employee exceed another, and this is always the case, Integrity.

When you start your day earlier, stay a little later, work a little harder, start to pay attention to little details that you didn’t focus on before; you are starting to practice integrity in your workplace. And whether you know it or not, your true level of integrity is apparent and is obvious to everyone around you. Perhaps the most important rule you will ever learn is that your life only becomes better when you become better, inside out and not the other way around, life is lived from the inside out.

At the very core of your personality lie your values about yourself and life in general. Your values determine the kind of person you really are. What you believe has defined your character and your personality. It is what you stand for, and what you won’t stand for, that tells you and the world the kind of person you have become. Mind it goes both positively and negatively; in my last seminar before launching this book, titled also “Decisions Make Destinies” I had one intervention from one girl in the audience stating that it is not about “what you know” nowadays, it’s about “who you know”, claiming her sincere belief that nowadays if you want to get a job, you have to know someone, and she expressed this demonstration as she is currently working as a waitress, which has nothing to do with what she is studying, and that even this waitress job that she took was by the factor of “who you know”, and she was debated by another young woman who applied for the same company, same job, every week, and just by this persistence that she got the job of her dreams, and that matches her qualifications and studies. Guess what, they are both right! If you see it internally as the first lady does, you will always be after “who you know” which won’t help a lot as you get to demonstrate your work afterwards, I mean, who wants to hire someone who lacks skills just because of this factor, unlike the second lady, who, with only her persistence, have the drive not only to get the job, but also to demonstrate her values in it every day.

Limitations

What are limitations? Aren’t they offsides too? Aren’t they things that we believe we can’t do? Or things we believe stop us from reaching where we want to go? How many limitations do you have? I believe every one of us has infinity of limitations facing them.

Limitations also begin to nurture inside us throughout our journey of life, from outside and inside, Anthony Robbins said it well: “its upon our potential that we take action, and from the results of our actions generates a certain belief in our potential”, taking a look at this, during our journey, makes perfect sense on limitations, since belief in potential can be as much negative as positive it can be.

Limitations are results of bad experiences, either ours or surprisingly the experience of our entourage. You’d think of a brilliant idea, and even before putting it into further thinking, some internal sound would interfere your creativity to whisper sadly “it won’t work”.

Limitations are creativity killers; they are the very single reason for the failure of our brilliant and crazy ideas. I just can picture if everyone on planet earth submitted and surrendered to their limitations, I would be writing this book of mine on stones, or even not writing it basically. The evolution of the human being was a series of creativity activities that consequently prevailed his limitations.

In one of my public seminars, I was pointing that point when I addressed the audience with the word imagine…

Imagine I had an extra eye in my finger, what could I do?

You could see easily more than 70% of the crowd with a perplexed look on their faces, what the hell could someone do with this? Why is he asking this question? How could this be? This can never happen, etc…

Then I proceeded: You see you surrendered immediately for your own and other’s limitations, even coming to think of it as I said “Imagine”, but you missed the fact that this idea came across a lot of persons who invented things that you use now, and most of you have on them, the camera, with all its types!

A +25 Billion dollar company called facebook originally started with the word “imagine!”, a happening world cup in Doha, Qatar, in 2022, the first football world cup version to be organized in the middle east, in an Arab country, started with the same word. Many of the things you use on daily basis, your lifestyle shall we say, started with the word “IMAGINE!”

It’s very common to hear statements like “it won’t work”, “who do you think you are?”, “are you crazy?” daily, we don’t often hear the opposite of these statements from our entourage; I guess they are giving us a bad legacy… their limitations; they are transferring their bad experience, and their own failures for us to take lessons from. Amazing.

We grow up being a small piece of moving meat, and then our movements get more and more conditioned with our bodies, we learn baby steps, then we walk, start talking, saying whatever, then we learn our so called “mother tongue”, which eventually was created by man to help communicate, then slowly but surely we begin to get more and more conditioned by the things we can do, are allowed to do, things that are forbidden, and it comes without saying, things that we can’t do.

We begin to have our internal limitations, being raised by our parents, the friends and family, the society, and our very own experiences. I remember I used to adore playing piano, by instinct, at the age of 6 or 7, I put my fingers on that old piano my dad bought so that my older brother starts to learn to play, and that he never did, and I started playing absolutely any tune that I heard, without even learning the notes or anything related formally to it.

I can see now the conditioning my father did to my older brother, getting him a piano, I remember his words back then to his friend: ”I want him to play piano”, may be he got what he wanted as Shady, my older brother, started to learn eventually how to play, but after a little while, that piano was merely touched. My parent’s conditioning didn’t stop there, few years later, as they saw me getting better and better in playing, they got me a piano teacher, thinking that this would make me go the next level, unfortunately, as playing piano was now a three times a week lesson, that teacher built inside me a huge limitation that I did not notice before, which was that I am left handed! I played the main tunes with my left hand, and when the lessons advanced into playing the tunes with my right hand, and use the left hand playing the Accord, I gave it up, and soon enough I stopped not only going to the piano lessons, but also playing the tunes I used to like before.

I can’t ski, I tried many times and it didn’t work… I am a nervous person; I get to an aggressive state easily… I am a shy person; I can’t even initiate a conversation… I can not do more than one thing at a time…I can’t stop smoking, I am addicted to it.

Read the above and jot down your limitations, after you finish, re-read them and think…think who is saying this inside you? Is it you? Or your limitations? Is it possibly someone who implied this once to you, or made you think of it the way you are doing now? think of your comfort zone, and put a line under each limitation you plan to overcome, take it baby steps out of your comfort zone, face your fears, your doubts, and as you got them into your system, so long ago, get them out now. 

Decisions Make Destinies - Application & Practices Workshop - June 25, 2011, Lebanon

The Power of the Subconscious Mind

In my weekly TV segments nowadays, I am speaking about the power of the subconscious mind, intending to highlight the importance of this ultimate power, your subconscious mind is far more powerful than your conscious one, as in millions of times. By learning how to train and use your subconscious mind, you will be able to break bad habits, control your behavior, fix your belief system and get rid of unwanted emotions.  The subconscious mind has many governing rules; the following is an explanation of each of these rules:

 

Rules of the Subconscious Mind

Have you been to a horror movie lately? If you have, then you must have noticed how your pulse raced in fear and horror despite being in no real danger. In simpler words, because your subconscious mind does not differentiate between real and imagery situations, it assumes that you are facing a real threat rather than a merely imagery one. Now, with such knowledge, you can start using it to your benefit. Suppose you had to give a presentation. If you properly visualize your presentation a couple of times before you actually have to present it, your subconscious mind will more or less believe that you've performed so well in your previous 'presentations' and is thus more likely to keep up the same level of performance in the next one; the real one!!

The subconscious mind does not differentiate between visualizations and real situations

Have you ever wondered why time always seems to fly whenever you're doing something fun? It's because you don't keep looking at your watch every few minutes, something you would have probably done if you were in a situation where you bored out of your mind. Consequently, you'd be experiencing the passing of time 'unconsciously', and because the subconscious mind doesn’t have a sharp sense of time, you'd feel like you've hardly spent any time. The same would happen when you're asleep; when you go to sleep, it is only your conscious mind that is in fact sleeping while your subconscious one stays awake. That’s why you feel like you've hardly had time to sleep when you wake up.

Your subconscious feels that time passes faster 

If you have a longstanding belief, it will definitely be more difficult to alter than a recently formed one.

The longer the subconscious mind believes something, the harder it will be to alter this belief in any way

If you think that you are going to do badly in a presentation, your pulse and breathing would start to race as soon as you start talking. These physical changes are caused by that one thing; the idea or thought.

Every thought causes a physical reaction

If you are sure that you are going to fail an exam, you will indeed fail even if you have all it takes to succeed. Your thoughts and expectations serve as the master plan for your subconscious mind, so whenever you think of something, your subconscious mind will do its best to make it come true.

What you expect tends to be realized

If you believe that you were not good-looking and someone makes a remark confirming your suspicion, you would probably be convinced beyond doubt that what you believe is true. That in turn would make altering your belief much more difficult.

Finding proofs to your held beliefs serves to strengthen them

If you are afraid of the dark and you passed into a dark room, you will definitely feel fear, apprehension and anxiety swell within you, even while you try to convince yourself that there is nothing to be afraid of. This is the result of the subconscious mind being more powerful than the conscious one; it will dominate your thoughts and basically "win" any conflict with your conscious mind.

The subconscious mind always prevails in conflicts with the conscious one

Up until the fifteenth century, people believed that the earth was flat. When it was proved that the earth was a globe, the people of that time simply accepted this new fact, replacing the old belief with the new one.

An idea, once accepted, will remain firmly in place until it is replaced by another

The greater the conscious effort the lesser the subconscious response: This can be best explained by the example of someone suffering from insomnia(inability to sleep). Consciously trying to sleep will only make this person even more awake. By avoiding conscious effort and thinking of anything else instead, he/she would find that they will eventually nod off.

Suggestions can be used to "program" the subconscious mind: This is the main idea behind hypnosis, namely sending suggestions to the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind accepts all suggestions that are sent, providing the absence of the conscious mind's supervision. 

To Quit or Not to Quit your Job

It sometimes happen when your boss demands that you do the job of two or more people, since he/she is short in staff, Which makes you work for longer days and weekends. Some other times your boss just tends to forget that you are a professional, and makes you waste your time copying, stapling, collating, filing and doing other silly jobs. What if the boss puts a freeze on raises and promotions, or he/she doesn't allow you to make decisions or allow you pride of ownership?

TO QUIT OR NOT TO QUIT… this is the Question

In today’s worldwide evolving markets, and the fast pace of globalization, a lot of principles of company loyalty changed drastically, one factor keeps influencing the employees decision to quit their jobs and to find new ones, management.

Statistics shows that 84% of employees around the world leave their jobs reacting to management behavior. When management constantly shuffles people around, and changes direction constantly, or when it doesn't have or take the time to clarify goals and decisions, hence it rejects work after it was completed, damaging the morale and esteem of those who prepared it.


Employees don't quit their companies, they quit their bosses!


But let’s take it from the employees side, and see what can be done to make sound decisions about quitting or not, thus not regretting a quick resolution later on; points are many that one should think about before making any decision:

Do you have this “High anxiety factor”? You truly dread going to work every day. If that's because you'd rather be sleeping or shopping, well, that's not reason to quit… Remember you have bills to pay. But if you just can't stand the people you work with or the work you're expected to perform, that's a reason to start fetching.

Are you no longer challenged? Some people work for a paycheck, and they say it out loud; they're not particularly interested in growth or building a career. That's OK.

Others, however, figure if they have to work anyway, they might as well want it to be  challenging and fulfilling. And when they start to feel complacent, like they can just phone it in, it's time to think about quitting to make a change. When there's no opportunity for excel within an organization or a field, it's time to shake things up. To move up, you must move out, which means quitting.

Winners never Quit… Quitters never Win… People who neither Quit nor Win are Idiots.

Are you Burn out? When your work is making you sick, it's time to quit and rethink your career options. We have to realize that our mental and physical health and well-being is far more important than any one position. If your health is being compromised, it's probably time to quit.

The same is true for the work-life balance of yours. If your family is suffering because of your work, you may want to think of calling it quits.

Can you fix it? Often you can spot opportunities to fix the problem instead of quitting. Think about talking to your boss, switching departments or taking on new projects. The grass is almost never greener on the other side. When frustrated employees tell me, "Oh, I bet this nonsense doesn't happen at other companies," I always say, "I bet it certainly does."

As our conscious mind focus on the job itself, on the job environment, on the positions people hold and the hierarchy and policies in companies, while our subconscious is more interested into 2 main factors:

Perspectives: what you see in the job, what you think about your boss, the way you admire or detest a peer, all those are not necessarily the way they are, bear in mind that this is the way you see it, this is your perspective, which generates your opinions.

The second factor is “Comparison”, whether we know it or not, whether we intentionally do it or not, we compare… we compare other lives and ours, others spouses and ours, other partners and ours, we do the comparison in every possible act, this is how we buy, this is how we believe and this is how we function. Before taking a quitting decision, take a step back and ask yourself with what and whom are you comparing your job situation now? If the comparison was for the better, the decision for leaving would be off better too.

So before you hand in your resignation, first identify opportunities for change or improvement because the devil you know is sometimes better than the devil you don't! Don't quit for the sake of quitting unless you've thought about how it will impact you financially. Most people can't survive without a paycheck -- and lining up another one when you're unemployed will likely take longer that you anticipate, so don't quit in spite.

The financial consequences can make quitting a decision you regret. Before walking out the door without another offer lined up, be honest with yourself about your true willingness to hustle to land another position and be sure you have at least six months of expense money to burn through.

Don't quit in the midst of a challenge. Instead force yourself to see it through. It's through hard work, and lots of sweat, that you truly test your mettle.

Never write when you’re angry, never make a decision while either being in rage, or under the prosperity of a promise that is not yet sure … remember, Decisions Make Destinies.

From "Decisions Make Destinies" my book launching in June 2011

2.    Offsides:

No one knows your weak points more than you, you are living with them, you are very certain at each second that they are, that’s a fact. In this book, I’ll try to give you ideas and tools on overcoming those “offsides” as I call them, because when you come to think of them, they are nothing but offsides, but definitely, not weaknesses.

Even weakness is limited with its time and place, its not inborn, its proportional; think of it this way, this one time you felt weak in any aspect, was that one time you were weaker than someone. Feeling inferior, take your memory tape back, and fill in the rest of it: “you felt inferior in front of…..” it’s proportional.

We build a whole character, a whole life, and a whole destiny by the factor of comparison itself, WE DO COMPARE, consciously and sub-consciously. We compare our earnings to others’, we compare our fitness, our wit, our clothes and our lifestyle to others’, having pointed that, its easy now to identify the reason of being inferior… makes sense?

Coming to your weak points, one of the easiest ways of overcoming them, or working on improving them, is to list them, put a target where you want to reach in overcoming them, and doing so, the only thing this can do for you, and you’ll be grateful, is that it’ll higher your self esteem.

As they say, self esteem is also a comparison: a comparison between the ideal YOU and the actual one, and it rises and falls according to the equality comparison between those two every moment.

Now you’ve been having those weaknesses for the last years you lived, change is an option, that if you take, you’d just turn yourself into a better comparison, with the ideal YOU.

Great minds, great acts, great destinies came after a change of an idle, people who inspired change and made it, were the people who decided to overcome their weaknesses at some point.

In one of the trainings sessions I made, the request was to conduct a communication skills course for a group of young, dynamic and intellectual blind persons.

When I was researching the topic, not communication skills but the special needs of sight disabled persons, it came to my attention that from nearly 55,000 topics researched, I found none on how a blind person communicates, they were all about how to communicate with a blind person, in a way or another…

I was surprised from that result until the moment I started that training session; during the first 15 minutes of Ice Breaking, I realized that it made sense; you see Blind people have no communication problem whatsoever, they know how to do it, they know their tools, they use them and optimize on their productivity; its us, people with full and strong sight, who have it.

We see them differently, we give them the look that although they can’t see, they feel, the look of difference, the look of pity. Losing sight can definitely be not only a weakness to someone, but also a disaster that can crash any normal person’s self esteem, it can ruin a whole life, a general system of living; but to them, those young intellectuals they see it differently… they live with it, they deal with it, and they’re apparently doing much more better with it then we are dealing with their handicap.

Considered a weakness, again, even losing sight, is considered to be comparative; we see them differently because we have an automatic comparison for their sight to the normal ones, we make them feel this comparison in our communication with them, making them feeling inferior whether we know it or not, but for them, they do the comparison from the other side, and they see us different, cheers: they think “poor normal people cannot read our coded papers”, “they don’t differentiate sounds as we do” and eventually they become more adapted to their own handicap, and live thus normally with it while we don’t.

Many offsides accumulate in us through the years, by the factor comparison. In school, with friends, neighbors, family and environment. We get what we call offsides when we compare: so I get this belief that I am a bad football player because I compared myself to better football players at the time; I had a very bad sense of direction while my brother was a walking GPS!

You see we build our Egos most often by the life we lived, things we did, and stuff we owned, but rarely reach the inner Ego inside us by what we want to do, where we want to reach, and how significant we can be. As that Ego was being built with the years, so are the offsides, but guess what, change is really a piece of cake when it comes to offsides.

You just have to get out of your comfort zone, do things that you don’t do usually, that you do not feel comfortable doing, get outside the box and take some risks. The best way into overcoming fear is to face it, the best way to overcome an offside is also to develop its skill by practice, by taking it to the next level, by putting your determination on stakes, and by living with it. So go there now and do the things you think you couldn’t do, it’s a wonderful feeling, there’s nothing more fun than doing the things the you thought you couldn’t do, it takes a decision, a decision to change, a decision to crack the code of that offside, I know you’re going to fail, once, twice may be a dozen of times, but then, you would be going baby steps into improvement. Remember, they say Thomas Edison use to be afraid of the dark, he ended up inventing the light bulb, but guess what, it wasn’t a success before nine hundred and ninety nine times of what his surrounding called failure, he called it 999 way that he learned it won’t work!