Craig Johns Are you Living

ARE YOU LIVING?

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ARE YOU LIVING?

By Craig Johns

Life is not separate from work as work is part of life. Too often we hear people in the workplace saying, “I’m working hard now so I can live my life when I retire or when the weekend comes around or during my next holiday”.

“I don’t think of work as work and play as play, it’s all living” 

Sir Richard Branson

Life is how work, home, community and your private self integrate, intersect and interact. They interconnect and feed off each other as we grow and develop through life. The biggest challenge in life is to figure out how to find the time we desire to excel at all aspects of our life.

How many hours a week is required to deliver peak performance at work?

If I spend an extra hour at work, how does that affect my life at home?

To ensure that I have maximum energy at work, how much time do I need to be exercising, switching off, socializing and sleeping?

Should I spend money and take that holiday to paradise now or wait until I have more money saved and are a bit older?

Do the people I socialize with have a positive or negative impact on the other aspects of my life?

We talk about having to make sacrifices in life. This maybe true, but sacrifices are all just choices. Choices that we have full control over. So, how do we know what choices to make if we want to achieve at a higher level? If you don’t have a clear purpose, vision and goals, then you will find it very difficult to find clarity in the decisions you need to make.

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between work and play.” 

L.P. Jacks

Work-life balance is a common buzz phrase talked about in society. So what is it? Is it either standing still and stagnant, or spending half our life working and half our life living? Depending on how you define balance, it will depend on how you approach your life. If you are working 12hrs a day 7 days a week doing something that you don’t enjoy, engage with or understand why you are doing it, then it only leaves only 4hrs a day for other activities in life, if we take into consideration that we are sleeping 8hrs a day.

“Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” 

Unknown

Let’s take a look at Work-life integration. It is an outcome of people exercising control and choice in their life to meet life’s challenges. They ensure that they enjoy what they do, take pleasure out of the people they interact with, love becoming better, have purpose and feel satisfied with the life they live.

“I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.” 

Thomas Edison

Your emotions, mood and energy tend to transfer from your work to your life outside of work and vice versa. Very few people have a split personality that they can switch on and off depending the circumstances. Therefore, if you want to be successful in all areas of your life, it is important to be genuine, honest and believe in who you are.

READ MORE ARTICLES

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Are You Leading A High Performing Culture? Link
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It’s Your Story Link
Be A Rookie Link

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High Performance CEO Energy

High Performance CEO Energy

High Performance CEO Energy

High Performance CEO Energy

By Craig Johns

Is it a badge of honour in your workplace to work non-stop, be the first one in the office, the last to leave and be answering emails while on holiday?

In your industry is it cool to be pumped up on caffeine, get an average of 4-5 hours’ sleep a night, have the most billable hours, and be out socialising with clients and colleagues most nights of the week?

For most, you will know that if you keep up this frenetic pace you will at some point burnout, get sick, hate what you do and maybe even lose something as precious as your marriage. However, you keep repeating that ‘next week or ‘next month’ you will take better care of yourself, but we all know that someday is unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever, and is more likely to happen when you reach a point that is too late to recover from losing things that are most important to you.

One day you will wake up and feel utterly miserable, exhausted and hating your life. You are highly likely do something spontaneous that is out of character and possibly you will regret. When you get to this point, it is not your mind and body that has let you down, it is the CHOICES you have made. Choices that you have had total control over.

EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER

If you are caught in this downward spiral, hopefully you get to the point where you say ‘I don’t want this anymore’, ‘I don’t want to be stuck on this emotional roller-coaster’, or ‘when my ENERGY is dipping, I can’t control it’. So, how do you expect to be taking everyone to a higher level when you are feeling at such a low point?

Companies and their staff set KPI’s around sales, profit, growth and in some cases, industry rankings. They want to achieve new standards, reach new heights, produce something that no one else has before and become successful. They desire high PERFORMANCE, but most act like complete beginners and are in fact are delivering an amateur environment every day that is destined for personal failure’s and in some cases company catastrophes, that are totally preventable.

PLAN YOUR ENERGY

World class Performers, musicians, artists, speakers and especially athletes do not get to be at the top of the world by living in a life of constant stress, exhausted ENERGY stores, lack of sleep, ENERGY-sapping hours and pointless activities that have a negative effect. They establish goals, set out a plan to achieve them, and develop strategies that deliver high productivity, enhanced ENERGY reserves, adequate recovery and rejuvenation, vibrant relationships, and PERFORM with positive mental, emotional and physical vibrancy.

You need high levels of ENERGY every single day if you want to deliver high levels of PERFORMANCE. It doesn’t matter what you have achieved by natural talent, pure luck or just doing more hours than anyone else, if you are constantly withdrawing from your ENERGY reserves, the quality you produce will begin to diminish overtime and you will not reach your optimum potential.

CEO ENERGY

As a CEO, business owner or an important leader, you require as much ENERGY as a high performing athlete. So why do so many neglect vital aspects such as fitness, nutrition and recovery as part of their daily HABITs as they desire to be successful? Is it because it is a challenge to directly measure physical, emotional and mental PERFORMANCE in the workplace compared to say an athlete, musician, artist where PERFORMANCE is out there in a vulnerable environment for everyone to see both the delivery of and the final result?

High ENERGY levels positively correlate with assertiveness, speaking up for yourself and taking actions toward reaching their dreams. It produces higher levels of creativity, people are more likely to deliver innovation, and come up with new ideas. Educational attainment and the pursuit of higher levels of understanding also positively correlate with high ENERGY levels.

If you have more ENERGY you have greater levels of confidence, self-esteem, happiness and are more likely to tackle bigger challenges. Mental alertness and positive emotions are enhanced, and you are more inclined to eat healthier and lose weight easier. A person with higher ENERGY levels exudes confidence, positive demeanour and a positiveness that enhances the likelihood of people believing in you, buy from you, following you and supporting you.

LOW ENERGY

Low ENERGY levels affect your ability to deliver high PERFORMANCEs and filters through all aspects of your life. People with low ENERGY levels tend to experience their mind feeling slow and foggy, they often feel physically exhausted, and they feel a lot of negative ENERGY and emotions. Low ENERGY correlates with low PERFORMANCE, unhappiness, lack of enthusiasm to take on challenges, lower perception of success versus their peers, lower confidence when facing adversity, less likely to eat well or exercise and have less influence over others.

Disaster strikes when people neglect their ENERGY while building their career. Focusing on developing positive ENERGY needs to be a HABIT developed at the beginning or at least the early part of your career. The last thing we need is a CEO, business owner or leader to turn into a stress monster, destroying their beautiful marriage, and causing significant financial losses because of constant low ENERGY levels.

HIGH PERFORMANCE

CEO’s, business owners and leaders tend to have higher levels of ENERGY that are significantly higher than managers, entry level workers or interns. This is probably due to the stakes and challenges being much higher and every decision has a major effect on how your PERFORMANCEs are perceived. It takes about the same level of ENERGY as a professional athlete, so you must care about your ENERGY as much as one. The more ENERGY you have the more likely you are to be happy and be determined to climb to the top of your primary field of interest.

To improve your ENERGY levels, you need to develop effective daily HABITs that include exercise, healthy balanced nutrition, recovery periods during the day as well as adequate sleep at night, the ability to switch off work, and spend quality ‘on’ time with your family and friends.

READ MORE ARTICLES

It’s All About Trust Link
Have We Got The Hiring Process Totally Wrong? Link
Are You Leading A High Performing Culture? Link
Are Leaders Born? Link
It’s Your Story Link
Be A Rookie Link

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Rip the band aid off

Rip The Band Aid Off

By Craig Johns

It’s time that you rip the band aid off. When dealing with an issue or a crisis, we see so many people trying to fix the obvious on the surface, rather than digging deeper to see what is the actual root cause.

Symptoms stand out like a sore thumb, like a runny nose when we have the flu. But the real questions, that are hardly ever asked, should be what were the underlying factors that led our immune system to be susceptible to the flu and why weren’t we more proactive in preventing these factors?

NRG Band-aid 13072018

This is no different to the workplace, where issues and crisis’s are all preventable with effective strategies, planning and systems to monitor our projects, people, competitors and performance.

In saying that, it is impossible to prevent every issue and crisis, therefore we need to have really good systems to ensure that we fix the problem right the first time.

When dealing with an issue, people find it much easier to apply a band-aid and give a little bit of tender loving care, rather than spending some extra time to understand why it actually happened, ask the tough questions and identify whether it can be prevented in the future.

Why are humans prone to the ‘path of least resistance’?

Why are we so susceptible to the easy way out or way of doing things?

I find it really frustrated when I hear ‘let’s put that decision or project on hold until we have more time, more money, the perfect design or most frustratingly, a new hire arrives’.

Hesitation is the difference between winning and losing in most sports, and it is exactly the same in business. If you wait, someone else will get to the market first and therefore be in the prime position to control the market, or more importantly you risk becoming irrelevant.

Solutions can sometimes be the most simple and obvious that are right there in front of us, whereas other times there is no clarity or even a potential path to get us started.

As leaders we need to be able to step back and take a birds eye perspective, then firstly, allow our teams the space to see the obvious (if the root cause and solution are right there in front of us) and secondly, dig deeper until they can get to the bottom of their nagging pain in the butt.

People have a habit of dancing around the tough questions, as though they are afraid to offend someone or unravel a large mistake they or the team may have caused.

How can you create an environment where your team is encouraged to ask the right questions?

It is commonplace for issues to be lingering in the workplace, partnership and with our products or services.

Why is it so hard to put your pride, integrity, record and relationships on the line and front the big elephant in the room?

Nine times out of ten it comes down to ‘trust’. One hundred present of time, the level of trust is a direct result of the environment established by the leader.

Trust, that our team feel they are allowed to make mistakes and learn from them, and that people can ask the right questions when they don’t understand, believe there might be a better way or there are some barriers preventing a greater performance.

Let’s ‘rip the band-aid off’ and create an environment of learning, growth and most importantly trust in our teams

READ MORE ARTICLES

It’s All About Trust Link
Have We Got The Hiring Process Totally Wrong? Link
Are You Leading A High Performing Culture? Link
Are Leaders Born? Link
It’s Your Story Link
Be A Rookie Link

LEARN MORE

active CEO COACHING
active CEO CORPORATE
active CEO PODCAST
Craig Johns SPEAKER
Craig Johns BLOG
Contact CRAIG JOHNS
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