“Most People?

Most people seem to have a feeling that everything is not quite right, not quite how it could be. Many of those delegates we met knew that they had a sneaking feeling that they wanted to change some things; to have more, less or different in their lives.

On our courses everyone had the chance to stop, look more carefully and see what this was all about for them.  No matter who they were, how clever or smart time helped them see more clearly and it seems that most of us need a couple of days to really grasp and accept what is really going on. If you have had a long and quiet break without much to do you might have had the same experience? and gained an increased awareness of where what you do is taking you and if this is ok (by you) or not.

We met so many good people who were working hard at all kinds of things, using all their hours and often all their energy. People who found that when they stopped long enough to consider what they really wanted, and then considered how what they were doing and the way they were using their time and energy would give it to them were totally dismayed at their own conclusions. It was obvious they would never get the reality they wanted doing what they were doing. for may this was the root of that nagging feeling. It seems as humans we are quite bright and however busy we may be, we still know when things aren’t quite right for us.

Most of us are busy, most of us say we struggle to find time for the things we say are important and most of us spend time doing things that will never take us where we say we want to go.

It’s relatively easy on a three or five day course that is designed to help you work out what you want and what you need to change to stack the odds in your favour of getting it but in real life its a bugger…

One thing that we promoted was a simple tool called stop start continue and if you have the snaking feeling all is not quite right in your world we offer it in the hope you might play with it over the next few weeks and watch for the changes that will come from its use.

We use stop, start and continue to evaluate how we are spending our time and effort and to break free and escape the ruts.

This is a simple tool that helps us evaluate what we are doing now and what we could do instead.It provides simple effective options for immediate change and helps us test if we really want what we say we do.

It’s reasonably clear that once we understand where we are going  we can make some choices about changing or nudging our world in the direction we want to go.

It helps us if we have some ideas about what is really going on and how things work but even if this is missing most of us are just too busy to change anything.

Most people agree that “Success” can be yours if you decide what you want and work on the right things to get it. It does not matter what you actually want, whether its a better relationship with your Monkey, to make a million dollars or lose 10 kilos.

This Stop Start Continue practice works to improve your chances of success and it works overnight. Many of our courses were constructed on a platform of success principles and often delegates left our courses with a valuable list of things they would simply not do any more.

If you want to change some things in your life, consciously doing more of what gives you what you want and less of what gives you what you don’t want, is a great place to start.

Whilst the fine points of determining what to do or not do, may be tricky, you avoid thinking about how to do things that will not help you even if you were to do them well.

This simple exercise helps you hit some of the key areas to give you the changes you want quickly and easily.

You have probably heard about the Pareto ratio – its not complicated and it seems to apply everywhere 

20% what we do gives us 80% of the results and 80 % of what we do only gives us 20% box our desired results. Obvious what to do then ??

Relentlessly work out what the 20% is and do it and relentlessly chase down the 80% and kill it of

Knocking out as much of the 80% activity that only gives us 20% of the results helps us

• tune our endeavours things the easy way
• work smarter
• take the simple route

You know it makes sense – we know it makes sense so why doesn’t everyone do it all the time ?

We like or are even addicted to some of the 80% behaviours or activities…….

The way forward

For busy people, thats people who use up all their time (all of us) it is not possible to do more without first dumping some stuff and not doing it anymore. Deciding not to make time for non contributory activity or thinking and focusing the saved energy and time on things that matter to us is a liberating experience. Its a message to you from you and it’s like giving ourselves permission to not …… (fill in yours here)

Once we start thinking out the 80 %  we feel better knowing that what we do now stands more chance of giving us what we want.

It feels fantastic to do the things that take you where you want to go and to say no to the things that don’t. As you build your ideas on what the 20% is for you you will also find it so much more comfortable to gently assert your right to live your way.

Stop start continue gives you a simple framework that will help you.

If you are working with your Monkey Stop Start Continue exercises enable you both to understand each other (and what you really want ) better.

Thousands of people adopte this simple framework to plan their work, to check their progress and to generate great results more quickly and easily.

As you can tell we are fans!!

Stop

We stop doing things that won’t take us where we want to go. The wisdom of this is simple. Most of us are busy and all of us use all the time we have. We may spend hours sleeping or watching TV or exercising but we rarely have time left over.

If we want a change for the better, we must spend our time doing different things. To do this, we must first stop doing some things we do now. We must create the space to do some new things that are more likely to give us what we want.

If your time is already used up, adding more stuff for you to do will never work.

This is the road to stress and burn out and failure.

This is one reason one of the early exercises in both the book and the challenge test our Monkey’s desire and ability to help by asking them what we could stop doing.

If you haven’t done it since reading the book, or if you are still too busy, then you might want to redo that exercise now.

Making conscious decisions and giving yourself permission not to do ………… (fill in yours here) , has had one of the biggest positive differences for all our delegates.

For some people giving themselves permission to just stop doing something that they had felt obliged to do

or they habitually done was the greatest gift they could ever have given themselves.

Start

Once we have some space, we can start a few new things that we think improve our chance of reaching our desired destination, the life you want.

Only start things that you know will give you more of what you want or less of what you don’t want or that you will love doing for themselves.

Continue

Finally, we take time to celebrate all the good things we already do. These can be simple things, like getting to work on time, taking part in a challenge or some personal improvement programme, paying the bills or keeping commitments, but it’s good to remember you are already doing plenty of things that work and contribute towards you having the life you really want.

Using Stop Start Continue regularly makes us look carefully at how we do things now and this makes labelling and subsequently discarding problem patterns (part of Stop) much easier.

It’s a great exercise to audit how you spend your energy resources and time.