581 | Daily Progress: Unleashing Your Potential One Day at a Time

Join us as we unravel the secrets of habit formation, goal setting and identity alignment to propel you toward your long term vision of success. That is coming up next.

Welcome to The Chris LoCurto Show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are.

Today, we are going to take a little journey to kind of harness the power of daily progress in kind of shaping our personal and professional lives.

Now, as I start this out, it could be very easy for you to go, oh, there's nothing really important here, folks. I am telling you, these are some of the things that are incredibly important to successful leaders and business owners.

These are some of the most important things I can tell you. As somebody who owns multiple businesses, has been a business owner for many, many years, has done this stuff for decades, I can tell you the things that we're going to cover today might seem simplistic.

They might seem small, they might seem not that important. And I will tell you, they are definitely great aspects to my success.

They are great aspects to so many business owners that I have coached, led, guided business owners that I know other folks that are just incredibly successful at what they do.

So as we talk through this stuff, it's funny because it, it doesn't seem very sexy. It doesn't seem like it's just this great, these great ideas, and yet they're not supposed to be.

It's funny how people are making so much money out there, being social influencers with all these great ideas of how you're going to make your next million dollars, and yet everything they suggest doesn't seem to work out really well, or it hasn't worked out yet, but somehow it must be working for somebody.

The things that I'm going to hit you with are things that literally work, that are a part of people being successful. So go with me on this.

I hope that you can not only hear and understand these aspects, but implement these things into your daily life. So in this episode, we're going to uncover the transformative potential of cultivating habits.

Yes, habits that align with our identity, with our vision, that help us to kind of propel toward better versions of ourselves. I pause in saying greatness, but yeah, I mean, at some extent greatness in your gifts and talents and the things that you do.

Please don't take that as in, I'm hoping that you become a great person among people. That's not what I'm talking about. Keep in mind, this is a show that consistently tells you that servant leadership is more important than any other kind of leadership.

But these habits can help you become great at what you do, right? So let me remove the term greatness and just talk about how great you can be at what you do on a consistent basis. So let's, let's focus on it that way so there's no confusion.

No, I am not going to be, uh, the crazy folks that are screaming, you know, at the top of their lungs about how it's all about you and, and you need to do you and take care of you and you're so important, yada, yada, yada.

That's not what I'm talking about. But if you do believe that you have a business with a purpose, with a mission, if you do believe that you were put on this earth by God to serve people, take care of people, solve people's problems, all that kind of fun stuff, then great.

This show is for you. This episode is definitely for you. So the first thing that we're going to talk about is the power of daily habits. Again, stick with me on this. I really want you to hear this and put this in place.

As they say in Hebrew, shema, hear and obey. Listen and do. This is something you should be doing. Don't just listen to this episode and go, man, that sounds like good ideas.

I hear, Chris, I understand that. Or don't listen to this and go, well, I've heard people talk about that stuff before and I don't see how it could possibly work. Folks, give it a try. The daily habits are vitally important to your success.

Well, Chris, how could that possibly be? Because the more you focus on the daily routine, the more you will begin to understand how vital it is for you to accomplish bigger things on a daily basis.

But there's also an incredible number of things that you're probably missing out on. There's an incredible number of things, vitally important stuff that is either getting shoved aside because it seems boring or it just doesn't seem that important.

Or, you know, man, I don't see how that can have an effect on my personal growth or my business growth. And yet, when you put them in place, you're going to be shocked at how much it does.

So just stick with me on this. The personal daily habits, it's going to bring a lot of satisfaction to you as well, because you're going to start to see some level of professional fulfillment.

What do I mean by that? Well, when you start ticking some of these things off and you see how they affect the rest of your day and the amount of time it takes for you to accomplish things and the number of things that you get done, you're gonna be blown away.

You'll be preaching this within, within a short period of time. You're gonna be preaching these things to other folks going, you've got to do this thing.

And they're gonna look at you the same way you're probably looking at, you know, your phone right now or your radio, whatever you're listening to me on.

So trust me, walk with me on this. All right, so one of the big things is, is we need to learn how to identify and implement keystone habits that drive positive change in our lives.

Now, I have experts in areas that have proven strategies and things that they do that when I find them, I'm all about it. I jump on board. I want to learn it. I want to, you know, I want to implement it for myself, see if it works, all that kind of stuff.

Health is one of those areas. You've heard me talk about a lot on this, this show. Why? Because I've had to deal with it for decades. I have had high levels of lead for an incredibly long time, and I'm still working on trying to get it out of my body, which is no easy process.

At least it has not been for my specific body. Any of you out there that have done it and done it in a quick amount of time, man, [email protected] shoot me your information because I'd love to have it.

I've tried so many different aspects and it's continuing to come down, but it's also very wearing on the body. So I say all that to say that I am somebody who studies a lot of doctors, a lot of processes that are happening, a lot of new studies that are coming out.

So I'm consistently learning on things that I should be doing, can be doing things that might help me. Yada, yada, yada, yada. Well, there's a great guy out there.

I enjoy him, named Gary Brecka, who is a human biologist, and he hits on a lot of things about the impacts of, you know, the, what, what he came from was the insurance world where they would study people to know when they were going to die, right?

What's the actuary tables on this person according to their human, according to their specific biology, and that would tell them how much they were going to, you know, charge for their insurance and yada, yada, yada, right?

When they were going to die, if they, they got a hip replacement. How much faster that was going to be before something else got replaced and all that kind of stuff.

So he hits a lot of great stuff, but there are certain things that he does as far as daily personal habits. He's got some four things that he does and some of those things I do myself as well, like getting up in the morning and getting outside with the sun.

It is incredible how much your body responds when you are physically outside. No sunglasses, you're not wearing sunglasses. Your eyes are adjusting to the sun. Coming up.

You're experiencing the sun, your body is kicking into. You know, for some of us that spend decent amount of time outside, your melanin starts to produce like crazy, but your circadian rhythm, your circadian clock kicks in.

And as it's experiencing the sun, well, Chris, can't you just do that sitting in your house looking out a window? No, it actually is being blocked by the window itself. So even if the glass is decently clear, there's a tint.

There's something that's holding that back. But you're also not out in those, those, those red light rays, the uv rays, all of that kind of fun stuff. So you get out there and it starts to kick your circadian rhythm.

Another thing he talks about is grounding. I've been doing that for a long time now where I have specific shoes. And some people just like to walk barefoot, but your body gets full of negative ions, these negative charges and when.

So we were created. You know, you have rubber soles on your shoes. Most likely. Very rarely do we find anybody who is walking around with leather soles or walking around barefoot.

Almost everybody's walking around since the fifties with these rubber soles. Well, guess what? It's keeping your body from discharging these negative ions when you go outside.

I can feel a difference of walking outside ground. I actually have shoes that ground. So my wife and I will get up in the morning, we will go for a walk. We'll actually go for some sprints. I'll talk about that in a little bit.

We're out there, sun's coming up, our body's adjusting. Our circadian clock is adjusting. We're getting that circadian rhythm with, with what's going on with the sun, putting us in a great time period of being tired later on.

So that we go to bed, we're grounding, we're getting these negative ions out of our body, discharging those into. By the way, you may not know this. Guess what?

Lightning is so solar flares coming from the sun send negative ions into our positively charged atmosphere. And when there's too much in the atmosphere, it sends it to the ground, getting rid of those negative ions, it gets discharged into the actual earth.

So, folks, this. You'll be amazed if you've got inflammation, how this helps out. So why am I going so deep into this? Because these are things that, as you do these habits on a daily basis, it will affect your health. It will change your health.

So, for us, it's big. I mean, we will get out there. We will walk in the. In the sunlight, as the sun's coming up, we will discharge negative ions out of our body.

And one of the things that we do is, and this is one of the key keystone habits that I want you to focus on, is we will do exercise. Now, my wife and I do sprints.

We're over 40 years old. There's a, you know, I'm 54. My wife is 47. And there's a stat that I think it's less than 2% of people over 50 will ever sprint ever again in their life.

It may even be over 40. And the great thing is, is that we know that if you're doing long runs or lots of running, then as you get older, that's actually just jacking up your hormones. It's not helping you out.

You're not losing weight. You're not. You are helping to stay in a cardio. Stay a good cardio state, but it's actually affecting your hormones.

And if you will do short things like hit, you know, high intensity interval training or sprints, my wife and I will do some sprints first thing in the morning.

Then it affects your health. It affects. It burns more visceral fat from your body, it builds more muscle, and it keeps you in. In better shape. So I know lots of information, Chris. I don't understand what all this means.

Here's what I'm telling you. These are habits that we do. These are things that cause us to feel so much better about ourselves. These are things that help us to kick our day off.

So we will start another thing we do. We are coffee lovers, but we won't drink caffeine for about 90 minutes. I know this is so much information, Chris. I'm a walking encyclopedia of stuff. Right?

We will start off our morning with a decaf. Decaf? Why would you ever do that? Because your body produces adenosine, and adenosine needs to actually work itself out.

Otherwise, if you put caffeine in too early, what happens is, is the caffeine shuts down your body's processes and your needs of when you're going to process that adenosine.

It stops the process many times. It will affect your adrenaline and keep your adrenaline from pumping when you need it, which adrenaline does a lot to heal your body. So this process actually helps you to process what's happened.

As you've slept. You know, you've gone through the night sleeping. You're not dumping caffeine into your body. First thing for us, we wake up naturally. We don't use alarm clocks.

We're waking up, you know, 535, 25, 30 in the morning sometimes. And then after a while, we'll go out and do our stuff, and after a while, we'll have a cup of, one cup of caffeinated coffee. We're good. We're good for the day.

These are things that have helped us to have much better days. These personal habits, these are some keystone habits for us. It's changed the way we face our day.

It's changed the way we feel during our day. Now, some of you out there going, man, that's great for you, but there's no way that can happen in my morning. I disagree.

As we talk through habits, one of the things you have to understand is the more things you say yes to, the more things you say no to. Every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else.

So there are certain things that are just too important for us. Bible study is too important for us to, you know, spend time doing other things.

Doing the sprints helps us to get exercise in in the morning instead of having to go and do 30 minutes, an hour of training somewhere, which, again, as you get older, is actually less beneficial than something short and intense.

So for us, we have things that we say no to all the time because we're saying yes to the keystone things. I highly suggest that Bible study is something that you do.

You and your spouse, if you're married, your kids, if you've got them, that you do every single morning, do it at nighttime. Pick some time. Spend time in God's word, growing like crazy.

Faith comes from hearing. Hearing comes from the word of God. So if you want to increase your faith with God and increase your relationship with God, start by hearing.

How do you hear? Read his word. Spend time in his word. Keystone stuff more important than other things. Well, Chris, are you saying you don't get up and immediately go to your phone and or immediately go to work on stuff and knock those things out? No.

No. I'm not waking up and focusing on work. I've been doing this for too many decades. I've got things in place that keep me from having to do that.

I'm not saying that there isn't something that happens once in a great while. I mean, maybe, I don't know, once every three years that something will hit first thing in the morning that I've got to go solve.

But folks, that's not my life. It's not my team's life, either. We're not waking up to emergencies. I used to do that stuff decades ago, a long time ago, I used to do that stuff.

That was the first thing is to run through, you know, step down all these different things with work to see how my day was going to be and what followed fires I was going to have to put out. I got sick and tired of that.

I started putting in good routines, good processes, good daily habits. So, things I want you to think about as far as daily habits that are going to affect you personally, that are going to affect you professionally.

Those are some of the ones right there that I just shared. Get your butt up, get out into the sun, get your circadian clock going. Get grounding. You don't have to have special grounding shoes. I just happen to.

You could get out there barefoot on your lawn and spend ten minutes, if you can, uh, grounding out there. Take your. Take your cup of decaf coffee, step out there and, uh, ground and enjoy, you know, your decaf whatever.

Um, spend time talking with your spouse. I mean, that's great conversations that my wife and I have as we, we actually run our farm. We've got a long road that goes all the way to our back pasture.

And we will spend time walking most of that. And then we will do three full on sprints while we're out there. And that's just time that we're talking through things. We're looking at the lay of our land.

We're talking about, you know, what our day looks like. We're talking about important things that we need to hit or things that we've got scheduled coming up. All those things. Get those things done. Other super important things.

And I talked about the Bible study. Listen, people always ask me, you know, where's my focus on reading? Because reading successful business owners and leaders read a lot, right? It is important to be reading now.

I don't want you going and reading a ton of stuff that you can't do anything with. I think that's a waste of time. You know, I'm so glad you listened to this show.

I'm hoping that you're implementing the things that we're talking about. But if you're listening to 20 different shows and you can't implement anything, that's a waste of time.

Pick a small number that you can do something about, right? Follow people that actually have the keys and explain something out well enough that you can implement it and then start implementing those things. Right?

Don't be overloading your brain with stuff and you can't do anything about it. Scripture, that's always constantly living, that's growing you, that's growing in your relationship with God, that's powerful.

Spend the bulk of your time reading God's word. Try it. Trust me, it will help. But also be looking at other things that can help you in your professional life, in your personal life.

You know, you should be focusing on, you know, how can you strengthen your marriage, how can you strengthen your parenting? We have a five year old that we adopted and, well, we adopted.

She's been with us for a while now, well over a year and a half, I think. And so we have poured back into learning specific things about what she comes out of and what she's experienced and how do we parent even better. Right?

What are things that we can do? How do we lean in her direction? How do we, you know, take the things that, that she experienced when she was younger and how do we build as parent her through those things, right.

It's that important to us. We don't just have a child in our life, and then we're just hoping that everything works out, hoping that she grows up.

Well, we're spending time, we spend time in our marriage, we spend time in our health, we spend time in learning different aspects of, you know, communication, whatever it is.

You should be reading on things that you can implement, and it's going to benefit you today, right now. Some of you like science fiction. I'm just not one of those people.

I'm not going to spend time on a science fiction book, throw it in a movie and maybe I'll watch it, but I don't spend a lot of time there. I'm always looking for things that I can implement.

Right now it's commentaries on scripture from people that are walking in the direction that I'm walking in. Whatever it is, be putting things in, be reading, spending time making sure that you're putting, you know, time aside for you to read.

Work that into your schedule, Chris, I just don't have time. Uh huh. Okay. Then we really need to reevaluate what you're doing on a daily basis. And is it worth it? Is it right? Should you be doing it?

You know, are there things you should change if you don't have time to read? There's probably a problem, right? There's probably an issue. Another thing you should be doing.

And successful people do this. They sleep. There are people out there who are so proud of their 4 hours of sleep that they get a night. I only need 4 hours.

I've heard that from so many people throughout my decades of leading people, and I can promise you this. There is a point where they tank.

They might be able to live on 4 hours for a period of time, but there is a point where they tank where it doesn't work out. And by the way, if you're only getting 4 hours of sleep a night, there's a problem with your body.

You weren't made for 4 hours of sleep. You were made to get rest. So if you are only getting 4 hours of sleep, I can promise you you should be getting to a functional medicine doctor and find out why.

What is keeping you awake? What is waking you up, what is dumping into your gut at, you know, 02:00 in the morning that you're waking up and you can't get back to sleep and you feel like, well, it's the right time to go to work, right?

Something's happening. Most likely you're getting a cortisol dump. You know, there could be all different types of things. You need to sleep. You need quality sleep. You need great sleep.

Find that habit of going to bed even when you don't want to. And folks, I will tell you, I am one of the worst offenders here. My wife says I fight like a baby. I hate having to go to sleep. Why? I love sleeping. I love the result of sleeping.

But there is something that is locked into my head because, and we've been dealing with a lot of stressful things over the last couple of years that we're still having to work through and junk and, and, you know, stuff that, that has been difficult and painful.

And I will say to some of you that have dealt with, my mom is struggling heavily through Alzheimer's right now, and this is a very, very painful and difficult time.

So to those of you that have experienced that or are experiencing that, I get it. I understand, never understood until I experienced it myself. And this is a difficult process. But it's interesting that sometimes for me, I don't want the day to end yet.

Because when I go to sleep, then it starts a new process. It starts a new process. And sometimes that next day is going to have some decent number of troubles throughout it. Right?

And I know that we're going to be dealing with some things and we might be dealing with some stuff with my mom and, you know, just other junk going on. So I get it. If some of you don't like getting to bed, I understand.

But here's what I realize. When I do not get to sleep early enough, the later I stay up, the worse I feel the next day, the less energy. Um, the. My brain just doesn't operate as well.

So it doesn't matter how much I convince myself that, you know, well, I'm just relaxing, you know, I'm staying up later and just relaxing. And this is helping me. Nope. Get your butt to bed. Get your butt to bed.

Get quality sleep. If you're not sleeping well, discover why. Try to find out why. So tons of stuff on the daily habits, those are a lot of personal things that you should be doing.

I want to hit some, some professional things as well that I think are just incredibly important. So let's just hit a couple of dailies on those as well. If you have not been through our lesson on Killing the Leadership Crazy Cycle, you need to go through that.

Everybody in our Mastermind group goes through that, and it's just crazy powerful. And some of the things in there, a couple of, you know, pieces, we've kind of talked about it before, but closing out your day, I'm not going to go into all the details on this.

I'm just going to give you a quick, brief overview. You should be spending, you know, blocking a specific 5, 10, 15 minutes, how long it takes at the end of your day or towards the end of your day.

So even if you're going to work a little bit further, get a block of time in where you stop and you do a brain dump on all the things that you've been doing, you have on your list of to do's your schedule.

How well has it gone? Have you completed things? What's not done? You need to dump all of this stuff out and then prioritize tomorrow. Listen to me.

I know some of you out there are so much smarter than I am, and some of you out there are going, Chris, that's just not that important, okay? How about you just try it for a while? How about you just trust me and try?

I know you're, you've. You've done so much better than I have. I get it. This thing seems so simplistic and silly to do a to-do list. I mean, come on, Chris. Here's what you need to understand.

Highly successful people have to-do lists for a reason because it makes you incredibly more efficient. If you will do it for one, two, three weeks, I promise you will continue to do this.

Now, the old adage it takes 21 days to build a habit is actually, that number is thrown out. We say that it's 90 days. You know, it's about 60 to 90 days. So it does take some time.

This is one I don't think will take you that long.  I think a couple of weeks, you'll be like, yep, I'm doing this forever.

So what you do is you dump all the stuff out in your brain that needs to be worked on or you've been working on, or you're in the middle of working on or things that aren't done yet, and then you prioritize tomorrow by blocks of time and by time slots.

So in other words, let's say I had something super important I needed to get done first thing in the morning. It's going to take me an hour. It takes the very first time slot for 60 minutes, right?

I'm probably going to put it in there for 55 minutes. I want to get it done in 55 minutes, maybe give myself a five minute break, run to the restroom, something like that.

And then what's the next thing I'm going to hit, right? So the next thing might only take 15 minutes, but it's way more important than the other things that I have on my schedule. 15 minutes, block.

Block it in there for only 15 minutes and so on and so forth. This is something that as you do this, there's multiple amazing benefits from this. One thing is you're not taking all the crap in your head home.

Yes, you are taking it home, but it's not going to be popping up inside of your brain while you're sitting at your dinner table with your family. You're not going to be on your phone sending yourself emails of things, trying to remind you of what you need to do tomorrow.

You're not going to be not listening to your kids talk about their day, not listening to your spouse, because things keep popping up inside of your brain that you have to keep processing through.

Folks, I've been doing this forever. Trust me. It changes your evening, it changes your family experience. It is crazy powerful. So that's a fantastic impact of it.

Second thing is you will find so much greater efficiency and efficacy in your day, the next day when you do it this way. And by the way, don't shy away from the tough stuff make sure you're looking at the highest value tasks being the things you have to hit first. Right?

Go after those things first. Some people will push those things off because, well, it's, it's conflict. I don't want to deal with that. Get it done early. Knock it out, get it done. You'll be amazed at how great the rest of your day goes.

But here's what I can tell you. If you do this long enough, what you will discover is, let's say you work an eight hour day and I know you don't.

You work probably more than that. But if you're a business owner, you don't know what 8 hours looks like. But let's say you scheduled out 8 hours and you had 17 tasks or twelve tasks or five tasks.

I don't care whatever it was that you needed to get done. And by the way, if you're a business owner, you should not have 17 tasks to do tomorrow. But let's say you get that on your schedule.

What you will discover is if you block that out for 8 hours, you will have it done in six, seven at the latest. You will get things done so much faster and so much better that you will get to the end of your day going, huh?

I've got time left. What else can I do? What else can I focus on? Well, restart your brain dump and put stuff on your calendar to finish out the day and reset tomorrow. Right?

This will change the productivity of your every single day. So much so you will be screaming it to your leaders. You will be screaming it to your team members. Y'all got to do this. This is powerful. This is so good.

This is what successful people do. They schedule the day. Why am I saying close out your day? Some people will start at first thing in the morning.

That's fine. You can do that. I'm going to tell you that your brain is going to be so much better at nighttime. Your sleep is going to be so much better if you do it at the end of the day, the day before. Trust me on this. Just do it. You'll be blown away.

Folks, if you've been listening to me for any length of time, then you know the number one issue when it comes to business, when it comes to family, when it comes to friendships, is having a lack of high quality communication to make sure that you are absolutely winning in every aspect of your life.

It all starts with having great communication. The best way to get that communication is to understand your personality style and to understand the personality style of the folks that you're spending the most time with, whether it be at work, whether it be at home.

The best way to do that is to go to chryslakirtle.com store and get your personality profile and personality profiles. Your team today, get it for your family members today.

As you go through that profile, you will begin to see the greatest ways to communicate. Go to chrislocurto.com/store today.

So what are some other things that successful people do to, you know, on a daily basis, on a daily habit basis to increase their productivity, to make them more successful?

One thing they do is batch work. I cannot tell you for how many years I have spent time looking at my time making sure that I batch my work together. So I'm not, I learned this early on.

I mean, I, all the way back in my days of e trade, back in the, the early nineties, when I discovered that I would spend time bouncing from one thing to the next thing to the next thing to the next thing, and I would just be, you know, at the end of the day, I was just like, losing my mind.

I'm like, how in the world could I possibly know what I got done today? Because I just couldn't repeat it back, right? I knew I did a ton of things, and the way that my mind worked back in those days is that I'd be working on something.

I go, aha, I've got to go fax that thing. Yes, we faxed things back in those days. I got to go fax that to the client. Oh, shoot, I forgot. I got to go do this thing over here. Oh, cool. Crud. I've got a meeting in five minutes. I gotta go.

Oh, you know, and I would just consistently bounce back and forth. All these things were important, everything needed to get done until I learned to actually batch my work.

So in other words, I take, like, items, you know, if there's something that I need to accomplish and let's say it's, it's doing, I don't know, I need to do four advertisements on the show or something like that.

I need to do something that, you know, I need to cut four videos or something like that instead of setting them up and doing like, one video on Tuesday and another video on this day. It's ridiculous.

Put them all together, get them knocked out, do it well. Stay on that roll, you know, so when you batch your work together, you have this flow, this mojo because you're doing the same thing and you're doing it consistently.

So this is another keystone habit that is going to drive so much more positive change in your life because you're knocking out, like, items at the same time. Get them done, knock them out, do it together, move on.

So take a look at how many things you can, and especially as you're closing out your day, take a look at how many things the next day that are like items that you can batch together.

So let's say, you know, what I did say was organized, you know, according to, you know, your highest value items. You know, hopefully you're also organizing according to needs versus wants. Right?

You'll get to the wants, get the needs done. But let's say you had something that was a high value item. Let's say it was doing a marketing piece.

Let's say you had to cut a video that needed to go out next week, but you also had this video that needs to get done, but it could probably wait a couple of days, throw them together, batch them together, get them done, get it knocked out, move on.

Move on to the next thing. Right. It doesn't have to be while this one was high value and I can't do the other one for another two days. No. If you can put it together, unless you have just way more high value stuff that needs to be done immediately, batch it together, you will notice that you become so much more productive. Okay, I think that's enough. That is a, that's a bunch on, just the daily stuff.

That's a bunch on, on having those daily habits. What else do we need to do as far as, you know, experiencing the power of habits? Well, another thing is, is you've got to work heavily.

Let me, let me back this up a little bit. So if you are the business owner or if you're a leader who does work on vision and goal setting, then this needs to be something that you're working on on a consistent basis.

I think a lot of leaders, especially a lot of business owners, believe that they either do work on vision a lot or that they don't need to work on vision a lot. And I will tell you that needs to be a constant.

So, you know, we have StratPlan that we do not only for clients, but we do it for ourselves as well. That is a vital piece of our growth. If you are not a. What is it? Zig Ziglar said, if you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time.

Hopefully I didn't just screw up another zig Ziglar quote. I know I mess them up all the time, but if you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every single time. Right.

So for us, we understand that if we just keep doing the same stuff over and over and over again and we don't set new vision, we don't have new direction.

Then what happens is, is we get lost on just doing the same thing and we'll just keep cranking it out and then hubris sets in and you're just like, well, it's just going to keep working, just keep doing this thing.

Well, what you have to understand is business doesn't always operate that way. You know, maybe you have the kind of business that you can keep doing the same thing over and over again, over again for 30 years and you have no problems.

For us. We're consistently looking for what is the next destination we are heading to? What is the, what is the next vision that we are getting to.

Now you can have 700 different destinations, right? If you're working on a current destination, you might, as you get closer to it, start working on the next one. You know, we do StratPlans all the time for companies.

Or like, hey, this should take you probably 6, 9, 12 months to get going. Then after again, after that, let's reset, let's hit it again. Let's put something new. Let's see how well we did.

Let's solve the problems, you know, in the areas that we didn't do well, so on and so forth, right? Let's get those things done.

And if you are not working on a long term strategy, and let me again, rephrase for me, I think long term strategy nowadays is actually within a one to three year period, sometimes maybe a five. It used to be we could set long term strategies for ten years.

You just. Business changes too fast nowadays, as far as I'm concerned, to be looking at a really long term strategy, if you're not working on something in the next one year to three years, if you don't have something on the board with action steps and goals and metrics and everything to get you to that place, then you have no clue what you're missing out on.

You have no clue how, how much you're holding yourself back. That's the reason we do StratPlan.

Well, a major focus of StratPlan is helping people to discover all the things that are holding them back from being successful and getting on to that, that next destination.

Those, you know, holding clients, doing better with clients, gaining new clients, all those different aspects. People always think it's just, well, you just need to make more money. Nope.

You need to discover all the things that are keeping you from making more money or keeping you from retaining money or utilizing that money.

Well, so with that being said, you've got to be working on your strategy. So for us, that's exactly what StratPlan accomplishes. What is our next long term vision?

Something longer than just the next 30 days or so, you know, something that's got some distance on it. What's our next big strategic plan? And then what are all of the clearly set goals, achievable goals that are related to us accomplishing that?

Do we have goals in there that have to do with our professional development? Is there goals in there? You know, we talked about, you know, hitting some of these personal daily goals, exercise, closing out your day, these aspects.

What about in my professional life? Do I have goals on how I'm gonna grow me? Do I have goals on how I'm gonna develop me? If I don't, then how do I expect myself to develop?

What's gonna cause me to grow and develop if I don't have those goals? Right. So what we need to do is we need to start each week by setting clear, clearly defined goals.

Don't just write down, be better at this. You have to define what that goal looks like. It has to be clear. It has to be understandable. If I can't look at the goal that you've written down and understand it, it's not clear enough.

I should be able to look at that and go, oh, okay, I see where you're going here. Right. It needs to be achievable. Right. It needs to be something you can accomplish.

Don't write down a goal that's going to take you three years to hit. Right. I'm not saying don't have three year goals. What I'm saying is we need to do something that is habitual. Right.

We need to put something down that we're doing on a consistent basis.

So if I'm going to accomplish something in my professional development, what can I do in the next 90 days, right? What can I do the next six months? What's going to grow me? Is there something I can do in 30 days? Right?

Start by every single week taking a hard look at what you can accomplish. How long is it going to take to accomplish, what are the steps that it's going to take to accomplish those, you know, every step along the way?

Sometimes, you know, it's great to just reverse engineer it. This is where I want to be. Well, how do I get there? What are the metrics?

What are the, the measurements that as I go along, I can see how I'm doing at any time, anytime in real time, I can see where I am. How well am I accomplishing this?

And then where's the accountability? Is there accountability that says, hey, I was supposed to get this done this week, so let's say I'm putting a 90 day goal together or six month goal together.

Let's say it's a six month goal or destination, a vision. Let me break that down now into quarters. How much can I get done in each quarter? I've got two quarters there.

How much needs to get done in the first quarter? How much in the second quarter? Break down those quarters into 30 day goals. So this much must be accomplished in this set of 30. This set of 30.

This set of 30. Break the 30 day goals down into weekly goals. This is what I must accomplish every single week or by this week, depending upon, you know, what, you might have more tasks in one week than another.

And then this is what I can do every single day to accomplish that. Professional development. Right. The accountability is breaking it down all the way down to the daily aspects.

What do I do today to accomplish this then? If I did not, the metric is, the measurable is, did I get it done if I did not accomplish that amount that I was supposed to get done?

Here's the accountability piece. Why? Why did I not? What held me back? What kept me from getting there? What stuff was I not planning on? What things are, you know, what mistakes that I make along the way?

What things torpedoed my day? All of those things that tell you why you didn't get that amount done in that day is what you need to reflect on by the end of that day.

Yes, we're going to have weekly goals. Yes, we're going to have monthly goals. Yes, we're going to have quarterly goals. But here's the deal. If you're going to be successful at it, you don't wait for the quarter to get over before you evaluate your steps.

You don't wait for the month to get over before you evaluate what you accomplished. You break it down into what I could do today to move this ball forward.

I'm talking about what successful people do. This is what we do at the poymene group. This is how we knock this kind of stuff out. And by doing so, guess what we do? We minimize distraction. Because I know I have this to do today.

I've, I've closed out my day. I've prioritized the, the vision that I'm working on. And, you know, I said professional development, but it could be anything. It could be you know, launching a new marketing campaign.

It could be launching a new product. It could be whatever, getting more clients, whatever that thing is. This process is how you break this down. It minimizes distractions. You know exactly where you're supposed to focus on.

You know, you're maximizing your productivity because you already have it laid out and this is what I have to accomplish. And then you measure the daylights out of it. If you did not accomplish it, why?

What happened? What needs to change? What do we need to do differently? Because now we're at the end of our day and we have tomorrow, are we going to go back another day tomorrow?

Are we going to fall behind? Are we not going to accomplish it again tomorrow? Do we need to adjust things now?

The last thing I want you to do is look at this and go, oh, well, I just didn't, you know, realize that this couldn't work out the way that I thought. So let me adjust everything. The goal isn't if you didn't hit your marks, make it easier on yourself.

Right. Instead, what went wrong? Fix it, figure it out. Right. Then readjust what do I need to do differently? Do I need more time? Do I, did I have too many distractions?

Did I get interrupted too many times by team members? Did I have too many tasks on my plate that aren't as important, that need to come up? Whatever it is, break that down and knock those things out.

If you do this and you just trust me and you put this stuff in place, this will become habit, this will become something that you do on a continuous basis. Why?

Because you will see your productivity skyrocket. You will see your success skyrocket.

If you are a leader or business owner after doing this for a period of time, you're going to become the biggest advocate for this and you're going to be telling your team, you've got to do it this way.

At bare minimum, your leadership team, you've got to do this. You've got to start knocking things out this way. You've got to start handling things this way. Right.

And, you know, this is how I want us to go after our next vision, our next product launch, our next, you know, how are we gonna acquire clients? Whatever we're doing, let's put this process together and then let's just go kill it.

For those that have been through strat plan, I mean, they absolutely understand when you have a system like this together and it's big and it has all the steps and people know who's doing what and there's accountability to it, you succeed.

It's just that powerful. Now, what if what we're looking at is not new vision? Or maybe it is, but it's a different aspect. Instead of it being a new destination that we are heading as a team or as a company, what if we are trying to implement change?

You hear us talk all the time about how important it is to make sure that your culture is led incredibly well. The better you lead your culture, the better everything inside of your business operates, right?

So what if part of this, and instead of, you know, we're not looking to create a new product launch, but what if we're trying to integrate new behaviors into our, you know, our existing routines?

What if we want people to, you know, we're looking at the, the way that we treat our clients and we're not exactly happy about it, but, you know, we want to make some changes.

Same kind of concept. You need to put the strategy together with where you want to be. How do, where do you want people to be? How do you want it to look? What are the expectations?

You know, what are the outcomes? And then let's back into this. How much time is it going to take to get there? How are we going to do it? What are the steps? What are the measurables?

Everything that I just walked through. So let's say we're going to work on something like communication inside of the team. And you know, let's take personality styles, let's take DISC and Values for example.

If you have not done DISC and Values with your team, you've got to get this done. It will change your success with communication. I can tell you that right now. So let's say we were looking at. All right, how my-- Chris?

I want. I want my whole team working on their personality styles, understanding each other, having better communication. I hear you talk about this all the time. I hear all the other clients talk about this. What do I do?

Okay, great. How are we going to get our team members there? So the first thing that we should do, and I think this is super powerful, is survey our team. Where, where are we on our communication?

Ask the tough questions. You know, is our community, how great our communication in this area? This, this, this. How much fear is there? Are you allowed to express opinions?

Do you feel shut down? Get all the tough questions out there to discover where is the communication on your team? How do team members feel? Are you going to have some people that are victims and are probably going to answer pretty crappy?

Yes, of course you will. But man, if it's. If your whole company is that way, then we got a completely different problem that we need to solve.

Give your team the opportunity to express what's wrong. Where are the struggle points? Where do they feel like they don't get to communicate well? Where do they feel like they're not being communicated well to? Right.

Start with those aspects. Get that survey. Let's take a look at what some ways that we can solve that. But one of the big pieces is if we are not doing disk.

At the bare minimum, I'd love for you to do DSIC and Values because now you're looking at not only the personality styles, the traits of, you know, how they act, react, how they give information, how they receive information, but then you can also look at the values and find out what motivates them.

Are they aligned with their role? How could you motivate them better to accomplish the things that they're doing? All of these things are super important for success, right?

So we take something like, the goal is we want people having these conversations. We're going to implement the personality styles video, we're going to implement the DISC+ or the DISC and make sure that everybody has gone through it.

Then we're gonna go through teams, and we're gonna make sure that teams are sitting down and everybody gets the profile of the people that they directly work with so that they can read through those.

And then we want them to, you know, we wanna have like, little 30 minutes meetings once in a while and set those up every now and then to discuss what have they learned about their team members?

How have they learned to communicate? What have they learned about their own communication? How do they receive information the best way and what's well and, and what have they learned in trying to communicate to somebody?

So you put all of these steps in place to implement this communication piece. Next thing you know, your communication is going through the roof. We've.

We've had people forever say we thought we had great communication until we implemented personality styles. Then we found out that our communication beforehand was chaos.

It was just crazy. It was too much. You know, we weren't communicating well. It was very chaotic. So if you're going to do something like a cultural piece, same kind of concept, right?

The big key here is focusing on self awareness. Where are we? What do we need to work on? What are we struggling with? What are we not accomplishing? What could we do better? All of these aspects.

And then looking at the habitual forms of what we can do on a daily basis, you know, what are those things personally, professionally, that we can do on a daily basis.

And then what are those things that we can do as a team, as a company to create habit that this is something we do on a consistent basis.

You cannot come to The Poimen Group and be in the building too long. That's our corporate name, by the way.

You can't be in our office too long before somebody is mentioning something about personality styles or somebody's mentioning something about communication. Right.

You don't come to our events without having some level of that aspect injected into it because we know how vitally important it is to win.

So after you're doing these, these habits, these habit forming pieces, personally, professionally, business wise, team wise, culturally, whatever it is, then we need to celebrate small wins.

We need to make sure that we understand the importance celebrating milestones, small wins, milestones that are going to help us maintain motivation, that are going to help us maintain momentum on this journey to this destination we are trying to get to.

If you are setting these things up and there is no celebration, then it just becomes blah. It's something that we do day in, day out. We don't really know why we're not.

We don't know if we've won. Somebody said somewhere back there that this was a good idea, but we just keep doing it.

Instead, when we celebrate these things, these small wins, it doesn't have to be big. Don't wait for it to be a big win before you celebrate. Celebrate the small stuff.

If you have people that are communicating well and somebody's talking about, oh, I didn't realize that your S, you know, needs to receive information this way.

Hey, let me, you know, let me lean in your direction when that's happening. Recognize it regularly. Recognize the accomplishments of the very habits you're trying to put in place. Right.

No matter how small, just don't wait until it's, you know, too big that people feel like there hasn't been any celebration at all. Right? If you do that, then it'll just get lost.

And then really what's going to happen is, is that by that point, if you've waited too long to celebrate wins, then you're just not going to do it anyways. Right? By celebrating the wins, people are going to repeat it.

You're trying to create some habits for folks. You want them to continue this stuff, well, then recognize it so that they do so. Also, another great thing is that it's going to avoid burnout, right?

When people are busting their butts and, you know, working hard on a daily basis, but they don't ever get recognized. And they don't realize if they're accomplishing anything, then eventually what they think is, this is just a dead end job.

This is just me busting it. I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I don't feel like I've accomplished anything. So why in the world am I doing it? If you will spend time recognizing the accomplishments, then it builds confidence in people.

It builds more motivation, it builds more mission. Yes, this is why I'm doing this. And it builds more energy to continue.

So, all of this being said, one other thing that I think is very important, whether it is you personally, you professionally, your team, your business, whatever it is, I think you need to cultivate a mindset of gratitude and appreciation.

This is something that, yes, I'm sure you are grateful for things. I'm sure you appreciate things. But are we talking about the things that we appreciate? Are we talking about the things that we're grateful for?

It doesn't have to be in every single moment basis, you know, but on a daily basis, on a. Every few days, can we share what we're grateful for? I love, in the mornings of just asking my wife and my daughter, hey, what are you grateful for today?

You're asking myself, what am I grateful for today? It changes the way you view your day. It changes. And again, like I say, we've been through some incredibly stressful times over the last two years.

A lot of stress, a lot of stuff that we've been dealing with. And I believe the gratitude is what keeps us from just being, you know, man, this sucks.

Instead, we're able to look at all the great things that God is doing in our lives and be happy about that and talk about it and share with each other.

And, man, I tell you what, that changes the way you look at the work that you have to do ahead. Help your team get there. Right. Help them to appreciate the progress that they've made each day.

Make sure that you're appreciating yourself and that you're grateful for the progress that you've made today. I'm not talking about be self focused and, you know, all that kind of crap. What I am saying is be proud of yourself.

Wow. I did that. My wife and I have been running sprints. Day one was not great. It was not great. We were glad to get back alive. That was a. That was an accomplishment. We made it back alive.

Day two ended up with a little injury. I think she had an injury on day one, and I had an injury on day two. It was like, oh, crud, but we kept going.

You just take a little bit easier. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Right? You gotta. You gotta be appreciative that you're actually out there and doing it, that you're accomplishing it.

Be grateful. Well, folks, I'd love for you to check out Episode 419, which is Restoring Willpower for Better Health so that you can focus on how to lead yourself better.

If you can lead yourself better before you focus on leading others, then you will be blown away at how much better you lead others.

On that show, we continue our conversation about restoring willpower for better health, but we're taking it a step forward and applying it to our own habits. That's why this works so well with this episode that you've just listened to.

So if you got a chance right now, go back and listen to 419 and just continue to add on how you're going to create this powerful process of creating more habits in your life.

Do me a favor. Do yourself a favor. Remember that the path to personal and professional growth is paved with daily progress and intentional. Underline circle star.

Highlight the word intentional, intentional habits by aligning your actions with your vision, by embracing your identity, by prioritizing your daily actions that move you closer to your goals.

If they're not moving you closer to goals wireless, are you doing them? You may have to reevaluate those, those daily habits.

If they're not actually getting you anywhere, then maybe you need different daily habits. But by doing all this, you can unleash your full potential and achieve extraordinary results.

You will be blown away at the success. Well, folks, that is all the time that we have for today. We hope this information has helped you.

Well, we want you to join us next time as we continue our exploration of essential productivity principles on the Chris LoCurto Show.

So, as always, take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.