Have Five More Hours Free-Time Without Changing Your Schedule
August 12, 2008
You tend to focus on how you ’spend’ your time. Time is your most precious non- renewable resource. It is an investable asset. Books and courses tell you how to apportion the quantity of your time among different activities in order to have the return on your investment of more success and happiness. Yet it is the quality of your experience rather than the quantity that will in large part determine your ultimate happiness and sense of accomplishment.
Its really even more than just your ‘time,’ because time is interwoven with what you devote your energy and attention to. I call time, energy, and attention collectively your “TEA”. Each day whether you are conscious of it or not, you are pouring out TEA. Question is: are you pouring it right into the cups of the things you want to experience, so you can metaphorically have something to drink in that nourishes you, gives back to you, fills you up? Or are you spilling your TEA throughout the day, so that at the end of the day the cups of what you really want for your life remain half filled (and to boot, you have a mess on your hands that you have to clean up - that will cost you some more time!)
Many clients report that they ’spill TEA’ obsessing about what their boss thinks about them, replaying incidents that happened and wondering ‘what they did wrong’, and feeling frustrated wondering why a difficult person in their life acts the way they do . You may not have connected the dots, but your confidence level significantly affects how much TEA you spill. When you have confidence in yourself, you are less apt to spend time trying to figure other people out because you feel right about your own actions. When you feel confident, you look within to know ‘how am I doing’, rather than obsessing about how others view you. As you develop the ability to deal with yourself better, you are able to curtail the TEA you spill each day.
For example, a woman in my recent 8 week Comfort Zone to Confidence Zone program said that she shaved off about 5 hours of week of spilling TEA and now devotes that time to her new relationship and time with her ailing Mother. She has to write reports as part of her work consulting for clients. Though quite seasoned in her field with a good track record of successes, for a long time she has felt she wasn’t ’smart enough’. So whenever she would have to write something she would obsess and edit it over and over. She would procrastinate, routinely ask colleagues to give feedback, and review competitors’ work to determine if her work was ‘good enough’.
Midway through the Confidence Zone course she moved beyond her longstanding doubts and built a significant degree of confidence — so she no longer had to do the behaviors that took up so much of her time, energy, and attention. When I asked her about how much less TEA she was spilling she said “A lot!”, and when I asked her how many hours a week she had freed up, she said “about 5″.
Are you are ready to stop stressing yourself out in order to free up more time in your life? Are you ready to reach the goals that will enable you to finally feel ‘enough’ within 8 weeks? Then join my Comfort Zone to Confidence Zone course in NYC beginning September 30. Learn more
If you have not heard me speak before and want a preview of the course, sign up for my free presentation September 15th in NYC. Sign up for the preview here.