Find Your Calling and Your Purpose (1)

Man waiting for a call. Image shows a man waiting for his calling or purpose to call him on the phone. — Calling and Purpose

God, please tell me what to do!

God speaks to a lot of people in the Bible. Even some people today, you can talk to them and they are sure that God has called them down a path. He does not speak to me in any sort of obvious way, and waiting by the phone for him to call and tell me what my purpose is, doesn’t seem to work. My wife and I were talking today about how communications isn’t just about email, and while God hasn’t adopted that either, he has left us plenty of instruction. He has left us his word, and he has created us uniquely to have a purpose.

Over the past couple of years, I have worked through a transition in my life, from a Defense Contractor to an Executive Coach and Management Consultant. I made this transition partly of my own volition, but also to pursue an opportunity to minister to people in the marketplace.

As a defense contractor, I was doing work I was passionate about, was interested in, and that I thought useful and cutting edge for the Navy. Other people had other priorities, and I was out of contract dollars to keep my technology growing. What I realized quickly is that I am not a software developer. That is not my experience nor my gift. I have written some R and python scripts, but I am not efficient or effective. It is a daunting thing to be dependent on others to bring your vision to life, without having money to pay them to do it. Rather than go after investors, I chose the consulting route and pursued the opportunity to be a Chapter President for @Truth at Work in San Diego. My goal was to use my leadership and management education, training, and experience to create a successful consulting practice to serve others. Along the way, I could also support business leaders who are lonely, isolated, and overwhelmed, by getting them into community with other believers. Then COVID came and put a halt to everything. So I began to ask myself, is this just my great idea, or am I really pursuing my calling?

In the Executive Coaching world, continuous education is a real thing. If you plan to help others to continue to get better, then you need to continue to better yourself. So I went back to school, got a certificate from the Townsend Institute at Concordia University Irvine. Then I started getting into other groups and started reading and rereading a lot of books (including the Bible!). Another thing that I did, was to become a client of the process, and hired my own coach, who has also helped me to prioritize what is important, to listen to subtle and not so subtle clues, and to try to figure out what God is really calling me to do.

I believe it was Larry Buxton who explained to me that the word Enthusiam is actually derived from words meaning “God within”. I found this tidbit at the Merriam Webster Dictionary:

What is the history of enthusiasm?

… Enthusiasm entered the English language around the beginning of the 17th century. It was borrowed from the Greek enthousiasmos, meaning “inspiration or possession by a god.” For the first two hundred or so years that it was used in English, enthusiasm was primarily employed to refer to beliefs or passions that related to religion…
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enthusiasm

So what if God is the source of our enthusiasms? If so, then things that we are enthusiastic about, are things that deserve attention. What things are you enthusiastic about? What things bring you joy? What do you get lost doing? At this point it doesn’t really matter if it makes you money, unless money making or spending money is your calling. Usually the money comes as a byproduct of pursuing your calling or passion, but that’s not to say that you may also need to make money to be able to pursue your passion. At any rate, list down those things which you are passionate about.

If you are feeling stuck or wanting to talk about a transition in your life, please schedule a time to talk and see if we can help you to Activate Your Passion! You just may find it helps to Optimize Your Performance!

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July 7, 2022July 7, 2022

Focus: Urgency VS Importance

What is Focus?

Focus is when you concentrate or put your attention on something. In today’s world, there are many things competing for our focus. Work, kids, notifications, social media, games, parents, pets, etc. Many of these things are necessary, and some are distractions. What sorts of things grab your attention? What are some strategies that you employ to keep your focus on things that are important and minimize distractions?

Day and age of distractions

As humans, especially in a day and age of technology, we often can get distracted by non-essential things. My daughter has her focus on one thing and one thing only: her iPad. Unfortunately, there are many other things that I would rather she focus on, so we have a saying: “Do what needs to be done before you do what wants to be done.” Brush your teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast, go to school, play the piano, do your homework, attend practice, and eat dinner and then you can play on your iPad.

Admittedly, I sometimes have to do the same. When I get distracted by apps on my own phone, calls, emails, texts, or even a thought in my head that makes me want to research things, like why can kids not focus, when I should be searching for why can’t humans focus?

It reminds me of the movie, “The Social Dilemma.” The film reveals that most of the games and social media we know so well have been invented in the past 10-20 years and actually incorporate things that help us focus on them, based on some behavioral psychology courses taught at Stanford.

Maybe we could harness this idea to help us focus on what needs to get done in our daily life, as opposed to how many aliens we can kill, blocks we can destroy, gems we can link, or likes on our blogs and posts, or pictures we post. I believe this proves that the ability to focus is limited. What do we do about that? I found this video the other day and used it to talk about rocks for a company the other day.

Focus and the rock analogy

Essentially, rocks are Imperatives. Now, let’s apply this analogy if you’re a business owner. Rocks are the essential things in your life and things that need to get done to help your business grow. Next is the gravel. Gravel is the things that are less essential and are tasks that need to be executed for your business to run because your company needs to be making money to pay the bills. Finally, there is the sand, which represents hassles, interruptions, and other things that take up your time while creating friction and may even keep you from getting the important (rocks) things done in your day-to-day.

Important vs. Urgency

Another way of looking at this would be to graph the things you do in your day, week, and month and figure out which of the boxes below you spend most of your time in?

If I can spend most of my time in the green box, then I am likely not getting too many things in my red box. If I spend most of my time in the black box, I probably have a lot to do in the red and blue boxes.

Remember, the rocks are the essential things in your life and business. When you focus on working on the important things with a plan for decomposing larger goals into smaller tasks to complete work, this can help you minimize the red. That to me is something I call focus.

In our last blog, we talked about vision and visionaries. One of the best ways to create a vision is to figure out what you want your future state to look like, then create a focused plan to make it happen.

With the plan, you need to focus your effort on executing it as opposed to making decisions that pull you away from your plan.

In EOS, (Traction), how you should review and reset your plan every 90 days because human beings tend to start to drift by this point. In addition, the utility of frequent meetings (weekly) keeps people accountable and focused on getting important stuff done.

But the Distractions…

In the video, you notice the things that keep filling up the time, are smaller than rocks, the gravel, and the sand. Maybe it’s the liquid mud that are the distractions that we spend too much time with and return almost no value to us. The social media, the video games, etc. It’s not that these things are not enjoyable or valuable to keep abreast of, but the concept of putting first things first and focusing on what needs to be done vs. what wants to be done is also important. Just like my daughter’s iPad, look at these things as extra rewards for completing the “rock” tasks that you need to get done.

Another idea is to silence your notifications on your computer and your phone. This can help keep your focus on the task at hand and not be pulled into other things that are not as critical. I have one friend who removed all apps from her phone that distracted her and left all her social media and games on her tablet, which she could then decide when she wanted to use those things, but would switch devices. There is also a new phone, the Light Phone, which comes, pre-unloaded. Free of distracting apps, and with no way to add any to it.

Tackship Consulting Can Help

Activate your passion, and optimize your performance with Tackship Consulting. If this is something that you would like to work on within your company, please set up a time to meet with me here.

April 4, 2022April 4, 2022

The Data Component of Traction

Data Component of Traction

Data is a great and comforting thing for me. I like to see numbers, so I know where I stand. Am I improving? Has my performance declined? Statistics about performance abound, in sports, business, and even our personal lives. Fantasy sports is all about tracking the performance of individual players or teams, and we create competitions based on this data.

The stock market is all about different metrics on the performance of companies, which we invest or divest of so that we can increase our personal value.

Personally, my 100-yard freestyle swimming time is something that I’d like to see go down over the years that I have been swimming.

Measuring something can help to maintain focus on that thing. Numbers are a fascinating way to track our lives, personally and professionally. I think about the number of people who track their performance in running, swimming, weight lifting, cycling, weight loss, and calories. If we focus on numbers, we can figure out what we need to do to move the number in the direction we desire. For example, Weight Watchers has historically been a way for people to lose weight by focusing on calories or points and tracking those numbers daily to create change in weight for people.

Similarly, in business, focusing on our data can allow us to see the performance of our company and see if we are moving towards our goals (10-year target, 3-year picture, 1-year plan, Quarterly Rocks). As we set our goals in the Vision component of Traction, we want them to be SMART, and if you recall the “M” in SMART, it stands for measurable. When we measure and keep track of the data, it will allow us to see how close or how far away we are to the desired outcome.

Providing people with measurables and targets can help them focus on something important. There needs to be a balance to set the right measure for people to track their performance while integrating it into the rest of the organization. If your sales team is bringing in more work than your operations team can service, you may want to adjust your sales team number to larger clients rather than the number of clients.

EOS Measurable Advantages:

Numbers cut through the murky subjective communication between manager and direct reports
Numbers create accountability
Accountable people appreciate numbers
Numbers generate clarity and commitment
Numbers create competition
Numbers produce results
Numbers create teamwork
Numbers help solve problems faster

Create a scorecard

Creating a scorecard is a great way to track data. The Traction scorecard looks like this:

Who – is the person accountable for the measurable.

What is the Measurable? Anything that you can easily track: revenue, cash flow, new leads, and customer satisfaction.

What is the goal for the metric? The goal of the Company Scorecard is to go over it at the weekly meeting. Then track the number each week of the quarter to monitor progress.

As with most Traction approaches, there should be a limited number of measurables, 5-15, and less is more since you want to focus on what is essential and not just measure things for measurement’s sake. Allowing for objective, data-driven analysis of performance, helping people to stay focused on tasks that help improve the numbers.

Keep focusing on the measurables for at least the quarter, and if something needs to change, then it needs to wait until the next quarter. Eventually, you will dial in the right measurables so that your employees, divisions, departments, and company are all tracking the right things that help to achieve your rocks, plan, picture, and target – this is Traction.

Get Professional Help

Our professional team can help you create measurable goals that everyone can easily follow.

Activate your passion, and optimize your performance with Tackship Consulting today. To learn more, schedule your free consultation.

February 17, 2022March 25, 2022

How To Create SMART Goals

In our last article, I shared information about creating a Vision for corporate and personal use, and now I want to share how you can work to obtain these through SMART goals.

SMART is an acronym, and when you break it down, you’ll get:

Specific: Specificity in your goals helps you know and qualify what success will look like because it is hard to say you achieved your goal if you don’t know how to define it.

Measurable: My first college degree was in science. Understanding data gives you an objective way to evaluate your progress. If you can define your goal with a metric, you can see how close you are to achieving it.

Achievable: Make sure that these goals are action-oriented, which means having the ability to control the outcome. In life, there are only two things you can control–your attitude and effort. If your goal will require too much effort, it may become unachievable.

Relevant: Keep the big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs) as something to work towards in the longer term. Break it down as weekly, quarterly, 1-year plan, and even a 3-year picture to help create more realism. As one client said the other day, “Meeting a goal makes you feel great. Failing to meet a goal makes you feel like sh…” uh, well, not the best.

Timebound: Working with companies, we have a specific time frame that we set goals for, namely 10-year target, 3-year picture, 1-year plan, and quarterly rocks. Breaking down the days, weeks, and months into actionable steps allows us to accomplish our goals while measuring the progress towards completion and celebrating once we finish.

SMART Goal Example

Let’s say you’re a business owner and want to increase your monthly sales. Rather than just saying, “I want to triple my revenue,” break it down into the SMART goal steps.

Specific: Triple my monthly revenue by selling my business services.

Measurable: I will go from bringing in $5,000 a month in sales to $15,000.

Achievable: I know the metrics of my digital marketing efforts result in 30 new leads per month, and of those 30, 10 become customers. If I can ramp up my digital marketing efforts, I can triple my new leads through new connections, networking, targeted advertising, or training courses.

Relevant: I want to increase my revenue from $5,000 to $15,000, so I will set aside 30 minutes a day to focus on sending out 20 connection requests based on the geographic, demographic, and psychographic characteristics of my ideal customer.

Timebound: It will take me three months to ramp up to 120 new leads a month, so I think a realistic timeframe is by August 31st, 2022.

Now, when we put everything together, your new goal will be: Increase my monthly revenue through business services from $5,000 to $15,000 by August 31st, 2022. To achieve this goal, I will send 20 LinkedIn connections per day to my ideal customer, double my budget for digital marketing, and attend one trade show and one training session.

Get Professional Help

Tackship Consulting can help you activate your passion and optimize your performance by helping you create SMART goals and implement them into your business and even your personal goals. Check out our website, or schedule a free consultation to learn more!