Take a moment and look around at where you are right now. Is your environment in sync with your goals? Do you have a routine that sets you up for success? Is your environment matching your vision for yourself? These are questions that The What Now Movement Team asks ourselves and is now asking you.
If you remember I have a full-time day job and manage multi-businesses along with The What Now Movement. My morning routine is everything to me and the beginning of a successful day. I wake up every morning at 3 AM and am out the door at 6 AM.
I also have these daily rituals that I learned from Darren Hardy, who was the former publisher of Success Magazine and the author of the Compound Effect. The compound effect is the strategy of reaping huge rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions. You cannot improve something until you measure it. Dr. Sharon’s Day starts with listening to his daily “BIG IDEA” updates.
So I wake up with my journal and listen. I also take notes, to see what resonates with me and how I can apply it. That gets my day going right. In addition to that, I time block everything. After my day job, my second life starts. And so I have only a short window of time to get things done in order to feel productive.
I have to make sure that I'm tracking my to-do list and keeping to my time block. This helps me set boundaries around the things that I need to do to be productive.
Reflecting is my most important. One of my other favorite books is The Learning Leader by Doug Reeves it is written for educational leaders with a lens on school improvement.
But when I tell you any leader, any business owner can benefit from the book. He has this leadership framework with four quadrants.
The Four Quadrants
Lucky, Losing, Learning, and Leading
If you are in the lucky quadrant you have high results, but low understanding. You don't know why you have those high results. So you can't replicate that. And we all know luck runs out, right? So you really don't want to be in that category.
The second quadrant is losing. That means that you have low results and also low understanding. You're not doing well. And you have no idea why you aren't getting the desired results, my friend, you are losing at that point.
Then you have learning. That means you have low results, but you have reflected, you have analyzed, you know exactly what's going wrong and you're going to start seeing growth, and improvement. You're in learning mode.
The last and the final one is the leading quadrant. If you fall in this category, that means you have high results AND most importantly you know and understand why you have a high understanding of what it is that you're doing to have those results. You can replicate that. And so that's where you want to be.
The Four Quadrants is a reflective tool for me. I apply it in every aspect of my business. I look to see if I am lucky losing, leading or learning. My goal is to be in the learning or the leading quadrant. But I say that if you can't lead you should at east learn.