Steve Davies Online

The first of these is what I call the "Attitude Shift". Changing attitudes is difficult, and in order to change your attitude towards the commitments that you have made you will need help. External help is really the best option, but a very effective technique is to pretend that you had to justify to somebody else how you spend your time… every hour of every day. 

Suppose you had a "boss" in your business looking over your shoulder and questioning your choices (what a hideous thought that is!) If you did, would you make some alternative choices and would you then spend your time differently? Maybe that would not be such a bad thing after all as CEOs really do not get challenged enough and allow themselves to behave as they wish without any accountability except the (eventual) bottom line.  

A good technique is to pretend that you do have a boss and to force yourself to come up with a coherent justification for how you spend your time. This is an excellent discipline with all difficult decisions, and it becomes even more effective if you force yourself to do it in writing and set up what amounts to a formal meeting with yourself to present your case.  

One of my long-time clients told me that before he joined The Alternative Board and solved his issues that way, he used to do precisely this. When he had a sense that his heart was ruling his head and that he was about to take a course of action he really should not, he used this technique and found that it stopped him from making some really poor decisions. 

The second element is learning how to use the "Power of No”. This is more subtle and more challenging and really has two different component parts. You will need to start by looking at the motivations that you have when you allow your time to be spent. You will notice that I did not say “the things you choose to spend your time on” and used a passive sentence construction instead.  

This is a very important distinction because we allow others to control our day, and we must change that. We have to take proactive control of our time and the way that we spend it rather than allowing others to spend it for us. It all starts with feeling confident with saying "no", and this is the all-important second element.  

This is not a comfortable place for many people, and because CEOs have a "can-do" attitude, there is a tendency to say "yes" when we really should not. Worse still, we retreat into "maybe land", where we do not say no and we perpetuate the conversation wasting our time in the process (not to mention the time of the other person). 

It is important to be positive in our communications and to learn how to say "no", and it is a skill that must be practiced and learned. Saying "no" is difficult and presents real challenges, and we all have a fear of doing it. It is so much easier just to say "yes" but giving in and taking the line of least resistance leads us into commitments that we really have no business taking on because we have not analyzed them properly and have not prepared ourselves to say no. 

I have a client whose slogan has now become "no and grow". His problem was that he took on far too much not-for-profit work and also wasn't tough enough on his clients either. He found that he was spending far too much time on activities that did not contribute directly to the bottom line, and it was really holding him back. He looked deep into himself and identified what he needed to change in order to stop taking on inappropriate commitments. 

That inner fear needs to be taken into account and understood in the context of your life and conquering it is an essential part of taking back control. You need to have the conversation with yourself before you have any dialog that may result in perpetuating or taking on any commitment, and it involves some serious self-analysis. 

It all starts with asking yourself "what is my fear of saying "no"? Let us analyze the reasons why you are reluctant to say “no”.  

·         Fear of confrontation?

·         You have raised expectations by retreating into "maybe land"?

·         Social pressure?

·         Spouse pressure?

·         Family pressure?

·         Worried about what people will think? 

Look at this list and look at yourself in the mirror. What are your real motivations for saying "yes" when you really should not...and how much time do you waste as a result? 

The next element to consider is the power that ego has in this process and we should never underestimate the power of this element in the mix. The question here is whether you have over estimated the value that the commitment you are making will bring to you.   

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