SMART Framework is not relevant learn a new way to set goals and achieve them|

Number seven is communicating. Now, once you have a goal that's let's just review crystal computable, compelling creative calendar celebrated. We're now ready to share our goal with others. Not before really because it's still in process. But the advantage of making it public is we're more accountable to making it happen.

Hey guys, this is Avi Arya, father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Moguls. Welcome to my channel. All right, thank you so much. Arya. Hi everybody, how are you? Hi Asta. Hi. Abdul Akhilesh. What's up everybody? Okay, we have Don Corey with us. Hello. So how are you doing?

I'm doing fantastic. How are you?

Fantastic, fantastic. Welcome, welcome Don. On behalf of Avi and the entire community of Internet Moguls of the world school, I would like to welcome you here. And first of all, thank you for your time, guys. I'll just give a very short introduction to Don. Don is a coach and consultant with the proven track record of coaching senior leaders and high professional employees to improve their executive presence, to strengthen their communication and relationship skills and to motivate and inspire teams. Don, at iam Internet Moguls of the World school, we believe that the shortest distance between two human hearts is a story. So here is my story to you. My name is Ajay Singh and I'm a father of two boys and husband to a beautiful wife. I'm a commerce graduate turned animator turned marketing professional. And now I'm a social media expert and a digital coach. And I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs grow their business using the power of digital media. Don, what's your story?

Oh man, do we have time for my story? First of all, did everyone come out of that meditative state? Are we ready for some energy and talking about time?

Oh yes. We are all charged up. We are all charged up to listen to you.

Awesome. Awesome. I love it. I've been passionate about this space of personal productivity for 30 years. It all started with this two day seminar I took in 1990 and learned how that important, the importance of being present and fully connected to your most important goals and how important that was. And when I got control of that, I just continued to study and study and study and learn more about the space until I brought this, brought it all together in this book when to say yes.

Wow. Lovely. So tell us about your journey from. I think you went into medical before. So tell us, what was the transition? What was the journey?

Actually my Background is in software development. So I led global software development teams and financial services for over 20 years with teams in India, by the way. So I've been to Mumbai and Bangalore and visited my teams out there. And so my job as a leader of global software development teams was to get them to work together across continents, across cultures, across time zones and deliver software on time and on budget. We all know how easy that is, right?

Yes.

So in early 2000, Bob Reynolds, who was the vice chairman of the company at the time, was speaking to a group of senior leaders and he said, I see it as a failure of our company when we have to hire leaders from outside. Wow. And so that was a really clear message to all of us in the room. It's your job to develop the next generation of leaders. So the vice chairman is asking. I took that call to action pretty seriously and learned as much as I could about developing leaders and high performing teams and taking this level of personal productivity to the next step. And so that's another part of kind of my corporate background as well.

Wow. So I think this is one thing which I've also followed in my business as well. So whenever I used to hire any of my team member, you know, there is a requirement. I always make sure that I hire somebody who knows more than me.

Yeah. Very good. Very good. Yes. That's the way to do it. You don't want to be the smartest person in the room. You're right. You want to do that?

Yes. I want all my team. Yeah, I want all my team to be smarter than me.

Absolutely. And leadership has changed over the last 30, 40 years. Because 30, 40 years ago, leadership was about the smartest person. The expert became the leader, and you relied on that person. And today it's very different. The leader is the one that creates the vision, keeps people motivated and removes roadblocks and takes care of their team. It's more of a servant and adaptive approach to leadership, which I think gets more results.

Perfect. And also I think managing time is something which is very crucial for a leader and we would love to know more about it from you.

Yeah.

Sorry, continue.

Yeah, well, you know, I. The, the book is called when to say yes. The five Steps to Protect yout Time. And what I was going to talk about today, if you guys are open to it, is to dive into the first step. And the first step to protect your time is called create your roadmap.

Right.

And this again comes a little bit from my technology experience because when you, when you're laying out tech, you look at one year, two year, three years in terms of quarters and what you're going to deliver in each quarter and iterate the process. So what if we had a roadmap like that for our lives and what if we could put really effective goals on that roadmap that we're focused on. And so if you're open to that, I'd love to dig into my goal setting process and how I've improved on some of the others.

Lovely, lovely. We can't wait to hear from you. Let's hear from the team, everybody. We have around 55 people already and more people are joining. Everybody, please. Message in the group. First of all, just welcome Mr. Don Quhari and just let me know that yes, Milu is saying that we are excited to learn from you. People are very excited. They are saying welcome, fantastic as they're putting that in.

I, I gotta tell you a funny story about my trip to India when I first went and are most of the people, is this the geography here? Are most of the people on here located in India or.

Yeah, yeah, they're mostly in India.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm flying from Boston, coast of the US to India. Some of you may know that trip you leave on Friday night, late, you arrive Sunday morning, early Monday morning. So I arrived early morning, whatever it is, one o' clock in the morning. And my colleague that ran the teams out in India, he was there ready to meet me at the airport and so he flagged me and he said, I'll meet you outside. So I got outside and when I got outside, I see this whole group of people, men and women with flowers and a lay of flowers. And I'm looking around over my shoulder like, who are they waiting for? There must be some really attractive person, really important person that they're waiting for. And of course it was our team that had come out to the airport at 1 o' clock in the morning to welcome me.

And that is Sunday morning.

Great way to set the tone for that. And I kind of feel that same warm welcome here in the chat.

Yeah, we love connecting with people, we love celebrating and we love learning here in the school. So Don, I would like to ask you, how do you want to do it? Do you want to have a question answer or do you have a presentation which you want to show it to us?

Whatever coordinators here asked me to put a short presentation together. So I'll do that and then, you know, feel free to put if you can help monitor the chat, AJ And I'll. I have it up Here as well. So I'll keep an eye on it. And if you have questions along the way, please type them in. And let's make it very interactive. How does that sound?

Lovely. So how about let's start with the presentation and then at the end we can do the. Do the Q and A.

Perfect, perfect, perfect.

So I'm just going to hand over the mic to you. I'm just putting myself on mute and over to you now. Thank you, Don.

Thank you. So let's talk about goals and goal setting. So what is a goal? You know, in soccer and hockey, it's a pair of posts linked by a crossbar with a net behind it. And the ball has to hit the net in order to score. Right? That's a goal. We all know that in soccer they make a big deal out of it because there aren't that many goals in our context as knowledge workers or business people. It's the object of someone's effort, right? Their desired results. That's what we want. So there's a cool study by a gentleman named Edwin Locke, L, O, K, C, K, E. He's a pioneer in the field of goal setting and he found the key to achievement. Do you see what I did there? Like, his name is Locke. Key to achievement, right. So Professor Locke compared groups with high specific goals with those with best effort goals, high specific goals and best effort goals. And what he found that individual with high ambitious goals had better performance than those who didn't. And you know what A best effort goals. I'll do my best to do that. I'll do my best versus ambitious and specific. So setting goals really helps us stay on track. If I ask you, for example, to drive to the Starbucks down, it's pretty easy. You get in your car, you go. If I create a detour, you'll figure it out. You'll go around the details, detour. But you'll still arrive at your destination maybe a little bit later because the destination is more important than the path. But let's change the scenario up. What if I just say drive somewhere? Well, you asked me for more specific. Where do you want me to go, Don? I don't know. You know, figure it out. You're smart, you'll figure it out. So you choose a direction and start driving. Now I create a detour. What's going to happen? Where are you going to go? Your destination is not clear. So you're probably going to stop or turn around or create a new destination or follow the distraction. So when your destination is clear or a goal in this place, you'll work around roadblocks and distractions. So that's what we want to work to. And if it's not clear, you know, let's face it, you're going to probably watch Steve Harvey and Family Feud and we polled 100 married women and you know the rest. So many of you are probably familiar with smart folks, right? Smart is an acronym that has so many different meanings if you haven't seen them. So for example, S could be simple or specific or sensible or significant. And M could be measurable or meaningful or motivating. And A, I've seen achievable, I've seen attainable, I've seen agreed upon. And then R could be realistic or relevant or reasonable. And T, I've seen time bound, time sensitive, time based. Usually time is in there somewhere. Some people have even made the acronym smarter, where E stands for evaluated and R stands for review. Now this is a great goal setting model. I've used it for many years and I've realized recently in the process of writing this book that there are some gaps in this model. So for example, who wants to be realistic anyway when it comes to goals? Was Steve Jobs realistic, Oprah, Warren Buffett, or even Jimmy Buffett? I doubt it. They all broke the rules. And yes, of course, goals must be timely. But you'll see in a minute, timely is really not enough. So what I'd like to introduce you to is what I call the Corey 7 C's of goal setting. It's a new improvement version of goal setting. So. And by the way, I have a client actually who has a goal to sell the seven Cs but that's a different seven Cs that ones I'm going to talk about. Nothing to do with this. So the seven Cs are crystal, computable, compelling, creative, calendared, celebrated and communicated. So let's take a look at each one of these in some detail and I'd love to give you an opportunity to improve on one of your goals or even set a new goal if you have one you've been thinking about. So just take a moment right now and maybe in your journal or in your notes or on the computer if you take notes that way, think about a goal that you'd like to work on through this process, okay? And then when you, when you put your head up and you see this next image I have, I'd love to see in the chat who recognizes this movie is some of you are all familiar with not seeing anyone yet. I'll give it another couple seconds, then I'll give you the answer. If you don't know. Nope, not Top Gun. But that is another Tom Cruise movie, A Few Good Men. Yes, Kanchon. You got it right. It's A Few Good Men. And the most famous line in that movie, of course, is, you can't handle the tooth or you can't handle. It's actually you can't handle the truth. But when I speak with dentists, I love to say tooth because it kind of gets a nice play on words. So in this scene where Colonel Jessup, who's played by Jack Nicholson, he's on the stand responding to questions from Lt. Daniel Caffey, who's played by Tom Cruise, and Jessup says, we follow orders, son. We follow orders or people die. It's that simple. Are we clear? And Cruz's Cathy responds and says, yes, sir. Are we clear? Jessup asks again, even more firmly and loudly. Crystal, Kathy says. Now, I love how Kathy responds that his point is so clear. It's like crystal, because crystal is as clear as you can get. So let's take an example. I'm going to use this example throughout. This is something I did a few years ago was I had set myself a goal to lose weight. A crystal clear goal would be, I want to lose weight. It's something, you know, even a third grader or fifth grader or ninth grader can understand. Right. Very simple. So that's the first C. We need to do this in order to. So crystal is first. Next, we want to make it computable. So how are you going to compute the results of your goal? How will you know when the goal is complete? If a goal is not computable or quantifiable in some way, we don't really have a way to know that we've accomplished it or even if we're making progress. So we want to make each goal quantifiable in some way. So, you know, put a number on it and compute the results that makes it computable. So let's use my example again. I want to lose ten pounds. Now, that's more specific than weight because you can't really measure weight, but you can measure 10 pounds. So let's just take a minute and the. Whatever goal you're working on, make it crystal if you haven't already, and make it computable as well. I love it. Thank you. Rash me done. Good. I'll see some more of those. And if someone's excited enough to actually share their goal, you can do that too. Okay. Now, some goals are easier to compute than others. I have a client who wants to improve his listening skills. So how do you really measure that? How do you measure listening skills? And he, he set up a self rating so that after every meeting he scores himself on how well he listened. And he's actually kind of a tough grader. So I think he's actually better than he's grading himself. But at least it's a measure for himself. And then maybe at some point he'll get feedback from other people and they'll score him on his listening. So there's always a way to do it. Even with the, you know, more people skills. I don't like to call them soft skills, really, because they're just as important as the tech skills. They're more like people skills or human skills. So let's go to the third C, which is compelling. Now, one of the key distinctions between people who achieve their goals, those who do not, is that the former have a compelling reason to stay on track. If you don't have a compelling reason, then the distractions are going to take you away from making significant progress on your goal. You know, we all have them. They're all popping up and dinging and buzzing and doing all of that. When you get bumped off track, you need that compelling reason to get back on. In fact, just a quick little side note on distractions, I'm working an experiment right now. I've been doing it for two weeks and it seems to be working, which is my phone is on do not disturb all the time, 24 by 7. So I know there's a text message. They come in all the time. I know there's an email message. I know there's social media notifications. I'll get to them on my time. I'm not going to pick up my phone right now during this important conversation because that's just a distraction. I need to stay focused, but I'll catch up after. So, you know, this is why Simon Sinek back to compelling reason. That's why he says, start with why not. Start with why not. So when discovering your compelling reason, I suggest digging three levels deep because something nice emerges after that. So, for example, let's go back. You know, maybe I started with. Maybe I started with I want to lose weight. Just as simple as that. Dig a little deeper. I want to lose weight so that I can look good. I want to lose weight so that I can look good in my clothes. What if we dig even deeper than that? I want to look good. I want to lose Weight so that I can look good in a bathing suit. Now that's compelling. And stop trying to picture me in a bathing suit because that's not really a pretty sight. I look much better this way. So go ahead now and make your goal compelling and ask yourself three times. Great, Padma, thanks for sharing your goal. Okay, we have others that want to displays good seeing, lots of dumbs. So let's go to the next one, which is the fourth C. Now is creative. And if we're not already having fun, you know, I'm a geek, so I like this stuff. I have fun all along the way. But if we're not already having fun, this is where we get to have some. And so when we get creative, we can actually make our goals enjoyable. So, you know, if we continue to ask ourselves better questions, we get better answers. Our minds kind of work like Google in that way, right? You ask a great question, you get great answers. You ask poor questions, you get poor answers. You've all experienced that where you've typed something into Google. You didn't quite get the answer you wanted, so you changed it around and maybe you got better results. You know, you can actually even Google what's a great question for Google. And don't do that now. Stay focused. Let's not get distracted. But just as an FYI, the seventh most popular question people ask Google is how to lose weight, which by the way, is right ahead of when is Mother's Day? Which I think means that losing weight is more important to us than our mothers. But let's not take it that far. So let's look at an example on this. So how can I lose weight and enjoy the process if it's only about losing weight? You know, I may settle for a salad every day and get pretty bored with that pretty quickly. But if I want to lose weight and enjoy the process, my mind is going to search for ways to do that. Maybe I add pumpkin seeds or different dressing or a variety of protein to spice it up and make it more enjoyable. There's another part of being creative which links back to Edwin Locke's research. If we're going to be creative, let's also make our goal ambitious. So maybe we have a goal to complete a project by the end of the month. A stretch would be to complete it maybe two days early. Or I just saw a goal here which was to achieve revenue of INR2 in calendar year 2022. So you probably have a. Hopefully you have a specific number on that which will make it crystal clear. But what if you increase that number. You know, what if your goal is a million, but instead of a million, you're going to shoot for 2 million or a million and a half. Let's make it ambitious because we want to shoot for those high specific goals. So go ahead and make your goal now creative, which means make it fun and ambitious and keep, keep it coming with those duns. Those help us. And AJ just a question about the way our A zoom meeting is set up. Are participants allowed to turn their video on or it's just the panelists that can do that?

It's, it's only the panelists who can turn on and, you know, just talk.

Okay, so we'll work with, chat on that. Okay, get some duns there who would like to share an example in chat of how they made their goal fun? I'd love to see some of that achieve revenue along with ensuring each team member achieves their own personal goals. Okay, nice. So how can you tie the company goal personal goals? Reward yourself every milestone. That's great. We're going to talk a little bit about that a little bit later on. Celebrated as well. That's great, Ajay. Appreciate it. People work on goals for two reasons, I think first is love. And another is fear. Yeah, we're. That's kind of a Tony Robbins thing, right? We're motivated to either move towards pleasure or away from pain. It really boils down to those two things. How can I make 5cr without any office? Is that what making. Is that making it fun, Rashmi? Is that what you're saying? Oh, do it. Maybe do it more virtually. Is that, that's going to be more fun? Maybe that's what he's saying. Okay, cool. All right. So love, love those. Awesome, awesome one. So now I'm going to go to fifth C, which is calendar. Now, to accomplish our goals, we must put them on our calendar and schedule time for them. Because if we don't, then we're using our time for other people's goals. Really? You know, you want to put your most productive, your most important goals and activities on your calendar because we trust it the most. We trust our calendar more than any other productivity tool. So you're going to do this in a couple steps. First, set a target date for when you want to complete the goal. Like I've seen some of these revenue goals by the end of 2022. Next, schedule time on your calendar to work on the goal. So first set the target date and then second set time. So for example, when I lost weight, my trainer asked me hey, Don, you seem like you're a planner. Is that right? I said, well, I thought first, maybe it's a trick question, I don't know. But I said, yes, I'm a planner. He said, can you plan your food out for next week? And I said, you know, I have no idea how to do that. Really. He said, okay, would you like to go shopping together? And I said, brendan, are you asking me out on a date? In reality, I was kind of thrilled with the offer because what happened was he showed me how to read food labels differently, focused on what are called macronutrients and the importance of planning your meals so that they line up with your target macronutrients. And you really need to plan that shopping if you're serious about this goal. So after that discussion, I blocked time on my calendar for shopping and meal preparation. It was a weekly activity, and I just had time blocked on my calendar to do that. Otherwise, it's going to get lost in the shuffle and it's going to be last minute and you're going to reach for the pizza or whatever is easy and convenient, which is not necessarily consistent with losing weight. So go ahead, schedule time on your calendar to work on your goal. Now, that may be just one block of time. Maybe you need an hour or two hours to get it, knock it out. Or maybe it's a recurring block on your calendar. So, like, for example, when I wrote the book, I had one hour every day consistently blocked on my calendar for writing. And, you know, it took several months, of course, just to get to a first draft. It took me 10 months. And that was just simply by doing the process every day consistently. It became like a habit. So while you're doing that, I'm going to catch up with chat. Good. We're going to talk about celebrating. So Mila was asking how to avoid distractions even when it's calendared. So I may want to dig into that a little bit and ask, what are the distractions? If they are things like we talked about, like text messages or emails or notifications, turn all those off and stay focused. If you're. It's. It looks like you're working in a virtual environment. So if you're home. Oh, people mainly. So people are interrupting you while you're at home? Is that what you're saying? So for the most important focus times, could you. Could you either close the door, if you don't have a door, put up some signal that you are in a space where you're not interruptible at this point, and then the next time you are, you'll tend to their questions. And if it's an emergency, like if someone's bleeding or something, that's what my parents used to tell me. If you're not bleeding, it can wait. I don't know if that's changed. Maybe there's another version of that today, but maybe there's some way to encourage the kids or other people to only interrupt at certain times. Maybe even like office hours. Maybe you're open up. You know, you open up from 1 to 2 o' clock each day. If it's. And here's the thing, there's. There's another cool little productivity tool I like, which is called the Eisenhower Matrix. Give me a yes in the chat if you know what that is. The Eisenhower Matrix. And this may help you, me Lou, a little bit. The Eisenhower matrix has four quadrants. In the first quadrant, it's items that are urgent and important. Urgent and important. That's things like a fire, either a real fire or a metaphorical fire that you must deal with. Right now, Quadrant three. I'm purposely skipping over two for now. Quadrant three is urgent but not important. Most text messages, most phone calls, most emails are probably not that important. At least right now they appear urgent because they're showing up and either buzzing or beeping or knocking on the door, just showing up in your face, they seem important, but they're probably not. And so if you can just easily make that distinction between important and urgent, you can minimize interruptions. And then I'll jump up to quadrant two. The more time you spend in Quadrant two, which is important but not urgent. For example, this webinar, you know, it's not really that urgent. You didn't have to show up, but all of you said this is an important topic for me. I want to learn more about it. I loved all the commitment to learning and improving that I saw in the chat. And you're setting that time aside. So planning time, exercise time, family time, all of that's important but not urgent. So you can look up more about that. Yeah. Stephen Covey popularized this in his book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And his follow on to that, which is called First Things first, but it was actually created by the. By President DWIGHT Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States. All right, cool. So I think a lot of you have hit the next C already, which is called celebrated. This is the sixth C. As a good friend of mine reminds me, if you want something to grow, pour champagne on it. I love the metaphor. Right. Find ways to celebrate your goals. And I say celebrate them three times. Celebrate when you set them. Celebrate the big milestones and the small milestones along the way, and celebrate when they are complete. You're going to party like it's 1999 at all three levels. Those of you that are in tech, you had a lot of fun that New Year's Eve, right? 1999, with the year 2000 bug. Now, when you. The reason I like this so much. And honestly, I need to be better at this, too. I really do. But when you celebrate your wins, you stay in the mindset of winning, of accomplishing your goals. So you're rewarding yourself, and you're going to want more of that. It just compels you to focus more on your accomplishments, which will breed more accomplishments. So take a minute, celebrate your goal. Define how you want to celebrate your goal. And I'm always looking for new ideas, so I'd love to see what you have in chat on this one. Tell me how you're going to celebrate. Great. A trip with the entire team. My whole 2022 is celebrating food and art. And food, art and travel. But it's also promoting the idea to celebrate with others. So bingo. This point is my goal for next year. So, yeah, food and travel and art, we all love to do that. Now we have to balance food celebrating with our goal of losing weight. But we can do that too, right? You can do both of those together. My goal is related to increasing fitness, so I would gift myself new gear. Love it. Dinner with the team. Yeah, that can be a lot of fun. Losing weight means new clothes. Yes. I had to redo my whole wardrobe. That was so much fun as well. So I love these great, great celebrations along the way. All right, let's go to number seven. Number seven is communicating. Now, once you have a goal, that's. Let's just review. Crystal, computable, compelling, creative, calendared, celebrated. We're now ready to share our goal with others. Not before, really, because it's still in process. But the advantage of making it public is we're more accountable to making it happen. When I started writing my book, I was reluctant to share it with others because I was thinking, like, well, what if I don't finish? What if it's not really that good? What if no one cares? So I just had a myriad of doubts about it. But my writing coach encouraged me to share the process with my followers because people love to see that behind the scenes, they love to see the process. So when I did that, two things happened. First, the initial video I shared got thousands of viewers, and it became more fun because I got that positive feedback. And the second thing is, I knew I had to deliver like it was out there. There was no backing down at this point. I just had to make it happen. So, you know the expression, houston, failure is not an option. So there's one caveat to this, which is when you do share it, you want to share it with people that you know, know will support you, not people that are going to get in the way or poo poo it or say, that's not possible. Like, when I was losing weight, I told my trainer, of course my wife, my parents, my closest friends, and they all supported me on the progress. So take a moment. Who do you need to communicate your goal to? Who do you need to communicate your goal? Yeah, announce it to the universe and it manifests. Communicate with followers, associates with the. All associates with the goal. This community. Yeah, it sounds like this is a really very supportive community that will support you on the journey. School and college, friends, husband, brother, team. Awesome. All right, so you guys have a 7C goal now. It's crystal, it's computable, it's compelling, it's creative. Hopefully you got it on your calendar. You'll find some ways to celebrate and communicate it. So fantastic. Great work. This is if you are interested in diving into this and the other steps to protect your time. This is the book when to say yes, you can get it on Amazon. We also love reviews on Amazon as well, so you're welcome to do that. And you know, Ajay, if this is the right time, I'm happy to open it up for questions and see what else people would love to on goal setting or honestly, any productivity topic, whatever's on your mind. We maybe have about five minutes or so to do that.

All right, perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much, Don. I was also making notes while you were sharing your presentation with me, so definitely many things. Of course, the 7C secret, which you have shared with us, I'm definitely going to use it for my weight loss journey. Thank you so much. Oh, we just missed Don. I think. Let's just wait for him to come back.

I'm back. I think I got.

Yep, got you again. So I was saying thank you so much for the 7Cs. I'm definitely going to use it for my weight loss journey and celebrate, you know, the journey as well at the same time while I do it.

Good. Excellent.

And now I would like to ask the team, all the community members, if they have any Specific questions regarding goal settings, regarding how to protect your time, how to remain focused. So one, one thing I would like to ask here, Doc sir, is that what happens is that social media in today's time, while it's a big opportunity and a great tool, but at the same time it's a big distraction also for many people. You know, when you go on, you know, watching one video, then it goes on to the next video another, and suddenly you see half an hour is gone. So how to stay focused while using social media for your own benefit?

Sure. Well, I'll suggest two things on this. Number one is there's a whole chapter in my book about processing email because people get really consumed with email and some of the people I've worked with have had thousands of emails in their inbox, which becomes really difficult to manage and your inbox becomes your to do list. So I lay out a process there to stay current on email and suggest that you get to zero emails in your inbox at least daily. And the same really applies for any activity that's coming into you. And social media is one of those. So I get it, you're talking about outward communication on social media. So step one, I think, or one option would be to block your time that you're going to work on social media, maybe. Because one of the suggestions for email is process email three times a day, not 17,000 times a day or however many seconds there are in a day, because that's just going to really be a distraction. So what if we took the same approach to social media and we decided to block three times a day or twice a day, or once a day, or five times a day, whatever the right number is for you. Block that amount of time and then you can even kind of set a timer and when that time is up, you're back to your important goals. And then let's go back to C, number three on the Corey seven Cs, which is compelling because when you have that compelling reason, you're going to want to get back to your goal and get away from Steve Harvey and Family Feud and cat videos, whatever else. And I can only share those because, hey, I've been there too. I get it, I get it. I wrote this as much for me as anyone else.

Lovely.

I see a question in here too. Is there an important seat to save your energy? Sometimes some clients exhaust me. It could be going to a wedding with your family, but you want to attend a productivity course. So first of all, energy is so important in achieving our goals as well. And I Think that could be a whole nother book. How do we keep our bodies and our mind healthy through effective sleep, effective diet, effective exercise, being around the right people. Rashmi, if you have a client that exhausts you, then I may challenge you with is that the right client for you? Is that really serving you? And what would happen either if you what would happen if you structured your agreement with that person or maybe even just let them go? Sometimes it's counterintuitive. It took me a while to figure this out too. But when you let those clients go that aren't really working out, first of all, it's probably better for them too, because they may not be completely satisfied, but it frees you up to take on lots of other clients and lots of other energy. It's tough. I get may be something worth considering. So yeah, energy is a huge part of getting things done. In fact, I have a colleague who says, you know, it's not really about time management, it's about managing your energy. That's what it is. If you can do that, then the rest falls into place.

We have one more question from Kanchan. She's saying how does one plan for keep buffer for contingency which may throw the plan calendar activities off balance? Could be one of those events.

Yeah, it's a great question. In fact, the next book I'm thinking about, I'm still in the thought process on it is just how to optimize your calendar. And that is a really important part of optimizing your calendar is giving yourself some buffer space to transition. And if you're not blocking specifically time to process email, you've got time to do that or time for emergencies. If you're too booked 7 to 7 or 9 to 5 or whatever the right time is, then you can adjust. So one of the other steps to protect your time is prioritize and reprioritize. And when we when we can get effective at that reprioritization. When is something new coming in more important than what is already on my plate? Then we can adjust. So for example, I'll just give you a simple example. Today I had a call from 9 to 10 with with a client. This. And this is Eastern time. So excuse the eastern time. This call scheduled for 10:30. This webinar. So what do you think I did between 10 and 10:30? Squeeze something else in? No way. I blocked the time. There's nothing else going into that time because I need to transition and be ready. And you know, you guys are clearly well positioned on Zoom and I want to bring my best. So that has to be block time. I hope that helps.

Aunt John, that's fantastic. Harshit has got another question for you. Document Don saying that follow up question is on energy, how to prevent burnout as a business owner. And I would also like to add one more thing here, Don, that as a business owner it is very easy to burn out, feel demotivated and feel tired. So I'm adding this to Harshit's question that how to stay motivated. It is very easy to burn out, feel demotivated and feel tired. So I'm adding this to Harshit's question that how to stay motivated as, as an entrepreneur because there are no bosses on your head who are telling you, hey, this is your deadline. You have to do that.

Right.

So how to stay motivated and at the same time don't burn yourself out.

Yeah. So two ends of the, of the coin and I think we can kind of wrap it up on this question and I'll give you a way to reach out to me if you have more questions as well on, on the motivated. I'm again going to bring that back to compelling reasons. Like if we have compelling reasons, we're going to stay motivated. If I want to look good in a bathing suit, then that's going to drive me. Or I'll give you another. You know, one of when I lost weight, another driver for me was to stay off medication. And so that kept me on track. And so when you have a compelling enough reason, it's going to be motivated. If you find yourself not motivated, then go back to that and maybe dig another level deeper. I'll give you an exercise on Harshit. Am I pronouncing that right or Harshit? Yep. Take a piece of paper, a blank piece of paper and draw a dot, align down the middle vertically. And on the right side write everything that you love to do and on the left side write everything that you hate to do and move your work and your business more towards the things that you love to do and that you're really good at and that really fill your cup at the end of the day and bring on people around you that can do the other things. If you're, you know, a good test on that. If you're waking up, first of all, just if you're waking up without an alarm and jumping out of bed because you're so excited about the day ahead, then you know you're not, you're motivated and you're not headed towards burnout. If you're not experiencing that and you Hit the snooze button five times, then maybe you need to restructure things. And that's the beauty of being an entrepreneur, is you do get to structure things, that you do get to define your own thing. It's one of the reasons I moved from a very successful corporate career to doing my own, because I wanted that flexibility.

Love to hear that from you.

Don't thank you all today because this was just. I mean, you guys, I love the interaction and chat and the questions and what you shared. And, you know, here's one of the things I say at the end of the book and I'll share with you two. If you implement what we talked about today in terms of the seven Cs and roadmap, and really just being conscious of protecting your time is sometimes enough, then you're setting yourself up to change the world. And in some cases, that's the whole world, like Steve Jobs did or Jeff Bezos did. And in some cases, it's your world. You know, we all have our own world. Our family, our company, our friends, our community. And if we can be more present and more effective in investing our time, we can change our world. So I wish the best for you on that.

I love that. Totally. Don, thank you so much. First of all, where can we get the. Can we get your book on Amazon? Is it available there?

It is available on Amazon and if you go to whentosayyes.com, maybe someone can put that into chat. W H E n t o s a Y-Y-E s dot com. You can contact me there, get in touch with me there, see other resources, see other podcasts I've done and other articles I've written. And I love this space. So please reach out. Would love to hear from you and.

How we can reach out on your social media where you are most active.

Yeah, Don Corey. If you just search for my first name, last name, that's pretty much where you'll find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. Really, I'm most active on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Lovely, lovely. Thank you so much, Don. Thank you so much for your time. I'm just gonna find out all the links and I'll share it with the team and I'll make sure all the people who have who are attending right now, they'll start following you. We'll get the book and definitely learn more from you and stay connected with you.

Awesome. Thank you all so much. It was fantastic. Have a great week ahead.

You too. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye.