20 - Would an 'Hour of Power' help your executive coaching business?

Welcome to the business of executive coaching. I'm Ellie Scarfe, an ex lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years I've coached in house, I've been an associate coach and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutiques, startups and organizations doing good in the world. I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a global a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like minded peers. I'm a traveller, a reader, a mum, wife and dog parent and I know firsthand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses. The executive coaching business is tough and.

I've learnt all the lessons through plenty.

Of mistakes and also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable and that supports your personal goals, whatever they are. I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context, as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors. If you want to level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is.

The place for you. Hello, welcome. So today I wanted to share a fun and I think quite helpful idea that I've been experimenting with over the last six months or so and some ideas for how I think it could be applied for anyone, in almost any context. So I came across the idea, it must have been last year, of An Hour of Power. And I think I discovered it on LinkedIn somewhere and honestly I can't remember where I read about it or who I heard it from. So if it was you, please let me know and I'd love to acknowledge you. What I suspect is that it was actually an idea that came from a number of places and I have aggregated it. So an Hour of Power, just to define it, is a regular period of time, think daily or weekly, where you work intensively on a chosen set of tasks that you have decided are priority tasks for you. The energy of an Hour of Power is very focused, like a sprint, and although it will depend on the choice of tasks that you are including, there is a real sense of a positive commitment to consistency and discipline in those things that you've chosen to put in your Hour of Power. Now, if you're anything like me, the word discipline is enough to make you immediately want to not do this. But for me, I'm experimenting with holding myself more accountable to the expectations that I set for myself and not just my commitments to other people. So I'm Choosing to see the discipline of an Hour of power as a good thing in this case. But rest assured, you know, I understand that, that it could feel like it is a, a box checking activity or something that is restrictive. So I understand that now I encourage you to just experiment, experiment for yourself. So my hour of power looks like a hybrid of marketing and business organization, because really, when I looked at the things that caused me stress and the things that made me feel like I was out of control or that I wasn't keeping up at the end of my day, it was related to keeping on top of my marketing tasks and keeping on top of my business organization. And because I have perhaps a tendency to the chaos, having a structure like this has turned out to be very helpful for me. So the things that I include in my Hour of power are the first thing I do. And by the way, I do this daily. You can actually do this on a number of different time horizons, but I do it daily. And what I do is I write my daily goals and I review my weekly plan and I do this each morning. And this is hugely important for me because I can very easily become either or tunnel focused and only looking at the thing in front of me or so completely up in the clouds that I've got no idea what I'm supposed to be doing on any given day. So I like to review my weekly plan and I like to write daily goals for myself. And often those are just the three tasks that I want to complete for the day as well as sort of some, some bigger picture, not quite affirmations, but goals for myself that I want to keep front and center. So I do that in my Arab power. I just write it down and I review my diary. The second thing I do is responding to LinkedIn and email messages from clients or prospective clients. So those messages come in, they're not necessarily, you know, live opportunities, but they are, they are relationships that I want to keep going, conversations that I want to keep ticking. So I need to make sure that I am responding to those on a timely basis. And I do that each day. The next thing I do is that I actually post on LinkedIn and I have also started posting on Instagram and Facebook as well. So I make a post on social media most days if I can. And ideally I will have done the content planning, so the either the actual writing and the image creation prior. But sometimes all I'll have is a prompt because sometimes I like to be a bit, a bit natural and not as scheduled. So in those cases I will write Something quickly. Now, it's always my policy not to overthink what I'm posting on LinkedIn. So, you know, either I've already written it, or I give myself a few minutes within my hour of power to write a post. And that can be sort of up to 10 or 15 minutes, depending on how much detail or what is speaking to me at the time. The next thing I do is clear out my email inbox. Now, you know, I think they say there are two types of people. There's the people who always have inbox zero, and there are people who have inbox six to 10,000. And I mean unread messages. I'm in the latter category. But I am trying to be reformed. I am trying to embrace inbox zero. So at the moment, as I look at my inbox, I am inbox 4 being 4 unread messages. And I think that's pretty good. So if I'm reviewing my email inbox at least once a day in terms of actually clearing stuff out of it, you know, deleting the spam messages, replying to people I need to reply to, putting things that need to be actioned into my task manager, And I use Monday.com, for that, then I feel like I'm. I'm doing pretty well. And also by having a consistent time to do that every day, I find myself less compulsively checking throughout the whole day. So I find that helpful. And then I also do at least once a week, some financial tracking, so tracking business financial metrics. And so I'll do that sometimes every day, but sometimes once a week and that's it. So that's all I do in my hour of power. And to be honest, sometimes I don't even get all that completed. But whatever I get completed, that's where I leave it. If it gets done in the hour of power, great. If it doesn't, then we roll over to the next day. So why is an hour of power great? These are the benefits that I have experienced. Firstly, you get shit done, and more importantly, you get things done that you have decided are priorities. Now, I can't tell you how many times in, you know, my career, my professional business career, I have decided something is a priority, but I've really had no mechanism or I haven't deliberately identified a mechanism to translate the priority into action. And so this hour of power is a really good way to go from priority to action. So I really like that. I think it makes you focus on what matters. Now, that presumes that what you Identify as a focus area for your hour of power is something that matters and is something that will, will, you know, create a great impact or a great outcome for you. So assuming it is, then this is a great mechanism to focus on important things, focus on the priorities. It's also great because if you're anything like me, I can do anything for a short sprint. I can't do many things for a very long time, but I can do anything for a short sprint. And so by giving myself that constraint, it's very beneficial for my energy and for my ability to focus. And I find it easy to maintain my momentum and my consistency knowing that I've got to go through this amount of tasks, I've got this amount of time, and I don't overthink it because it's very limited. And then I get to move on.

So that helps.

It's also very helpful for me because it puts constraints around tasks and, you know, yeah, actions that can otherwise expand to fit the time available. And this takes a bit of experimentation. But for example, if I'd said, I'm going to, here's my hour of power, and I'm going to use my hour of power for posting on LinkedIn, and that was it. It would take me that full hour to do my post, if that's what I allowed it to take. Similarly, email inbox review, if I gave it an hour, it would take an hour. If I spent an hour responding to messages, that's what it would take. So I find that putting constraints around things helps me to be much more efficient and also get things done. And if you listened to my last podcast episode from last week, I talked about this idea of the 80%, so that if we're, if we tend to be perfectionistic, it can be helpful to give ourselves a percentage that we're going to work towards. And for me, I work towards getting things done to 80% to ensure that I just get it done. And I think that's the same energy that helps with me saying, okay, well, this is what I'm going to do in an hour, and whatever I get done, then that is great. So that is a very much a benefit of this process for me. And then finally, another benefit I have is that it allows me to build on things and consistent behaviors, right? So, you know, small things repeated frequently create the greatest results. Like we know that from, from the, the research into habits and incremental changes. And so, you know, doing these things, consistency consistently allows me to get compounding benefits right from those tasks. Now there are Also some challenges. So the things that come up as a challenge for me that I do always have a question of, should I be doing this hour of power first thing, which I do, or should I be putting things that are either harder or require more brain power? Should I be doing those things first? Right. So should I be doing my content strategy or writing or developing a masterclass? Should I be doing that stuff first and then moving on to my hour of power? In the end, I've decided that it's best for me to do the hour of power upfront. And the reasons for that are, firstly, that it's a really good segue for me into work. So going from that personal life into my work life, it helps me to get up and running almost like, you know, like a bit of a slow start to some degree. And the other reason why I do that is that I can't focus on the more significant stuff. And maybe more significant is not even a great word. I can't focus on the stuff that requires more brain power unless I have those basics locked away. Otherwise they're just going to be tapping at my brain going, oh, I should probably post in LinkedIn or you haven't have your inboxes full of stuff. Who knows what in, what's in there, should do some, you know, check your emails, should be replying to people. If I don't do those things, it's very hard for me to focus on, on getting things that are sort of that higher level thinking done. The other challenge is that it can feel not monotonous but routine after a while. And I'm not a routine person, although I'm trying to become more of a routine person. And I do think that actually the fact that it can feel like you're going through the motions is kind of the point, right? I'm trying to build a set of habits. I want it to feel habitual. Now I think that there is a fine line though between it being habitual and it being boring, right? Or boring to the point that you check out and you're box checking. So one of my tips, which I'll go through is that I think you need to be regularly reviewing what you're doing in your hour of power. So, you know, you can mix it up, give it, you know, maybe each quarter you change it up. And then the other challenge I have is that, you know, when you're doing anything consistently, you can get into that streak mentality, right? So if anyone here does duolingo, my daughter is doing that. And that's where you learn a language and you get these streaks. So every day you do a lesson, it gives you another day in your streak and you get sort of, you know, points and you go up and down in leagues. And my daughter's just about at her 200 day streak of Swedish, learning Swedish and it's fantastic. But if you miss a day in your streak, you tend to be one of two types of people. Some people don't care. They move on, they're happy to start again, no big deal. Other types of people, such as myself and. Absolutely. Such as my daughter, if you miss, if you break your streak, it can feel like the end of the world. It can feel like you failed and it can actually be demotivating. So, you know, the, the benefit of the system, right. Is that if you actually miss one, it's no big deal because you're doing the work consistently right. You're not going to be far behind. The risk is you, you know, you are not mindful of the fact that that's okay. It's normal to miss some. That's, you know, absolutely. We should, we should factor that in and then you go, oh, well, I missed one. I'm just not going to do it anymore. So that is a risk, I think. So I have some tips on how to create your own hour of power and I really would, I would love it. If you decide to create an hour of power, please let me know what you put in it and how you find it. Now, the first thing you need to do is identify your focus area. Now, this could be a business or a work focus, or it could be a life focus or a personal priority. What you should do though, is really go back to values. Go back to your big picture. If you've ever done any activities like a, you know, like a letter from the future, or if you've got something that is, you know, causing you a lot of angst. Those are the sorts of things that might give you some insight into what your focus should be. But really we want to think about what are the things that, if you got them done consistently, would have an oversized impact on either your outcomes or your experience, Right. Would they make you happier? Would they make your business better? Would they make you feel, you know, some way that you want to feel, right? So that might be organized, it might be healthier, you name it, right? So what is your priority? Some examples of priorities that I think would work really well for hours of power include marketing or sales, outreach, organization or planning, either in a business or personal context. Metrics and tracking Email management, content writing or development. You know, development in sense, in the sense of personal development. So things like reading nonfiction, journaling and meditation, that could be a really interesting hour of power. And then you might have, you know, home management hour of power. So tidying your house, decluttering, all of those sorts of things. You might want to focus on your hour of power once a week on connection, right? So you ring your parents, you write a letter and you, you text five friends. You, you might choose to focus every day on having an exercise hour of power where you do some cardio, some strength and some stretching. You might have a self care hour of power where you read a trashy book and you have a bubble bath. I don't know. Obviously I'm not very well versed in self care, but the ideas are literally endless. I was even thinking that it could be a fun thing to do with your kids. So I was thinking for my daughter, she really needs an hour of power around doing a little bit of homework, a little bit of clarinet practice, and tidying her room. But then I thought, geez, that sounds like absolute torture for her. So I think my chances of getting her on board are slim to none. So think about it. What are a few things that if you got them done consistently, would have an oversized impact on your life or your business? And then you need to think about how frequently do you want to do this? Is this a daily, weekly, monthly, twice a day? Whatever it is, it should be dictated by the, the, the, the subject or the focus that you have on your hour of power. And then put it in your diary, right? Make it an appointment to yourself that you're strongly committed to. And this is the thing, I think that will take it from a nice idea to something you actually do. Write a checklist of the tasks that you will complete. So make sure that you know exactly what you will do in that hour of power. And you can do this in your task management tool. So mine's in Monday dot com. Or you might write it if you have a physical diary, but just have it somewhere that you review daily so that you can literally check off the tasks in your hour of power and have a way to track your streak of how often are you doing this? And there's lots of ways that you can do that. So whether it's task management tool, a spreadsheet, you know, some people like to have nice checkboxes in their journals. Whatever it is, do that. Now some tips to make it more likely to happen and also to make it more effective. Firstly, make sure. It feels exciting to you if it feels like too much of a drag, right? So you've just put all the tasks you hate doing into one hour of the day. You just won't do it, right? So make sure it feels good, it feels motivating. Make sure you can identify the positive benefits of it and that you're connected to those and they feel meaningful. The second is to review the tasks and the outcomes, right? So every few weeks, maybe after a month, check in and say, am I getting through the things that I want to do in my hour? Have I put too much in there? What could be removed? You should also ask yourself if a task is actually valuable, right? So ask yourself, does it matter if I do this? What would happen if it didn't get done at all? If you start to ask that question, then chances are it might be something you could just take off your plate or outsource. Experiment. Feel free to experiment with what you include, right? You could choose to add something more fun as, as a reward for something that you don't enjoy as much, right? So maybe you don't like reconciling your books in Xero, but you really like going through your email inbox, pair them together, right? Make it. Make it fun to help you get through the bits you don't like as much. And the next one is that actually focus is key. So the success, once you get into your hour of how it goes, is going to be about how quick and how effectively you could get into the zone and stay in the zone. So there's all sorts of ways you can do that. You probably know for yourself what helps you. I've discovered that I love the coding playlist on Apple Music. Now, I don't know why I like it. I think it's just the right side of elevator music and it hasn't got lyrics. So I've trained myself to hear that music, not be distracted by thinking I might like to sing along or anything like that, which I do for anything with lyrics. But I hear it and I feel motivated and I feel focused and I've got this sense it's go time, right? So you could try that. You could try. I have heard that baroque music is apparently the right frequency for your brain to be focused. I don't know if that's entirely true. I did try, but I found it a bit intense. But you might be a person who is. Is better at, you know, listening to intense things than me. You might need to put your phone on, do not disturb. You might need to close the door, make yourself a cup of tea. Whatever it is, if you don't stay focused, you probably won't get the most out of your Hour of Power. So build your own ritual that helps you to be focused. And then finally, I touched on this as well. Don't let missing one hour of power put you off staying, you know, staying the course. So I'm talking to my perfectionistic high achievers here. If you're the type to decide, oh well, I've ruined it. Better stop forever. Now, my challenge to you to help you get over that is to proactively decide to deliberately skip one every two weeks, right? Make yourself miss one or two so that you don't trigger this perfectionist or rebellious streak in you. Give yourself a get out of jail Free card, make yourself do that and then get back on board straight away. So I hope you have enjoyed hearing about Hours of Power and I would love to know if you do anything like this. If you think you might give it a try, what will you include? Let me know. You can drop me a message. Send me a DM on either Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from you and talk talk Hour of Power strategy because I think it's really fun. Okay, all the best and I will see you next week.

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