How To Destroy Time Poverty

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

How do you destroy being time poor? So many people say I don't have enough time, I'm too busy. A lot of the people that come and want to work with me are leaders, are people who are high performers. They got a lot on their plate. They say, look, I'm so time poor and I have to just disagree with them. People are not time poor. So if you think you need more time to get the things done in your life that you need to get done, I have to say something that might not sit that well with you. And that is from my experience personally, but also from my experience in working with top CEOs and high performance athletes that when your priorities are diluted, so is your time. So to me, people aren't busy, people simply lack priorities. Now it's easy for me to say that and go, hey, you know James, it's nice for you to say that, but how does that actually help me? How does that support me? Well, we can do so much within our own situations to really make such a difference. And I want to share a couple of concepts with you that might really help you. These are the same concepts that I use with my clients and with the high performing organizations that I work with. But I want you to think for a moment about someone who had just a limited amount of time to make a big difference. That person, and I speak about him often, is Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa. The very first day democratically elected black president of South Africa and he spent 27 years of his life in prison, and at no point did he know if he would get out. He believed that, you know, in the future it may happen. He will do everything to prepare so when he comes out, he can make an impact. Now, when he got out, he was an old man and didn't have a huge amount of time on his plate. But I'll tell you what, in the short time that he did have between leaving prison and. And dying, he made a monumental impact. Why? Why was that? Well, he became president within a few years and then really shifted South Africa as a nation, shifted the whole idea of apartheid and separating people and discriminating people based on skin color. And he really rewrote that narrative and created what we call the rainbow nation. Right. I've geeked out a lot on Mandela, read a lot of books on him, went to visit the prison cell on Robben island that he spent his time in. The prison cell was tiny and cold. And I think to myself, if someone can make such a massive dent in history from a tiny cell, and then with a small amount of years left when he got out, all of us have an opportunity. We've all got privilege. If you're watching this right now, you've got a massive level of privilege because you've got access to technology, got access to electricity, to devices, to YouTube, to podcasts, whatever you might be doing to listen to this and experience this, that's privilege. Right, well, I'm here to help you to destroy time poverty, because when we're time poor, it means we do not have a grip on our priorities. So a couple of things I want you to get clear on. When you look at someone like Nelson Mandela, what was he clear on? First and foremost, the big P. That's right. Purpose. Of course, this is the lead on purpose podcast. I talk about purpose a lot. When we don't have purpose, we are leading ourselves and leading our teams with no intention. Nelson was very clear on what his purpose was, right. And that was to break down all of this injustice and to fight for equality. My challenge and my question to you is, what's your purpose? What are you fighting for? What are you excited about? What is it that you want to do to make a global, monumental, huge difference that could be in your own community, that could be within your own family, but what's your purpose? There's no point in moving forward to try and become more productive and manage time if we don't get really clear on our purpose. Right. And that could be difficult. It can be really difficult to figure out what Our purpose is. But I'm going to challenge you to get a journal and start writing about what matters to you, what you're willing to stand for. Also, what are you not willing to stand for that's equally as important? That's the first P. Now, when you get clear on your purpose, and I would go as far as to call an MTP your massive transformative purpose. If it's massive and it's transformative, it's going to live through tough times, it's going to push through those challenges to get thrown at us. It's going to be bigger, bolder, got more heart than AI or any form of AI out there, right? So get clear on your massive transformative purpose, your mtp. Now, once we get clear on our purpose, what that actually helps us to dictate is our priorities. So few people know what their priorities are. Have you got a to do list? Do you keep a little to do list? Well, look, that's not your priority list. Your priorities are super clear and they're dictated from your purpose. Your purpose will help you to get clear on what your 3, 4, or maybe at most 5 priorities are every single day, every single week. Look, I encourage all my clients to sit down on a Sunday and plan out their week. I just call it Sunday success steps. If I do a little bit of planning on a Sunday, it helps me have a much more successful week ahead and small little steps. So I'm going to encourage you to do the same. If you don't have a planning moment or an hour or half hour each week, get the phone out, pop it on your calendar and say, I'm committed to planning. All of the great leaders that I've ever interviewed on the show, I mean, some of these people are running billion dollar businesses, some of them are rewriting the history books. But the one thing they all did was got clear on their purpose and then made time every single week to make a plan to execute on their vision. So that's what I'm going to ask you to do. So purpose dictates your priorities and then this is the last part of it. Productivity. Productivity is shaped by your priorities. And when people say I'm too busy, I've got so much on, that's because they're not basing their actions off their priorities. They're simply just writing a to do list of everything that needs to get done and trying to do it all. You know that saying, when you need something done, always ask a busy person, don't be that person, don't be busy. Being busy. None of us want to be busy, fools. Right? If you are intentional around your purpose, it dictates your priorities and therefore shapes all of your productivity. So you can actually time block certain parts of every single day to execute on your priorities. Everything after that come second. Everything after that is essentially noise. You gotta execute on your priorities. You are not busy. You simply lack priorities. So I want you to think about today. I'm always about setting a challenge right today. Are you clear on your purpose? Has it shaped your priorities? Do you know them? And what is your productivity like? Have you said in the last week I'm busy to anyone, including yourself, it if you've said I'm busy or I'm really busy or oh my goodness, so much is happening right now that should be just awaken within you that you're not clear on your purpose and your priorities. Take a moment. And this kind of reflection and self leadership is challenging. In our high performance leadership program that we run, we go through seven different pillars of being a high performing leader. And one of them is planning, evaluation, self assessment. It's not easy, it's definitely difficult, but it's what makes a difference in terms of you moving towards your ultimate goal. So I hope you really enjoyed today's session. But please get out there and lead your life on purpose.

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