90. New Year - Do This Exercise NOW!

Hey my friends, welcome back to Leadership in a Nutshell where we're cracking the code of the driven mind. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman. This is episode 90, believe it or not, episode 90. New Year. Do this exercise. Now that is what I want you to do today is an action based exercise. I'm not going to spend a ton of your time here today because. Because I want you to do some work that'll change your game. As you know, if you followed me in any amount of time. I'm not real big on New Year's resolutions. I'm not real big on using the calendar to set my goals. I'm not really big on having a moment in time that somebody else dictates designs for me that says, oh hey by the way, it might be time to improve your life. Oh hey, by the way, it might be time to get healthy. Oh hey, by the way, it might be time to drop a couple pounds. Oh hey, by the way, it's. It might be time to make some money. It might be time to elevate your leadership game, whatever that is. I get it. But I also get the way that people work. And there's a really good chance that you've had some hard spent marketing dollars thrown at you this time of year. You've probably had Facebook ads about new journals. You've had every goal setting workshop. All the quote gurus out there are trying to sell you new programs and different whatever it is what it is. So here's what I'm going to do for you today. I'm going to give you an exercise that will be a reminder for some of you. Some of our listeners are blue collar members and some of you have gone through this exercise with me. Do not tune out. I want you to hear this from my heart today. I want to connect with you in a meaningful way that will help you draw the very best out of yourself and then out of your team. I continue to evolve as a speaker, as a leader, as a communicator, as a podcaster, as an educator, meditation expert. All these types of things I continue to learn from my high level clients where we're creating massive behavior changes and completely changing the game in all kinds of phenomenal areas. So as that happens, I might lay down an exercise one week here in a podcast that you've heard me talk about before. But stay tuned in and stay emotionally connected because as I continue to evolve, so will my instruction, so will my framing, and, and so will the benefits that you get from the exercise continue to evolve. So here's what I want you to do this exercise now as you head into a new year, we call it the Start, Stop, Continue exercise. And some of you just now went, oh, yeah, I remember that exercise. Well, here's the deal. Remembering it or thinking about it does nothing for you. Myself and other blue collar coaches have facilitated this countless times, live in companies where we've brought people in and done this exercise. I'm going to frame it a little differently for you today because in leadership, in a nutshell, my first and foremost priority is you as the leader. And my goal is to impact you in a meaningful way to where if I can help you manage your emotional regulation, if I can help you up, level your consciousness, if I can help you connect to a deeper place within yourself, then I know I can help drive change in the organization. And so my goal is to change the world one leader at a time. And you and I are having that conversation today. So I want you to think about this exercise first and foremost for you individually as a leader. So when you think about you specifically, how do you want this exercise to show up? So we call it start, Stop, Continue. A late, dear friend of mine that passed earlier this year taught me this exercise. We'll call it. You know, it can be a training, it can be a facilitation. I've evolved with it since she taught me this. Probably 15, 20, man, we're probably pushing 20 years. Holy cow, Kenny, time's flying. A lot of people realize wording matters. By the way, step out sidebar. A lot of people right then when they had that, that I just had, like, oh, wow, that was almost 20 years ago. I was thinking that was like 10 years ago. A lot of people's knee jerk reaction is to go, my God, I'm getting old. My team does it. I'm one of the oldest people in my organization. In fact, I think at the time I'm recording this, there's only one person that's older than me. Yep, Jim, that's you, brother. I'm talking to you. I know you listen. Listen to the podcast. So get a laugh with me. Give me some knuckles through the airwaves, but I'm one of the oldest in my organization, and yet you will never hear me say I'm getting old because I don't believe in that. I might be aging on the planet, but what I believe is the longer I'm here, the more wisdom I have. And it might be a little presumptuous for me to walk around and say, I'm getting wiser I'm elevating my wisdom. People might be turned off by that, but that's how I feel. And so, you know, I just, as things come to my mind here. Yeah, you can call it a squirrel moment if you want. I'm here to lay down things that change your life. Stop saying that you're getting old. Stop saying that you're old. When you realize, oh my gosh, that was 20 years ago, man, that's incredible. I've had an amazing run for the 20 years since I learned this exercise. And now today, I'm going to remind you of how to do this exercise. Start, stop, continue. We begin the exercise with continue. There's a very specific psychological reason for this, and that is that we can always find areas that we suck. We can always get out our boots, our butt kicking boots, we'll call them, and kick our own butts for things that we could be doing different, should be doing different. Oh my gosh, I suck at this. Blah, blah, blah, I get it. That's why we structure this exercise in three different components. And we begin with things we want to continue. So as an individual exercise, you just want to write, continue doing things I want to continue in my life. And you would begin crafting a bullet list. You would begin paragraphs, you would begin whatever works for you. You might do it on a flip chart, you might do it on a whiteboard, per se, you might, you know, I personally write on my iPad. I take notes with the pencil on my iPad. Whatever it is, you can type if you want. But what are things that you want to keep doing this year? You want to continue, you know, maybe your leadership meetings, you want to continue your morning rituals, you want to continue your savings plan, you want to continue the trend of the business, you want to continue getting your income statement on time, whatever the things are. And you can go as cellular as you want, as global as you want. But what are those things that you're like, oh, hell yeah, that's going great, I want to keep doing that. First, craft a list. 6, 8, 10, 12, 25 things, whatever it is, what are things you want to continue doing from there? We want to move to some things that we want to start doing. Okay, so there's things that we want to continue doing. Then what are some things that I want? Actually, I'm going to have you go stop first. So I'm going to go continue. I then just, I'm rolling with it. I want you to say, okay, now I want to keep doing those. Now here's some Things that I want to stop. These things just don't make sense to me anymore. For, you know, let's see, for me, off the top of my head, I'm going to say that I, I don't want to work the same hours that I've worked in 20 that I did in 2021. So I want to structure my schedule more. When I say work the same hours, I'm not talking the amount of hours, I'm talking about my batch, how I batch. I batch coaching days together. I batch recording days together. Whether that's audio, like what we're doing now. A lot of times I'll batch this. If I have recording to do in the studio, if I'm working on a training for blue collar or if I'm shooting video, a lot of times I'll batch those things. And I, you know, as I do different things, though, sometimes I'll get sucked in and not blocking my free time, but for my incredible time with myself and the lovely Christy that we value. Because I love what I do so much, it's easy for me to just say, oh, yeah, add that to my calendar. Oh, I'm going to go ahead and work on Friday or whatever the case is. I want to stop that. I want to keep the flexibility of my schedule, but I want to stop allowing certain things to creep in. And so I've got my continue list going. I do my stop list. I want to stop allowing the text to go to the parts house. I want to, to stop the insanity of not having leadership meetings. I want to stop the fact that it takes forever to get an income statement, whatever that is. So we do a continue, then we do a stop and then we move to a start. What are the things that I definitely want to start doing? For me, a few years back it was I want to start a morning ritual that has meaning to me and it completely changed my life forever. I've recorded on this. I've talked to you about that in person on recordings and game changer for me. And it wasn't that, hey, I'm going to do yoga every day for the next X amount. I've done goals like that and I've had those goals. So it could be a 90 day plan. I want to start doing this the next 90 days. I want to start an exercise regime now. Don't forget, you got to have your why. Your why has to be strong. My life changed when I started my rituals because I personally had a super strong why as to why I was doing massive emotional connection. Right, right. So when we look at things that we want to start doing, I want to start sharing my financials with my leadership team. I want to start elevating my assistant. I want to have her or him do more things for me. I want to start a new training program in the company where every Tuesday we are doing communication training. I want to start reviewing my price book once a quarter I want to start one on one cup of coffee, meetings with my direct reports, whatever it is. What are the things that you want to start? So here's the three process. We call it start, stop, continue. But the way that it goes is actually continue, stop and start. So what do I want to keep doing, what do I want to stop the insanity on and what do I want to get rocking with? This is an incredibly powerful workshop. You know, workshop for yourself. I call it a workshop because I've done it in, you know, many times with groups. I've done it. And it's important when you're so first off, do it yourself, then I would encourage you to do it with your leadership team and do it as a group. Now you keep your mouth shut when it comes to doing it with a group. So. Meaning you just facilitate. So okay, what are some things that we want to start doing? And you just let them go. Don't get involved. People will tell you crazy things. Now when you do it frontline, there will be truth in the crazy things. When I've done this in plumbing, heating air, electrical service businesses, I've had, you know, oh, what do we want to start doing? We want to start driving Teslas for service vehicles. Okay, cool, put it on the board. Anyway, write that stuff down. Don't discount anything anybody says because then you want to go through the list and you want to see the commonalities, you want to mine out where people are. Like several people said we should change our pricing structure on service agreements. Several people said that a maintenance pricing without a service agreement isn't right. Several people have said we should just include flappers with a toilet rebuild because we can't charge whatever that is. Let those things come out and then make sure you communicate back to your team. So if you're doing it for yourself, for your own game changing reasons, then when you do it with your leadership team, make sure that you compile things and set another meeting at that time. When you do the exercise, no judgment, no changes, no hows. It's not like who and how are we going to do this or get this change to happen? Nope, it's just getting information. Then after the fact. You're going to decide on who are we going to use to help us, how are we going to engage people, what is this going to look like. It's always who before how but after why. So we're going to get to that but right now it's just uncovering the information of the things that we want to continue to make sure we rock on the things that we want to stop doing and the things that we want to start. Compile your list, get back with your team, share that, build a plan and rock and roll baby. That is what it's all about. It is early in 22. This is episode 90. Do this exercise now and you're going to change your game. My friends. I'm always here for you. Please make sure you're following us. Subscribed ratings reviews we appreciate all of it until we talk make it a better than fantastic week. I'll see you soon. Sam.