Restructure yourself for success

Like a company, if you too want to remain successful, you need to restructure to ensure that you are at the optimal state.

From years of coaching and training individuals, I use the following 7 Ways to help my clients restructure themselves. You too can apply them and reap the rewards!

7 Ways to Restructure Yourself for Success

1. Unload the Overloaded Circuits
2. The Best Advise You’ve Ever Got
3. Managing Your Boss Effectively
4. How to Play to Your Strengths and Sell Your Weaknesses
5. Compete without Fighting
6. Making Time When You’ve Got No Time
7. Inspire Yourself to Greatness

1. Unload the Overloaded Circuits

Yes, your mind is key to your productivity and if your mind is too cluttered with ‘to-do’ lists, how can you ever be productive? Working longer hours will only end you up being more tired and productivity can only drop.

So the first thing to do when you have ‘overloaded circuits’ is to reduce your work load. If you have subordinates, you can delegate your tasks to them.

Make sure that they understand what are to be done so that the delegation will not be a nightmare for you later.

When you have no one to pass the work load to, you have streamline your work. Cutting down work that brings in little value but taking too much time, which includes administrative work, unnecessary meetings, and going through reports that don’t make sense to you.

Of course, cut down on many popular activities like gossiping and ‘clubbing’ will also help.

2. The Best Advise You’ve Ever Got

Work with your full hearts and soul instead of merely using your body and mind. We know that when the head combines with the heart, miracles can happen.

Don’t settle for 2nd-hand life, i.e. live life first-hand. This means having your own thinking and as Steve Jobs said, don’t adopt dogma, which is living your life based on others’ thinking.

If you cannot reach your destination despite your best efforts, understand that you are already successful because success is a journey and not the destination.

When you finally reached the destination of success, this is called “Success Recognition”, not “Success”.

Put your life in safe hands: your own hands! For no one knows better of yourself than yourself.

Stop taking advise from people and start giving advise! For the more you give, the more you receive.

3. Managing Your Boss Effectively

First recognize that if you don’t manage your boss effectively, you will not be get there. The boss is not perfect, and if you just follow his instructions blindly you will get the organization into trouble.

Five Ways to Managing Your Boss Effectively:

1. Adapt your style to his style. There are 4 styles: domineering, friendly, step-by-step and free-style.
2. Know what your boss likes and hates and don’t do things that make him dislike you. Most bosses hate people that are not punctual, dishonest, never follow through and most importantly, treat him like a surbordinate.
3. Always give face to your boss, even if he is in the wrong.
4. Be professional in your dealings with him, don’t get too personal and never let your personal feelings get in the way.
5. Be a good follower, and know that at the right time, you can always lead your boss. If you think that you are right and that he is wrong, let him know and don’t follow blindly. But never scold your boss and criticize him as though he is your surbordinate.

4. Play to Your Strengths and Sell Your Weaknesses

Your strengths are things that you are good at and things that are easy for you to pick up. For some they could be public speaking and presentations.

Know that your strengths could also be your weakness, because people will also raise their expectations on your strengths.

As for your weaknesses, instead of defending them or worse still, deny them, you should acknowledge them and turn them into your strengths.

For example if public speaking is your weakness, you can turn it into a strength by putting you heart and soul into it. Even though your speaking style may be weak, people will be moved by your conviction. Besides, if they know this is your weakness, they will lower their expectations and you can easily over-deliver.

Most importantly, sell your weakness. This means let them know that you have other strengths that will downplay your weakness. Better still, turnaround your weakness and make it into a strength by working on it.

5. Compete without Fighting

Many people like to fight against others, for they have a scarcity mindset and think that everything will be gone if you don’t fight for it. So they spend their whole lives fighting for promotion, fighting for market share, fighting for love and even fighting to keep fit.

The problem with fighting is that it keeps you looking outside of yourself and by doing so you will ignore your own strengths.

To compete without fighting means that you look inside and improve yourself first. And when you do look outside, do not aim to be better than the outside. Instead look at how you can collaborate with the outside so that both of you will be better.

For the word ‘compete’ comes from Latin, which means ‘to strive together’. So competition is about collaboration. And we definitely can compete without fighting!

6. Making Time When You’ve Got No Time

Many people find it hard to have time to do the things they truly want to do, like pursuing their interests and improving themselves. Actually time is not something that we spend, it is something that we make.

For everyone has the same 24 hours a day, and you cannot really spend time as time is something that we cannot hold on to. Time passes every moment regardless of what you are doing. Right now I am writing this article and time just simply passes if I do nothing. But I make time by writing this article.

All of us have got no time because time doesn’t belong to us at all. Time belongs to no one and no one can hold on to time, regardless of how powerful or rich he is. Most importantly, time is the same for everyone, and time doesn’t care how you use it for it doesn’t belong to you.

So make time my friend!

7. Inspire Yourself to Greatness

Many of us are inspired by successful people for they often say ‘If I can do it, so can you!’ How many of us are really inspired by such successful people and go out to duplicate their success?

For me I find that if we keep on looking at the outside, we lose touch of the inside. So we should first be inspired by ourselves.

How to be inspired by yourself when you think that you have not achieved much success?

The following are the 3 Easy Ways to Inspire Yourself:

First, realize that you are a unique person in this world, and you have unique aspirations. Look back at your past achievements since young, and remember how proud your parents were.

If you could achieve such success when you were young without much knowledge, wouldn’t you be able to achieve more success now that you have more knowledge?

Engage in ‘Possibility Talk’ with yourself on a topic that you are most passionate about, e.g. global warming. Talk about all the possible methods to solve global warming, and you’ll surprised that you have so much ideas that even experts may not have!

Find something small but meaningful to do, it could be helping a charity. When you see the results of your contributions, you’ll feel like you have done the impossible.

When you are inspired by yourself, you will inspire others. And when you inspire others, you will create changes.