Geoff, Author at Geoff Blades

How Do You LEAD Better, Right Now?

With a number of our business clients we’ve been digging deep into the topic of leadership.

We see it as a “field” that is ripe for disruption, and in particular, simplification.

There’s millions of great ideas on leadership.

And there are many many many great thinkers too.

But, more than ideas and books and speeches and whatnot, what matters most is…

How Do You Better Lead, Right Now…

The field of leadership is akin to the field of personal development.

You can spend your lifetime plowing through shelves of books and videos and courses, but that’s not what most of us want or need.

We simply want to know the ideas that are right for us, and be able to use them in a way that works.

Most people don’t want to know how an internal combustion engine works; they just want to know how to get in and drive.

Leadership is the same.

YOUR Definition of Leading

A consultant to our consulting firm (yes, like a double consultant), a Navy SEAL sees leadership in action.

It’s about building high performance teams and empowering them to do their best work.

Vince Lombardi saw leadership as asking yourself tough questions, working harder, chasing perfection, and demanding autonomy.

John C. Maxwell. Warren Bennis. Simon Sinek. And many other top leadership experts have many other great models, principles, tips, and ideas.

So, who do you listen to? Whose leadership model do you put to work? Do you have to read them all to figure it out? Have to attend 3 years of leadership workshops?

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What’s the Fear of Iterating?

Of the “meta fears” that hold many of us back, this is one of the most pronounced.

I’ve never heard it termed this way (because I made it up) but you see plenty of evidence of this fear of iterating all around you.

It is buried in the fear of hard work.

The fear of failure.

The fear of getting it wrong.

The fear of looking silly.

The fear of “What will people think?”

The fear of committing to something that truly matters.

The fear of “Am I good enough?”

These and many other fears are merely the fear of iterating in disguise….

OK, So What’s the Fear of Iterating?

It is being afraid to get something wrong in order to keep getting it more right.

It’s the fear of starting with a wrong or incomplete answer, and then continuing to work and re-work your answer until you get to the right one.

Iteration is the process behind every single form of improving, and unless you’re willing to keep iterating something that needs to improve, it never will.

This means, to get anything right we must be cool with continuously improving at getting it “wrong.” To keep moving towards the right answer we must be unafraid to keep landing on wrong ones.

For many people, this fear is game-stopping.

Literally, they’ll never get past it, so game over.

Because they’re scared to admit they aren’t already living the life they truly want, or they aren’t the 100% perfect person they pretend to be, they remain too afraid to improve in any way.

Look around you. You see it everywhere.

As Emerson put it, “All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.”

Yet, just by seeing that of course life is nothing but a continuous iteration to the “end,” we give ourselves an opportunity to iterate to new and better experiences.

How Was Your First Sex?

Imagine that the rest of your life’s sex was as “good” as your first.

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Rescue Hours a Week from Email

If I said that reading this would save you hours this week you might not believe me.

But even if you don’t, you’d likely believe that the way many of us engage with email is costing us hours a week, right?

Hours a week flushed down the gurgler.

Hours a week that you could put into valuable tasks that lead to more of what you want.

Hours a week that you could be doing something fun.

Hours a week that you could be much more enjoying your time than eyes pasted on a screen.

I know we all identify with these goals, which only leaves two questions.

First, what are you going to do with all that extra time?

Second, How Are You Rescuing It?

Now here’s the thing that I’m not going to do here…

I’m not going to give you some “productivity hacks” or tips that may or may not be right for you.

I’m not going to try and get you to “just look at email less” or “shut down your email during the day.”

Instead, I’m going to share with you an important principle and suggest that, if you want to rescue a couple hours a week from your email, you use these ideas to commit yourself to a new email routine.

Not So Easy

In some ways this should be the easiest change in the world, but we all know it’s not so easy.

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FEAR: Draws The Boundary of Our Lives

Are we really in “control” of our lives? What leads us to make our most important decisions?

Are we motivated towards what we want, or away from what we fear?

The answers are complicated, but it’s generally agreed that fear drives us more than we like to admit.

In the last two weeks I’ve heard two people say more or less the same thing about how fear held them back.

That is—because they were scared, they held themselves back from taking a job.

It was an odd idea to me, but having kicked it around with some people, I now see it more clearly.

Why Was It Odd To Me?

It’s hard for me to understand how fear could prevent someone from taking a better job because I couldn’t imagine fear holding me back from anything that I truly want.

I see fear as part of the package. I’ve jumped from metaphorical planes without a parachute, I’ve suffered plenty of fear, but I still keep leaping.

In doing what you want, you take the actions anyway, and train yourself to deal with the fear.

But that’s not to say I’m immune to fear… I simply face the same lie as the second guy I’ll tell you about.

Not Taking A Job Because of The Fear

One person told me that she didn’t take a job because of her fear.

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We all have cats in our heads!

I’m yet to meet someone who doesn’t suffer from fears or insecurities or worries, or what not.

We often think it’s just us, when as far as I can tell, it’s nearly all of us, if only we had a way to talk about it.

We all have thoughts in our heads and feelings in our bodies that hold us back; it’s just a matter of whether we let them.

Last week one of my friends opened up to me on some things he was embarrassed to talk about.

He’s a great guy. Really optimistic. Fun. A dreamer. A visionary. Business builder.

But he’s got some cats running around in his head.

Like most of us who’ve lived long enough, he’s had some bad stuff happen in his life.

His father passed away. He went through a tough time in his business. Other things happened that have been weighing him down.

He’s had a heaviness to his days.

A lethargy. Trouble getting focused on topics that matter. Some days struggling to get motivated.

“It’s Not Just You…”

I told him.

Now, while I won’t speak for all 7+ billion of us humans, I will say, if it’s not “all of us,” it’s certainly many of us.

A number of my clients I used to think were 100% confident, charismatic, secure, all-powerful leaders…

Then I got into their heads and saw, hmm, it looks good on the outside, but inside they’re holding it together with rubber bands and duct tape.

That didn’t make me respect them any less, but much more.

I saw they didn’t have some magical gift that made it easy for them to be amazing—they worked at it, doing their best to be their best, sometimes really struggling through it.

Most people who know them would never imagine that, but after years of being deep in the heads of successful people, I imagine this is true of most everyone.

A reason I know this is because I’m a pro, and it’s certainly true for me.

I Turned Pro Because of This

I said to my friend—

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Go Time: Powerfully Finish Your Year

Yesterday my client said to me, “I really love this time after Labor Day.”

For him it’s an energizing sprint into the holidays, where he seeks to consolidate his year.

Over the next few months he’s focused on driving home those things he’s been working on all year, as well as laying the piping for next year.

The last two weeks in August he takes time to slow it down, but this weekend he was in full swing, winding it up to finish the year.

Building Momentum

So much of getting what you want comes from building momentum.

Just like hitting the gym once a year on January 1, success doesn’t come from what you do one day a year, but from what you wake up and do every day.

Showing up his best my client knows that he drives his best results, but it’s also through building this momentum every day that he feels his best.

This is the case for most of us.

We can get our knickers in a knot thinking too much about what we want to get done, but we feel our greatest when we just dive into doing it.

It’s for this reason that over the last couple of weeks we’ve been taking the thinking out of it, and laying out two systems for my client to get back in the swing.

Systematically Use Your Day

As I constantly rant about, all things get better through a systematic approach.

You could wake up tomorrow and try to get dressed by wading through a massive pile of clothes that you keep stacked up in your closet, or you can dress easily when you systematically organize your clothes. (e.g. keep socks together)

Each and every part of your day can work the same.

You can wake up in the morning and allow your mind to run into the hundreds of things that may or may not matter to your day, or you can wake up and direct your mind into your systematic approach for your day.

How do you best get organized to crush your day?

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1 Practice This Holiday

The trick to quickly mastering any skill is to pick one crucial aspect of that skill to focus on like a maniac before moving on to your next one thing, and so on.

For instance, many of us know that the word “but” (as in “Yeah, but”) screws up communications.

It negates what that person just said and means you basically end up throwing your words all over their self-defenses.

Notice this week that nearly every time you say “but” you could have easily said “and,” and just by changing this one word how much better you are at keeping people on side.

Changing this one small aspect of your language can have a massive impact.

All skills are the same.

The Hardest Skill To Master

In my lifetime I’ve learned an endless number of skills, but none have been so hard to master as the skill of thinking.

That’s the skill of getting beyond those old habitual ways of thinking that your biology and society conditioned into you, and choosing the thoughts that you want to live by.

So instead of say reading the news and seeing the world through crap-covered glasses, this skill involves stepping outside of the fear-based social reality, and living in your own reality.

As we cover all the time together, the skill of getting what you want mostly comes down to this skill of thinking.

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Trump: Won. NYT: WINNING

After the latest gaffe around Charlottesville, Trump lost a number of high profile CEO supporters, and the New York Times quickly moved in for the kill.

In its appropriately titled section, “Morning Agenda,” the NYT ran the headline, “Debating Gary Cohn’s Future in Washington.”

Using powerful influence, citing no sources but “the many” business elite, and “several people close to him,” the NYT expertly seeded the idea that Cohn might be next to go.

To those people out there who read the news as “factual” this may appear to be a simple statement of the “truth…”

But to those of us who enjoy watching the wars of propaganda in our society, you see the NYT beautifully using one of Trump’s favorite devices of influence against him—external validation.

In his presidential campaign Trump proved himself an excellent influencer, but the media is proving itself better.

Where Blowing Up People Fails

Trump principally has one approach to winning—a hand grenade.

He’s used to blowing through things, forcing other people to bend, break, collapse, and hand him victory.

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A Secret To Influence Too Few Of Us Know

Sitting at dinner in London, it’s obvious that the woman at my one o’clock is ready to go…

Dilated pupils, twirling her hair, playing with her necklace, stabbing her straw into her drink, she’s parading the most obvious signs of attraction, but her date has no idea.

She’d be embarrassed if she knew everyone in the room could tell what she was thinking, but fortunately, the rest of the room is as unaware as she and he are.

An entire conversation is playing out in front of me that nobody else can “hear.”

Stop Talking To Me

Walking into a top law firm I passed a man and a woman sitting in an office.

The man was sitting in his power pose, behind his big mahogany desk. The woman on the other side was squirming, every aspect of her body language saying, “get away from me.”

As the man kept talking, she kept leaning further back, her arms and legs twisted tighter and tighter like a pretzel, indicating (not definitively) that she didn’t want to hear what he was saying.

The man, in his mid-fifties, who presumably learned to speak five decades ago, still hadn’t learned how to communicate!

Your Words Are Mostly Meaningless

Us humans mostly associate communications with the words that are coming out of our mouths.

But, unfortunately, as anyone who has studied communications and influence knows, our words are only a tiny fraction of the message we are conveying.

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Would You Let Your Arm Flap About?

Imagine your right arm, for whatever reason, couldn’t control itself.

So, you might be walking down the street, and that arm of yours is just lashing out, pointing here and there, turning itself over and over, swinging all over the place.

You’d be pretty embarrassed by it, and worse—in close quarters that arm would likely flail around and hit other people.

Eventually you might even find yourself in a court of law trying to explain how that arm of yours knocked out an old lady at Starbucks.

It’s not YOUR fault; that arm of yours just has a life of its own.

But most of us would still do near everything we could to get that arm under control, including strapping it to our body.

Not Talking About The Arm

Now let’s say that wasn’t your arm, but that part of you flapping around, lashing out, constantly turning, is your brain.

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How a 12 hour delay = happiness

There’s a lot of things that make us happier, and part of life is figuring out what they are.

We of course know that making more money and having more success has little positive impact on our happiness, so what does?

You guys know my answer by now—it’s all in the head.

And to keep feeling more amazing every day, we want to keep finding ways to change the way we see the world.

One way is to adjust our expectations.

The Secret of Low Expectations

According to happiness researcher Barry Schwartz, the secret to happiness is—Low Expectations.

This of course means, if you have high hopes then it’s easy to be disappointed and hard to be pleased, whereas if you’re happy eating out of a can of tuna, well…

I saw this in Buffalo last night.

Having been diverted from Newark to Buffalo and after sitting for 6 hours waiting to hear whether we’d get out or not, the boarding gate was a pretty somber affair.

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How Much Do You Want It?

Over lunch with a leader, I asked him, “What do you see makes the difference between the many in your business, and the few that truly win?”

“Focus and intensity,” he fired back.

Winning is simple to him.

It’s not about who you are or where you come from, but how willing you are to find a way to win.

He sees it at every level, including in his own game.

“Sometimes I see effort other people put in to win a piece of business,“ he said, “and I’m no longer willing to do that.”

He’s good with that choice; he’s got enough, and he’s willing to leave a little for others on the table.

What about you?

Intensity and Duration

Two rules for “manifesting” your reality are—intensity and duration.

The more intensely you go at it, and the longer you do it for, the more likely you are to create the results you want.

But of course that’s not the entire game.

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A Key to Feeling Amazing—Right Now

In 2010 when I moved to Vail Colorado I was escaping to the mountains for more than just the skiing.

It was the hardest time in my life, and I was there to transform.

I had chosen a job that was way too hard for me, I was stuck in my work, feeling like crap beating up on myself, and I needed to fix my head.

I needed to become mentally stronger and clear the roadblocks my mind had put in my way; work that would take me another two seasons back to my mountain chrysalis.

It was there, in the isolation of the mountains, I began to go deep into the mind with hours of meditation and hypnosis a day, including while barreling down the hill.

It was there, even after a decade of R&D’g personal development, I began to appreciate the depth of these topics, and I started my 7+ year obsession with the mind.

Going down the rabbit hole I’ve focused on a lot of super deep ideas over the years, but ultimately, I began with just one.

How Do You Feel Amazing Every Day?

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Summer of Getting Better

One of my clients has been setting the bar higher.

We’ve been working together for more than five years, and every week he’s shooting to get better.

Yet in the last couple of weeks he’s taken it to an entirely new level—his Summer of Getting Better.

Why Get Better?

For many people, getting better is mostly irrelevant to their success.

Even most the people I know in high paying jobs, so long as they show up every day and get done what they “need,” they’ll have a great career.

But my client is different.

He left one of those jobs years ago, and in his business today, if he doesn’t get better, he will FAIL.

I don’t write that to be dramatic, but factual.

He’s chosen a very hard game. Over years of constant improvement, he’s pulled ahead in his business, but he only keeps winning because he keeps getting better.

In his case, it’s simple—Get better or fail.

But That’s Not His Only Why

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Too Old Not To Settle

There are many complexities and constraints when it comes to creating the lives we truly want.

In different ways it has been said—you can have everything you want, just not all at the same time. And, indeed, throughout our lives we are forced to choose, to sequence our “wants” according to what makes sense for our circumstances.

Coming out of school with a bunch of debt, it’s harder to venture out on your own. With a young family and mouths to feed, it’s harder to take risk. With the runway of a great career, it’s harder, and often wiser, to work that track for the “right” amount of time.

If we do it right, and we’re lucky to live long enough, by “simply” making the right choices at each point in time, we can create our most magical lives.

Yet, it can be very hard to keep our eye on the prize.

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Why You Feel Stuck—And 6 Tools How To Push Through

Focus Tools

How many of you have goals that you can’t seem to get yourself to focus on?

They might be professional, personal, getting things done around the home. You know that you “want” to do them, but you just can’t consistently get yourself to take action.

I know that’s a problem for many of us because I know few people who it isn’t a problem for, and because many of you keep telling me it’s a problem.

This weekend I did a call with a member of our community.

Some time ago he’d reached out to me about his grandest vision for his career and life, and although he’s too junior to be a client, I jumped on the phone and gave him some pointers.

He’s moving, he’s making good progress on his goal, but some days when he sits down eager to get things done, he finds himself stuck.

He knows the things he wants to get done, but, well, he can’t get himself to do them.

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Mike Tyson’s Daily Routine Was Simple, Predictable, And Unstoppable

In his latest book, Iron Ambition: My life with Cus D’Amato, Mike Tyson lays out what it took to become a champ.

Inside, Tyson details his relationship with his trainer and what took him from a punk kid in Brooklyn involved in petty crime to 7 years later becoming the youngest heavyweight champ.

How did he do it?

Simply. There was no secret bullet, no expensive course he took that “catapulted him to reach his full potential.”

He became the best in the world by building a daily training routine with a simple set of tools—tools you can use to become a champ in your own life.

Tyson’s Daily Routine Uses Tools You Already Have

Cus D’Amato, Tyson’s trainer, gave Tyson a “secret sauce” of mental training anyone can practice:

Affirmations
Hypnosis
Visualization

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It's Not Just You: Why So Many of Us Cannot Feel Fulfilled

A trap many of us Do What You Wanters fall into is that we spend too much time obsessing over that thing we want, and too little time indulging in what we already have.

We certainly will spend our lives dreaming of and charging after a rosier future, but we also want to be smelling the roses around us.

Rushing to get out the door every morning, one of my clients realized he’d been waking up fixating on what he wanted to get done today, but missing out on that precious little time he gets with his boys.

He travels and works late, so he misses them most nights. This 15 minutes in the morning is all he really gets during the week, and now he’s fixating on enjoying it.

As Epicurus put it, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

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The Complete Guide To Winning Daily Routines

You hear a lot about the importance of daily routines, but how many of us actually use them?

I know many professionals trying to compete at the top of their game, and honestly, many teachers who promote the importance of daily routines, who fail to use them. That’s because, as I did for years, we often look at routines completely wrong.

In the same way that many people see exercise as hard and grueling and something to be avoided, we often think of building winning routines as requiring a lot of “hard work.” In fact, the opposite is true.

Top daily routines aren’t about grinding it out against a stop watch, squeezing every ounce of productivity from your day, but getting yourself focused and in the right state of mind to get done those things that truly matter to you.

Like the rituals a top athlete follows ahead of a competition, daily routines are the key to top performance, but they’re also about something far more important—feeling happier and more energized every day.

None of us want to be lazing around in bed tired hitting snooze, do we? Of course not. We all love the idea of bouncing out of bed excited to dive into our day, right?

Similarly, none of us want to be sitting at our desk stressed, worried, whining about all the things we “have to” get done. We want to be clear on what matters, focused on doing it, and feel great looking back at the end of the day having gotten it done.

In this guide I’m sharing with you my ultimate daily routines, a system for your day, broken down into three phases:

Pre-Productive Phase
Productive Phase
Post-Productive Phase

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Why I Don’t Charge For Coaching

What most people call “coaching,” I do for free.

Sitting with someone and spewing advice is a service people charge for, but it’s not particularly valuable. It might get someone to feel better about their day and life, but it’s unlikely to lead to transformational results.

To get transformational results, you have to take the best knowledge and build systems of continuous improvement that you work and re-work every day until you get what you want.

Results are valuable, and they are the only thing I can imagine charging people for.

Do You Want Advice, Or Results?

A concern I have when I write each and every one of these newsletters is that I’m leading you into the same trap that I found myself in.

Spending more than 10 years of my life reading thousands of books on personal development, I learned a lot, but, honestly, I mostly just filled my head with redundant knowledge.

That knowledge is incredibly interesting to me, but knowledge by itself is next to useless. Just like that piece of meat between your, um, ears, it’s what you do with it that counts.

I’ve read many amazing books that gave me amazing knowledge. I’ve sat with top executive coaches—who charge six and seven figures per client—who have also shared ridiculously good knowledge with me, but on its own, it all fails to get the job done.

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