Executive Toughness: The Mental-Training Program to Increase Your Leadership Performance: The Mental-Training Program to Increase Your Leadership Performance (Business Books)

In this day and age it is normal to feel overwhelmed by information overload, multitasking, and extreme time management. “Urgent” items inundate our daily to-do lists. It isn’t uncommon to spend hours putting out the fires that masquerade as important issues—hours that could have been spent developing long-term solutions to truly important problems

It’s your job to rise above the people who distract you from your purpose and goals.

The “power of three” phenomena shows up often because of channel capacity, an idea introduced in Chapter 1: our mind can usually maintain focus on only a certain number of concepts at a time, and that magic number happens to be three.

Each one of us has an innate desire and drive to accomplish certain things in life, and you simply can’t divorce accomplishment from goal setting. David Kohl, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech University, has found that individuals who write down their goals will have nine times the success of those who don’t put their goals on paper.

His definition of success continues to ground my personal and professional life: SUCCESS: Peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best you are capable of becoming.

priority areas of life, both personal and professional, creates a powerful, synergistic effect. Improvement in one area creates confidence in another, and soon you are able to “win” your whole package rather than jeopardizing success in one area of your life to feed another.

As Stephen Covey, who was recognized as one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans, puts it, “the noise of urgency creates the illusion of importance.”2 I think you will find daily emergencies will cease to exist when you make the choice to stop responding to them. Letting yourself be blown by the wind of the seemingly urgent is simply un

setting product goals is the easy part, and that is precisely where most individuals stop short. The real key is to develop two or three process goals for each of your product goals. Remember, the process goals are the “what it takes on a daily basis” to achieve the product goals. Sometimes, a process goal may happen less frequently than every day,

COMPLETE DAILY PERFORMANCE EVALUATIONS: Take the time on a daily basis to evaluate your personal progress and effort, and you will inevitably learn to achieve your win.