Strengthen Your Professional CORE Building a strong physical core requires regular repetitions of core exercises. Similarly, developing your cognitive core—what I call your “core capital,” encompassing your ability to regulate emotions, focus, follow through, and communicate effectively—also demands consistent practice.
Consider these examples:
Jay W. from Wichita, KS: He does a set of 30 pushups every four hours.
Janelle S. from Winchester, MA: Training for the Chicago Marathon, she completes six hill reps five times a week to build leg strength and endurance.
Jesse from Elmhurst, IL: Focused on core strength for distance swimming, he performs six sets of seven barbell reps every other day.
What do these individuals have in common? They are all startup founders who use physical fitness challenges to help them improve their startup stamina. By committing to their physical exercises, they strengthen their resolve, pushing through discomfort and monotony to reach the next level. Each founder agrees that the discipline of physical core workouts translates into the repetitive actions necessary for their business growth, such as:
Daily cold calls
Weekly customer check-ins
Regular meditation
Posting on social media
Maintaining a healthy bedtime routine from Monday to Friday
Saying “no” to distractions when most vulnerable
Planning the next day’s activities
To make these actions more automatic, the key is frequency, not the duration of time spent on each task.
There are various ways to monitor your consistency with these reps. If you prefer a pen-to-paper approach, visit our Tools section, and print out the Streak Out Accountability Checklist. This tool helps you track your target behaviors and the small steps needed to ensure consistency.
For example, effective weekly customer check-ins might involve reviewing the status of a complaints or concerns beforehand, leading to more constructive conversations. Similarly, prepping your workout clothes the night before can increase your chances of making it to the gym on time.
The number of reps, assuming that you do one rep or a set of resp per day, to create a habit varies, typically ranging from 7 to 66 days.
Here are two of my favorite resources for building your core capital:
Atomic Habits by James Clear – A comprehensive guide on building good habits and breaking bad ones, with practical advice on how to make small changes that lead to significant results.
What areas in your life could benefit from more reps?
Need help identifying a high value behavior integral to your core capital and making it a habit? Learn more about my CoreCoaching approach at MindfulCommunication.com
If you read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book FLOW, you may recall an exercise where he gave pagers to participants and instructed them to record their feelings and activities whenever the pager went off randomly throughout the day. The participants were asked to note down what they were doing, how they were feeling, and their overall sense of enjoyment and engagement in the activity.
I suggest this exercise for my clients with clear task deadlines who are challenged by distraction. I advise them to set random alarms when they need to get some serious work done.
Once they have a plan for the task, they set 4 random alarms to go off during a 3-4 hour period of work time. The objective is to not be caught off task when the alarm goes off. If you do get caught watching the news when the alarm goes off, then it’s a reminder to re-direct you back to the task.
You are competing with yourself to be on task each and every time that alarm sounds.You can also set an alarm for every 20 or 30 minutes during that 3-4 hour work period. How much quality work can you complete in a 20 or 30 minute span of time?
You can create a random alarm experience on both iPhone and Android phones. Here’s how you can do it on each platform:iPhone:
Open the Clock app on your iPhone.
Tap on the “Alarm” tab at the bottom of the screen.
Tap on the “+” button to create a new alarm.
Set the desired time for the alarm by scrolling through the hours and minutes.
Tap on “Repeat” to configure the repeat settings.
Select “Custom” from the repeat options.
Tap on the days of the week to enable or disable them as per your preference.
Set multiple alarms with different times and repeat patterns to create a random alarm effect.
Android:
Open the Clock app on your Android phone. The exact app name and location may vary depending on the device manufacturer and Android version.
Tap on the “Alarms” or “Clock” tab, usually located at the bottom of the screen.
Tap on the “+” or “Add” button to create a new alarm.
Set the desired time for the alarm.
Look for the option to set the repeat pattern (e.g., daily, weekdays, weekends).
If your device has a “Custom” or “Advanced” option for repeat settings, select that.
Adjust the days or intervals to create a random alarm effect by enabling or disabling the desired days.
If you want more spicy ways to get things done, done well and on time, visit my website at MindfulCommunication.com.
To get work done, done well and on time you need to create a “closed system” or situation where you completely shut out distractions and focus your attention on the right things for a set period of time. An “open system,” in contrast, is a situation where you are open season for distractions.
Close down to work on business tasks that require your utmost focus and concentration – writing, decision-making, study, business planning, slide deck assembly, etc.
Open up for meetings, email, phone calls, family time etc. where distractions abound.
What you do first thing in the morning has a major impact on your day and your productivity. Therefore, close down for business before you open yourself up to activities that over-stimulate you: news reports, texts, videos, social media or emails.
My clients have reported 30% to 50% improved productivity when they start the day “closed for business” versus starting “open” to distractions.
Here’s how: The night before note the task(s) and prep materials you’ll need. Notify family that you are “closed for business” from X to Y o’clock except for emergencies. After you get up the next morning, go straight to your office space. Do not engage in ANY email or phone activities. Shut the door and get to the pre-assigned task. You’ll be open for business when you emerge!
At day’s end, notice how much more you’ve accomplished.
Need more help using your time and energy more efficiently? Contact me at Rebecca@MindfulCommunication.com
When I ask clients to create a vision of their optimal self (i.e., when they won’t need coaching anymore), we discuss how they will manage a wide range of distractions. For the minor, chronic distractions, clients may declare “No technology in the bedroom. I’ll be using an old-fashioned alarm clock instead.” “I’ll clean up my office at the end of every day.” Good solutions for the minor distractions.
Then I ask, how will you deal with the major distractions; the ones that tug at your emotional stability and hijack your thinking brain? The ones for which you have little control: pandemics, major shortages of all kinds, political insanity and threats of nuclear war?
All kinds of distraction share some degree of “comfort.” Or we justify a distraction as more “important” than what we should be doing. It’s more comfortable to watch TV instead of doing your taxes. It feels more important, in a weird way, to scroll footage of the war’s devastation than to do marketing research or see what your competition is up to.
I’m sure I sound cold-hearted to some readers, but folks, you know what you’re doing. Fretting or allowing yourself to be consumed by major distractions will exact a huge toll on you and your enterprise. Certainly, stay informed. Problem solve if these major distractions pose a threat to your business. But avoid falling into the comfort trap or assigning importance to events that diminish your priorities.
The devil is in the distractions! Learn how to curb distractions of all kinds. Contact me at Rebecca@MindfulCommunication.com.
Perhaps it’s the end of the year, the anticipation of the New Year, distraction or something, but a complaint that frequently crops up in coaching these days is: trouble making decisions.
How you feel about a decision should, no doubt, be recognized. But, at some point, when our emotions start to gum up the decision-making process, we need to revert back to thinking mode. The wide range of emotions cloud the process and extend the time it takes to make a well “thought out” decision.
Damon, an owner of a health food startup, was faced with the dilemma of letting a talented, well-liked, but defiant employee go. He cited several concerns that put him in a state of decision-making paralysis. Once he made a decision, he realized other factors he had forgotten and retracted the decision. The constant flip-flopping made him question his competence as a leader, affected his sleep and added to his distractibility. After a couple weeks of woeful waffling, we took the step of putting the pros and cons on paper.
Not only an aid to working memory (the ability to hold several factors online in your head while you make a decision), writing down the pros and cons helped distance Damon from the emotional upheaval. If you’re on the fence, good ole “putting pen to paper” brings a decision-making process into better focus.
Hampered by distraction? Trouble keeping your focus under stress? CoreCoaching can help. Contact me at Rebecca@MIndfulCommunication.com
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If you read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book FLOW, you may recall an exercise where he gave pagers to participants and instructed them to record their feelings and activities whenever the pager went off randomly throughout the day. The participants were asked to note down what they were doing, how they were feeling, and their overall sense of enjoyment and engagement in the activity.
To get work done, done well and on time you need to create a “closed system” or situation where you completely shut out distractions and focus your attention on the right things for a set period of time. An “open system,” in contrast, is a situation where you are open season for distractions.
When I ask clients to create a vision of their optimal self (i.e., when they won’t need coaching anymore), we discuss how they will manage a wide range of distractions. For the minor, chronic distractions, clients may declare “No technology in the bedroom. I’ll be using an old-fashioned alarm clock instead.” “I’ll clean up my office at the end of every day.” Good solutions for the minor distractions.
Perhaps it’s the end of the year, the anticipation of the New Year, distraction or something, but a complaint that frequently crops up in coaching these days is: trouble making decisions.
"It takes more than courage to be an Entrepreneur, it takes CORE."