America’s Leadership Expert : Time Management
Clay Staires: This is Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert with Podcast Number 38, the 15 Wells of Wealth, Session Three.
At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, I have learned over the years, it’s taken me a while to learn this, but over the years I have learned that there are actually some specific skills that I need to acquire along the path of producing wealth. Early on in my life, I didn’t understand it. I thought it was just about working hard. Get a good job and work hard and over time wealth will happen. I didn’t realize that there were actually specific things that I needed to gather along the way. It’s almost like a video game where you’re on a certain level and you need to get a certain number of points. You need to get a certain number of pieces of candy or something like that on that level so you can move to the next level.
It’s the same thing here. With Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert Tulsa Business Leadership, it’s important for us to begin to gather skills along the way. That’s what these 15 skills are, these 15 wells of wealth. There are 15 things that I’ve discovered that I’ve been able to identify over the past 30 years that you will need to expand in, that you will need to grow in, that you will need to do well to help you gain wealth.
We’re going to pick up with well number 11. You need to be sure to be able to manage your time well. At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, I get the opportunity to travel and speak quite a bit on time management to managers and business leaders and entrepreneurs. This is one of the primary stresses and struggles that leaders have. People in leadership positions just feel like they are overwhelmed and don’t have time to do what they need to do.
I was just working with a client yesterday, and unfortunately they were in this very specific boat. When I was telling them, “Okay, we need to do this and we need to do this,” they were just working me and you could tell that they were feeling overwhelmed. At Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert Tulsa Business Leadership, I was wanting to encourage them, I was wanting to help them begin to manage their time and begin to get more done. They were going, “Clay, there’s no way to do this.” Then I began to ask them, “Okay, right now as you step into this new level of leadership,” they were actually going to be the General Manager of the company. I said, “How much time have you been putting in? What has been your hourly workload so far in the job that you have had?” They said about 40 hours, 9-5. I’m going, “Oh, okay, cool. Now as you move to a new level, you’re going to have to expand your leadership, your responsibilities are expanding and it’s going to be important for you to also expand your work week. Expand those hours. Chances are very good you’re not going to be able to lead your company in the same amount of hours that it took you to do the work in your company.
We began to introduce this idea of how to manage your time. By far, again, this is the most precious gift given to man is time. The very first thing when you begin to learn how to manage yourself, the very first step is to learn how to manage your time. Managing your time well is a very important step, a very important skill that you will have to have as you move forward in positioning yourself for wealth.
At Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert Tulsa Business Leadership, the 12th well of wealth is learning how to manage your life well. This, again, has a connection to managing your time, but it’s understanding that I want to live an F5 life. Remember the F5 life is your faith, your friends, your finances, your fitness, and your finances. The five Fs of life. Learning how to manage that. There is a certain amount of time with your family, your faith, your finances, your fitness, and your friends. There is a certain amount of time that you’re going to need to allot to each one of these areas.
For me to manage my life means that I have to look at my life as a whole, not at my life in compartments, not at my life in a vacuum, but I have to look at my life as whole. The time I spend with my family. The time I spend at work. The time I spend with my friends. This time I spend personally growing in my faith, connecting with my God. These are all areas, these five areas of my life, are areas I’m going to have to manage. The very first step in managing them is managing the time that I spend with each one of them. If I can’t manage my time, I won’t be able to manage my life.
Again, we want to remove the drama and be deliberate with our life.
At Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert Tulsa Business Leadership, well of wealth number 13 is learn how to learn well. Unfortunately, this is something that we don’t really think of. It’s not really something that we really naturally pick up when we’re in school.
Again, I was a school teacher for 15 years, so I know that this is something that’s not really taught in school. We don’t really spend a lot of time teaching kids how to learn. What we do is we say, “Here’s the information you need to know, I’m going to give you a test in two days, so go pack this info into your head to the point that in two days you’ll be able to regurgitate it back.” We do a great job of teaching our children how to memorize, but not teaching them how to learn. As we get out into the world, all of a sudden it’s not just here go learn this, or go memorize this and then come in and take a test, but everyday becomes a test. Learning how to learn is a vital piece, it’s a vital skill that we pick up along to road to positioning ourself for wealth.
Leaders are readers. Knowledge without application is meaningless. It’s not just about gaining knowledge. Learning is a combination of knowledge and experience. Education, experience … I’ll throw out the three E’s. To learn well, there is education, there is experience, and there is evaluation. The evaluation piece is actually having somebody in my life that is helping me learn how to think. Somebody that when I feel like I am learning, I am able to regurgitate this is what I feel like I am learning through my experiences. Having that person in my life saying, “Okay, that sounds good, that sounds good, oh, wait a minute, let’s tweak that one a little bit. You’re thinking about it a little bit wrong, we need to do this.” That way we begin to learn how to learn.
At Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert Tulsa Business Leadership, our well of wealth number 14 is learn how to develop revenue streams well instead of just getting a paycheck and looking for that paycheck to grow and grow and grow. You may be in a position already where you do not feel like your paycheck is growing fast enough to keep up with your desires and your dreams to live the type of life that you want to live. What we have to do is we have to add revenue streams to our life.
In the Bible, Ecclesiastes Chapter 11, Verse 2, it says that “wisdom is to have seven or eight revenue streams coming into your life, into your household.” My wife and I, this last year, we just got revenue stream number six. We have six different businesses and revenue streams coming into our house right now. Hopefully in 2017 we’ll have number seven. It’s been very exciting. Again, I didn’t know this until my late 40s. It’s just been in the last five years that we’ve been adding these revenue streams. Obviously, some of the revenue streams are larger than others, but we have six revenue streams coming into our home right now.
At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, I get the opportunity to speak with other business owners and entrepreneurs and managers across the country, and encouraging them to look for opportunities to gain more and more revenue streams into their home. Again, it takes education, it takes learning how to do that. When I was younger, to think of … If I pick up my old way of thinking, I knew that my one paycheck that I had coming into my home, the one revenue stream was through the paycheck of being a school teacher, or being the executive director of a non-profit organization. To get that paycheck was taking a lot of time. It was taking 50 or 60 hours a week. America’s Leadership Expert To get a new revenue stream, in my head, it was all about getting another job. That took time. I was going, “There’s no way to do that.” I thought that the answer was just to get a bigger paycheck. That is not always the case. I want to encourage you, once again, at Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, one of the skills that you need to grow in is being able to develop more and more revenue streams well into your household.
Finally, the last well of the 15 wells of wealth is to learn how to solve problems well. At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, this again is another skill that we teach our business owners and our workers and our managers. Workers do a great job of identifying problems, but so often as we come up that pyramid, if you remember the production mindset pyramid, as we move up from manager … From worker to team builder to manager to leader, unfortunately it’s only the leader up at the very top of the production mindset that is the one that is able to solve problems.
What we want to make sure is that as a worker, if you want to set yourself apart, become a problem solver. Learn how to solve problems well. Representing your company, knowing that you’ve got to stay within budget and you’ve got to stay within time restraints, but you have to begin to learn how to solve problems well.
I’ve heard it said that the more problems you solve for more people, the more money you can make. Solutions … We have an equation here. Solutions times the number of people equals wealth. If you can solve problems for people, you are adding value to people. People will pay for value. People will pay you for solving their problems.
This is Clay Stairs America’s Leadership Expert with Tulsa Business Leadership with Podcast Number 38, Session Number 3 of the 15 Wells of Wealth.
