Book Description

“Time cannot be managed; instead, you manage activities,” said Bob Proctor.

Have you ever tried time management systems without significant success? Would you like to bring back control to your life and enjoy your life much more?

If so, then Time Leadership Time is for you.

Ben Wood, businessman, dad, husband, and church leader, presents to you a system that has worked for him and his family. Using the system, Ben successfully transformed his life and now enjoys living his purpose.

His system builds on the foundation that you were not born by mistake but for a purpose. Only when you live from your purpose will you begin to enjoy your life, not for a day but daily.

Here’s some of what you’ll learn in this book:

●     Three life-changing tests you can do to discover your purpose.

●     The areas that you should grow in your life. Unless you grow in these areas, life will be hard.

●     Two overlooked ways your goal setting fails.

●     The purpose for setting goals. (Note: You don’t set goals to achieve things. There is only one reason you need to have goals, and it is this element that most people miss, causing them to stay miserable.)

●     How to use the Time Bucket Table for scheduling your activities. This system includes a time slot that is missing in many systems.

●     How to say no and still feel good about yourself. A failure to say no is behind most people’s failure to complete the tasks that they schedule.

●     Five reasons you often don’t celebrate and six benefits of celebrating your wins.

And much, much more!

Time Leadership Time allows you to lead your time instead of managing it. It is the most effective way to live a purposeful life.

If you are tired of fighting fires and trying to control and enjoy your life more, then buy Time Leadership Time now!

Time Leadership Time - Practical Strategies for a Life of Purpose, Growth, and High Productivity

Learn the Principles of Effective Time Leadership Not Management! Identify Your Purpose & Start Life-Long Personal Growth. Improve Your Self-Development & Health (Both Body & Mind). Build Stronger Relationships, Set & Achieve Your Goals. Make Your Time Work for You With These Principles of Time Leadership

Ben Wood

© Copyright 2021 - All rights reserved.

The content contained within this book may not be reproduced, duplicated or transmitted without direct written permission from the author or the publisher.

Under no circumstances will any blame or legal responsibility be held against the publisher, or author, for any damages, reparation, or monetary loss due to the information contained within this book, either directly or indirectly.

Legal Notice:

This book is copyright protected. It is only for personal use. You cannot amend, distribute, sell, use, quote or paraphrase any part, or the content within this book, without the consent of the author or publisher.

Disclaimer Notice:

Please note the information contained within this document is for educational and entertainment purposes only. All effort has been executed to present accurate, up to date, reliable, complete information. No warranties of any kind are declared or implied. Readers acknowledge that the author is not engaged in the rendering of legal, financial, medical or professional advice. The content within this book has been derived from various sources. Please consult a licensed professional before attempting any techniques outlined in this book.

By reading this document, the reader agrees that under no circumstances is the author responsible for any losses, direct or indirect, that are incurred as a result of the use of the information contained within this document, including, but not limited to, errors, omissions, or inaccuracies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Section 1: How to Discover Your Purpose

Why You Should Discover Your Purpose

Ways to Discover Your Purpose

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The DiSC

Find Out the Things That Come Easy to You

Section 2: Growing in All Areas of Your Life

The Health Growth Area

Growth in Your Career

Growing in the Finance Area

Developing Strong Family Relationships

Personal Development - Staying Mentally Sharp

Four Benefits of Reading and Listening to Audiobooks

Section 3: Setting the Right Goals the Right Way

What Are Goals and What’s Their Purpose?

Wrong Ways of Setting Goals

Setting SMART Goals

Ensure the Goals Are Measurable

Ensure Your Goals Are Attainable

Set Relevant Goals

Have Time-Based Goals

Section 4: Time

Section 5: Time Leadership Time

How Time Leadership Time (TLT) Works

Not All Time Is Equal

Urgent and Important

Urgent and Unimportant

Not Urgent and Unimportant

Important and Not Urgent

Top Tips

How to Say No and Still Feel Good About Yourself

Notice That ‘No’ Is a Full Sentence

Ask for More Time to Decide

Make a Counteroffer

Section 6: Celebrate Your Wins

Six Benefits of Celebrating Your Wins

It Boosts Self-Confidence

It Can Help You Stay on Your Purpose

It Can Be an Opportunity to Inspire Others

It Can Help You Feel Good

It May Enhance Your Performance at Work

It Can Be a Way to Recognise People Who Help You Succeed

Section 7: Formation of New Habits

What a Habit Is and How It Forms

Decide What You Really Want

Create a Plan to Achieve the Goal

Reinforce the New Habit

Conclusion

References

Image References

Introduction

Do you find yourself struggling to do all that matters in your life because of a lack of time? Do you work hard and yet still feel like life is hard? If so, then Time Leadership Time will help you transform your life. Let me explain.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, our lives were all thrust into a time of uncertainty, lockdown, home-schooling, and survival. My wife and I also took on the responsibility of leading a local church. We had been preparing for the transition and handover for over two years, but when the time came, it was completely different from how we had imagined.

We were thrown into the deep end trying to steady the business that I run along with supporting our four children at home. Add to this the fact that we were also trying to navigate how to lead a church that had never been online. The extremes of this time were enough to push someone beyond their breaking point. The daily and weekly load of home-school, running a business, preparing messages for the church, communicating being a dad and husband along with everything else was intense.

We had some level of time leadership during this period having learned a lot of what you will find in this book over the years in the business world; however, out of the intensity, heat, and pressure of the situation came this system that is Time Leadership Time, combining all of these different models in a practical and visual way of leading your time. By the end of 2020, we ended up coming out of that trial with a way of living life aligned with our purpose. We were also able to lead ourselves better, which benefits everyone else including our children, the business, our church, and the beautiful people we serve.

I know that this system can help you. The central tenet of this system is that you should stop managing your time and start leading it. The only way to make your time count is by leading it out of purpose and from why you are here. If you are yet to live that way, then you’ll need to learn how to grow by making your time count. Let me tell you what you’ll learn in this book on time leadership.

This book outlines a practical way of how you can lead your time better to not just get stuff done but also be intentional in your growth. This means that you’ll learn the process of intentional movement towards a greater you. Instead of being frustrated by lack of time, you make time work better for you. I’m not here to provide proof or detail the mechanics of psychology. I’ll let the professors do that. I just want to make what’s already been found work and explain it in a way that you can use your time more effectively. Here are the Time Leadership Process steps that the book will cover.

First, you’ll connect deeper with yourself to discover your purpose here on Earth. This is the reason you were born. You may have had a taste of what living your purpose means once in a while. That’s not how life should be. You want to live your purpose every minute of each day. I’ll provide you with the tools that’ll help discover this purpose so that process is easy for you.

Life is about growth. If you stay stagnant, you’ll feel bad. Nothing in life stands still. So, you need to grow in all areas of your life including in wisdom, health, and your relationship. Other areas to pay attention to are finance and spirituality. I explain in detail how to grow in all of these areas. Most importantly, I delve into the importance of personal development because it is the bedrock of growth in any area of your life.

The tools proven to transform people are goals. Without goals, we lack direction. In time leadership, you need to set your growth goals for the next three, six, and twelve months. The key to goal setting is that each must help you grow. This means that you cannot set goals that you know how to achieve. Importantly, you need to add a certain ingredient to achieve the growth you need. You’ll be exposed to the SMART approach of setting goals.

Next, the book goes into an explanation of the Time Bucket Table for scheduling your activities. These should be the tasks that help you achieve your growth areas in various roles you play in life. The most important activity in the planner is the Time Leadership Time (TLT) slots.

The critical section of the book deals with TLT. Here, you’ll learn how to carry out TLT and how much time you should allocate to it daily, weekly, and monthly. One of the important things you’ll learn is that not all time is equal. There is time to do urgent and important work and time to not do urgent and important work. You’ll see where you should spend more of your time.

I get that we should work. However, we are not made for work. We are made to add value and enjoy life. We achieve that by celebrating what we feel is important. You’ll learn about the reasons many of us don’t celebrate things, especially the small wins. Furthermore, you’ll find out what you benefit from celebrating.

The final section of the book deals with the formation of new habits. This is critical because you’ll need to make TLT a habit. I explain in detail the process you need to follow to ensure you adopt new, beneficial habits.

I cannot wait to share with you a system that has worked so well for me and my family. I know your life will never be the same once you adopt and use the system daily, weekly, and monthly.

Without further ado, let’s begin with discovering the purpose you were born.

Section 1: How to Discover Your Purpose

It was a Tuesday afternoon when Stephanie sat across from her boss, who had called her in for an important meeting. He slid a manila envelope across the huge mahogany table, and it landed just short of Stephanie’s hands. As the envelope neared Stephanie, her boss followed-up with, “I’m sorry, Steph. We had to lay you off.” Those were crushing words to the ears of the 33-year-old single woman. She just couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that she was getting fired. What’s worse is that she was being laid off by her friend of many years.

Stephanie had worked with her boss for over a decade marketing a local hospital. It was devastating, to say the least. What’s even more painful was the fact that the vice president had assured Stephanie’s division that they would be spared from the reorganization. Yet there she was holding an envelope in her hands. With her mind still on the cheap, brown envelope, her boss added, “That’s your severance package.” A cocktail of emotions swirled within Stephanie. She wasn’t sure whether she was angry, rejected, hurt, or confused.

She had a great job with a lot of flexibility and excellent benefits, and it was interesting and entailed corporate communication relations. The one aspect that she didn’t like was that she did too many routine tasks. However, she earned a good salary and had learned to live with it. In the previous year, she had become restless and begun to feel empty. The lay-off news came when she wasn’t feeling at her best and devastated her.

That night, she found it hard to sleep. She couldn’t figure out what she would do next. The morning after the lay-off, she asked God to show her a career that glorified Him and fulfilled her. After breakfast, Stephanie summoned enough courage to open the manila envelope. She found out that her package consisted of a six-month salary and a few paid vacation days. That’s when she knew she had a few months ahead before she would begin to starve.

Later that week, she unpacked the boxes containing her stuff from the office. As she took the items out one at a time, her eyes landed on a smiling image of a man on the cover of an audio series. The program was on goal setting. She had bought it one time at a conference and never listened to it. She decided right then to begin listening to it. As she listened, she typed up her responses to the speaker’s questions on her computer. Suddenly, she remembered her passion for writing as her fingers effortlessly punched the keyboard. She felt a feeling of regret for abandoning the gift that God had placed in her hands. Without a moment’s hesitation, Stephanie knew that her life destiny was to go back to writing, a career she had given up 15 years earlier. It was in writing that she felt happy and alive.

Instead of writing about crime and gossip, she wanted to redirect her work to communicating Christianity. In other words, she wanted to become a Christian communicator. While figuring out how to do this, she wrote stories about what God had done in her life and in the lives of other people she knew. Soon, she felt the urge to write becoming more audible within her. It was different from how she had felt while working for the hospital. There, she had felt lethargic and apathetic.

Once Stephanie discovered her passion, she knew she had to find a vehicle to live it. Four months after the lay-off, she discovered that she could live her passion by hosting a radio talk show. At this stage, she had no idea how she would do it until one of her friends invited her to a networking event. While there, one of the speakers talked about how she used radio to achieve the success she wanted. An idea sprung into Stephanie’s mind that she could use advertising sales on the show to pay for airtime and her salary.

Eight weeks before her severance package finished, she put on headphones and delivered her first radio talk show. She got a great response. That’s when Stephanie began to live her passion and feel alive for the first time in many years. It did not take long before she met her soul mate, and they got married.

Stephanie’s story shines a light on the fact that many of us have perched ourselves in careers that are good but often misaligned with who we are. We may make a good living but fall short of having good lives. What’s missing? The answer is we haven’t discovered our passion or purpose. Life without a purpose feels empty and meaningless. Yes, you may be able to pay your bills, drive a fancy car, and stay in a mansion, but don’t be surprised when you feel empty. Like Stephanie, the way to regain your liveliness and enjoy life is to change something.

I am reminded of what Steve Jobs said when he gave a commencement speech in 2005 at Stanford University. One of the most profound things he said was, “For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” I couldn’t have said it any better. If you feel empty living the way you do, isn’t it time you changed something?

Like many other people, you may have never given sufficient thought to the subject of purpose. If so, chances are that you may be living off purpose. This book will be the catalyst to getting your life on the right course. You’ll know when you are on purpose because you have a navigation system that’ll tell you so.

No one can find your purpose for you. Your purpose is about what you were born to do and is based on what you care about and are good at. Without living it, you are not doing what your Creator brought you here on Earth to do. You can do many things, good things, but you’ll always feel empty.

Why You Should Discover Your Purpose

A person’s life consists of deeds or actions. Where do these actions come from? Most people barely stop and ask why they behave as they do. We sometimes can go through life never wondering why we choose certain things over others. An individual’s actions come from their emotions. For example, anger shows up on a person’s face before they even do anything like attacking someone. If you are frustrated, it means that you’re unlikely to do something good. Therefore, you need to guard your emotions. You should try to stay happy.

How do you control your emotions? You have to go to the source, and emotions originate from a person’s dominant thoughts. So, if you are unhappy, it means you predominantly think unhappy thoughts. If you are unhealthy, you dwell more on unhealthy thoughts. The results that you produce in your life are the result of your thinking. In turn, an individual’s predominant thoughts originate from their mental conditioning. This is where social heredity plays a significant role in our upbringing. An unhappy life is a result of a socially unhappy environment. The good thing is that you can reprogram your mind and create a new paradigm. As Craig Groeschel once observed, “Our life is always moving in the direction of our strongest thoughts. Most of life's battles are won or lost in the mind.”

For most of us, we have forgotten the reason we were born. Society has, consciously and unconsciously, wired us to live for a career and to chase success. Yet, most find it difficult to achieve success. The major problem is that we live most of our lives in pain because we never become content. Each time we find a great job, we realise that our spirit yearns for more. The reason this happens is that we live out of our purpose, like a ship without a rudder. Our mental powers barely operate at maximum.

Worse, we scatter our powers across many things. As a result, we fail to make a significant impact on ourselves and others. Purpose changes all that. It brings enjoyment to life. How, then, do we begin to live enjoyably daily, weekly, and all the days of our lives? The process begins by discovering our purpose. Once we do, our energy will be concentrated, and we’ll become more and enjoy more.

Ways to Discover Your Purpose

There are many ways you can search for and discover your purpose. Perhaps you are wondering why I harp on about discovering purpose instead of creating it. You see, each one of us came to Earth for a reason. You were born to do something that makes your heart sing. Furthermore, you have an internal guidance system within you that tells you when you are living your purpose. No one can identify it for you. But I can guide you on how to search for it. In many cases, you likely sometimes live your purpose. The problem is that it is an on-and-off process. I want it to be your normal way of life.

One of the first tools you can use to identify your purpose is a personality test. Although these are a good starting point, you should remember that they are not 100% accurate. You still need to evaluate the results you get against your internal guidance system. That would enable you to validate or deny the results. I’ll take you through three tests that could help you discover your purpose.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

I cannot begin to count the number of times I have taken the MBTI. It is an excellent tool that helps you discover the type of person you are. In other words, once you take the test, you’ll know where your strengths and weaknesses lie. When combined with other tests, you’ll feel that you understand yourself better. In the process, you’ll start to have a feel for what comes naturally to you. It is this that is related to your purpose in life.

The MBTI is based on Carl Jung’s theory of personality. It is one of the most well-known and often used personality tests for helping people decide their careers. The idea behind it is to help you choose a career that aligns with who you are. Isabel Myers and her mother, Kathrine Briggs, developed the MBTI to help understand people’s differences. They believed that when people understood themselves, they could select careers that matched their personalities and live happier lives.

The key to the MBTI is that it helps you figure out who you are. Armed with that understanding, you can make better choices. Your MBTI personality results are based on your answers to a battery of questions, and the questionnaire is divided into four scales.

Extraversion (E) - Introversion (I)

The extraversion-introversion scale defines how people react or respond as well as how they interact with others and the world around them. Extroverts are people who are action-oriented; that is, they are outside-focused. In contrast, introverts tend to focus inward and don’t mind spending a lot of time alone.

No person is exclusively an introvert or extrovert. We are a blend of the two to a degree. However, each individual has one of the two in well-developed form.

Sensing (S) - Intuition (N)

The sensing-intuition scale relates to how you gather information from your surroundings. You either predominantly learn more from your five senses or enjoy dealing with abstract ideas. Sensing people are fact-oriented and prefer to work with details and hands-on experiences. On the other hand, intuition-led individuals are about exploring possibilities. They are not limited by the concrete things of this world.

I am sure you already have a feeling about which side of this scale you probably fall on.

Thinking (T) - Feeling (F)

The third scale considers individuals as either predominantly thinkers or feelers. This is about your preferences when you make decisions. Do you enjoy making decisions based on what you think or what you feel?

If you prefer thinking, you tend to place more importance on facts and statistics. You are logical, consistent, and objective when you decide. Note that you don’t necessarily decide that you’re going to prefer facts. It’s something that developed over time because you enjoyed it.

A feeling type uses emotions to arrive at conclusions.

Judging (J) - Perceiving (P)

The fourth scale considers how you deal with the external world. A person whose judging side dominates likes structure and predictability. These are people who are slow to adopt change. They prefer to keep things as they are.

Perceiving individuals, in contrast, enjoy flexibility. They are the exact opposite of the judging types.

All four scales mentioned above interact to create a unique individual with special qualities. All in all, the combination of the above creates 16 personality types. The names of the personality types are descriptive in that they tell you which side of each scale an individual prefers. For example, the INTP personality type prefers the introversion, intuition, thinking, and perceiving side of each scale.

Each personality type has certain qualities that describe a person. Let me share with you the qualities of just two of the personalities, the ENTJ and ESFJ types. The former is someone whose four scales are extraversion, intuition, thinking, and judging, while the latter’s scales are extraversion, sensing, feeling, and judging. Although they share some of the dimensions, individuals characterized by these personality types are different.

Here are the qualities of the ENTJ personality type:

●     They have well-developed communication skills. This allows them to persuade through either writing or speaking.

●     They enjoy interacting with other people. This means that they are a social person.

●     They rely more on objective data to make judgments.

●     They prefer stability and having control rather than adapting to changing situations.

●     Hiding emotions is one of their strong qualities, so they seem to be cold and ruthless.

The ESFJ personality type has the following qualities:

●     They thrive when caring about the needs of others.

●     It’s common for individuals of this type to value helping others.

●     They tend to be easily hurt by unkindness.

●     They are mindful of the feelings of others.

You now have an idea of what the MBTI is all about. The easiest and fastest way to discover your personality on the MBTI is through doing an online test. There are many websites where you can do free tests. Hop on to your favourite search engine and type “free MBTI test”. You’ll see many results. Choose one, and follow the instructions to do the test. Once done, you’ll obtain the results. Study those results to check if the description of the personality matches yours. This exercise will also help you see the other side of yourself that you never knew existed.

There is a second type of test that can help you discover who you are. Most importantly, it will help you figure out your strengths and preferences. Thus, you can use the information to discover your purpose. I suggest that you do all the personality tests I share because none of them is complete by itself.

The DiSC

DiSC is an acronym for dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. Each of the letters represents a personality type. Let us briefly go over each of these personality types so that you can know which describes you better.

The Dominance Style

Individuals who display the dominance personality style are action-oriented and value winning and success. They work hard to shape the environment, overcome challenges, and achieve their goals or target results. These people are competitive and achievement-oriented. Living their purpose may be racing or working in sales.

The Influence Style

People whose personalities fall in the influence style shape their environment through persuading others. They value relationships and collaborating with others. One way you may live your passion or purpose could be by promoting not-for-profit organisations. Here, you would use your persuasion skills to help others.

The Steadiness Style

This person likes loyalty and dependability. Often, they are calm, patient, and consistent. One of their major values is helping others. If you are this kind of person, you may find that your passion is in coaching others in one way or another. For example, you may coach people to manage their finances and feel alive.

The Conscientiousness Style

A conscientiousness-styled individual values independence, accuracy, and competency. They are a systematic type of a person with a flair for tactfulness and analysis. They do what they do with an eye focused on quality and accuracy.

All people combine the above DiSC personality styles. However, only one or two of the styles dominate. Each style can be associated with two others. For example, the conscientiousness style can blend in with the steadiness and dominance style. So, a person may be a CS or a DS, and each will have different values and qualities. Like the MBTI, the DiSC assessment can be completed online.

There are several personality tests on the market that can help you discover who you are. That knowledge will guide you in discovering your purpose. If you do the above assessments and find that they don’t seem to describe you accurately, there are other options such as the CliftonStrengths, the Passion Test, or the Who Am I quiz.

I’ll explain another test shortly, but first, let me share with you some tips that can help you discover your purpose.

Find Out the Things That Come Easy to You

As stated earlier, you don’t have to create your purpose because you were born with it. There is a strong chance that you are already living your purpose some of the time without noticing it. How would your life change if you found this purpose and lived it daily? You would certainly live a more fulfilling life.

Take a moment to think about the answers to these questions. What do you love doing most of the time? Do you love drawing, teaching, singing, acting, writing, cooking, or fashion design? Look back at your life for a time when you lived what you love doing. Where were you? What were you doing? How did that make you feel?

One of the things that I have found helpful is writing the story of what I was doing on a piece of paper. In fact, you may have more than one story where you enjoyed what you were doing. Writing these stories down may reveal a pattern that can help you identify what you love doing most of the time.

I remember Joe’s story as if he told it to me yesterday. Joe began his professional career as a teacher. After three years of teaching, he decided to change careers. So, he went back to school and studied metallurgical engineering. On completion, he worked for a copper mining company for six years. That’s when he decided that he wanted time freedom because the job left him little time to spend with his family. He felt going into business for himself would eventually free his time.

Unfortunately, the business failed within four months. In the process, Joe lost thousands of dollars. When trying to find the reasons for his failure, he ended up analysing himself. One day, he began to notice that he enjoyed himself when teaching. Since then, he has spent most of his time reading and teaching. He feels alive when helping others learn and achieve their desires. He has reconnected with his purpose, just as Stephanie did. This story shows why self-analysis is an important tool to add to your search for your purpose.

One of the most powerful eye- and heart-opening exercises I have ever found is the Passion Test created by Janet and Chris Attwood. The goal of this test is to help you discover your purpose, your destiny in life. Here’s how to perform the Passion Test:

Write Down a List of Your Passions

We all have certain activities that excite us when we do them. We feel like doing them forever. These activities are our passions. Passions are essential for our well-being and happiness.

Write at least 15 passions on a piece of paper or in an app. To help you get started right, begin each passion this way:

When my life is perfect, I am _______________.

For example, when my life is perfect, I am teaching others how to live responsible lives. Another example could be, when I am living a perfect life, I am free from financial worry.

Be careful that you differentiate between your passions and goals. A goal is something specific to achieve in the future, while a passion is how you are presently living your life. Some of the questions that can help you generate a list of passions are as follows:

●     What unique skills and talents do you possess?

●     What things get you excited when you do them?

●     What activities do others compliment you on when you do them?

●     What do you enjoy doing most of the time without getting tired?

Put Your List Aside

After writing, put the list of passions aside and allow your subconscious mind to work on the list. During this time, take your conscious mind off the list. You can achieve this by doing something unrelated to your passions such as taking a walk.

Revisit Your List

Go back to your list of passions and ask yourself, “If I could have only one passion from the first two, which one would it be?” In other words, you want to select the passion closest to the perfect one from the first two on your list. That becomes your passion #1.

Next, you compare your passion #1 with the third one on your list. Again, you need to select the one that closely matches who you are. Having made your selection, the chosen passion becomes your new passion #1. Going forward, you repeat making choices by comparing your new #1 passion and the fourth one. The process continues until you have exhausted your list of passions.

When you have finished doing comparisons, you’ll have what you believe to be your passion in life. Thus, you’ll have a strong idea about what you should spend your life doing to stay a happy person.

Write a Purpose Statement

It is only after identifying your purpose that you can move to writing a purpose statement.

Here are a few examples of purpose statements you can model yours on. Don’t try to be perfect. Write it out as it appears in your mind, but feel free to polish it when you get better ideas as the days progress. Here are the examples:

●     I am so happy and grateful now that I create stunning works of art that reveal the beauty of nature.

●     I am so happy and grateful now that I produce life-changing stories that inspire and educate people through my writing.

●     I am so happy and grateful now that I stand up for what I believe in and represent those who need a voice for their beliefs.

●     I am so happy and grateful now that I am a dad at home, work, and in society and protect the defenceless.

●     I am so happy and grateful now that I am a teacher known to inspire my students to be the best version of themselves.

I trust that the above will inspire you to generate a powerful purpose statement that represents who you are, not who you want to become. You are already living your purpose, but you probably only do it sporadically. From here on out, you’ll pay attention to what you do and ensure it connects with your life purpose.

Let’s move on to the next section of the book and look into your growth areas.

Section 2: Growing in All Areas of Your Life

Living your purpose intentionally is not a haphazard process. You cannot expect it to be static, but dynamic. This is how it should be because everything in this beautiful universe is in a constant state of motion. Nothing rests. If it did, the orderliness we see around us would disappear in nanoseconds. You and I are a part of the universe; thus, we are bound by the invisible hand of its laws.

For this reason, we must keep growing. There are several areas you could direct your growth efforts such as health, financial, mental, career, societal, familial (relationships), and spiritual dimensions. You may be aware of others such as emotional, but the seven I mentioned are the most common ones. You must grow in each of these areas, and each should be in tune with your purpose to begin to enjoy life.

In this chapter, we’ll focus on why you should grow using selected areas as examples. Overall, the intention is to grow holistically. Forget about balance because there is no growth when that happens. Let’s begin with health.

The Health Growth Area

If you were to grade your health status up to a maximum score of ten, what would you give yourself? In my case, I would give myself a seven. You may give yourself a ten, nine, six, eight, or a two. The reality is that it doesn’t matter what score you rate your health. What matters is that you know that there is room for improvement. Deep within, you’re convinced that you can up your health, even if you’ve rated yourself a ten.

There are three factors that affect your health that I would like to focus on. These include eating healthy food, having enough physical activity, and getting adequate sleep. An unhealthy body cannot support you as you endeavour to live your cherished purpose. Also, you may not be able to grow in the other areas of your life. You need to be healthy to be able to fight off diseases, stress, and anxiety.

Eating Healthy Food

I don’t want to tell you that it is easy to eat healthily all the time. As people, we have developed the habit of eating unhealthily, and the thought of doing better deflates us. We think eating healthily deprives us of enjoying ice cream and sodas. Added to this, we live busy lives with some of us working two jobs just to have a plate of food on the table. However, we barely stop and wonder why we don’t seem to get control of our lives.

We eat out more often than we cook at home. If we don’t eat out, we pass by the stores from work and buy takeaway. As a result, we eat more unhealthy food. This is one of the reasons many British citizens suffer from chronic illnesses such as heart and circulatory disease as well as diabetes. The British Heart Foundation estimates that there are 160,000 people in the UK who die as a result of heart and circulatory disease. That’s a staggering statistic, wouldn’t you agree? Furthermore, coronary heart disease kills more people in the world than any other heart and circulatory disease. So, it is time to pay attention to our lifestyles and diet (British Heart Foundation, n.d.).

Another deadly disease prevalent in astonishing numbers is diabetes. About 3.9 million people in the UK suffer from the illness. This number represents about 6% of the population (Diabetes UK, n.d.). Diseases like diabetes are lifestyle illnesses that can be managed. Food plays a major role in their management. Not only will diet help you manage these illnesses, but you can also bring your weight under control if you are under- or overweight.

What It Means to Eat Healthily

Eating healthily means that you should take foods from all the groups including proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. However, you should eat them in the right proportions based on feedback from your body. I am aware that there are general portion sizes out there as if people respond to food the same way. Although this sounds logical, people are genetically different.

Furthermore, they live vastly contrasting lifestyles. As a result, eating two ounces of brown bread won’t result in similar metabolisms. By the way, metabolism refers to chemical reactions that take place in the body to break proteins, fats, and carbohydrates into forms of energy that the body can use. Most importantly, include enough fibre in your meals so that you can have a healthy gut.

Let’s move on and discuss the value of exercising for your health.

Why You Should Exercise

What came to your mind when you read the word ‘exercise’? I have heard people tell me interesting things. Most see a gym with muscular people lifting giant weights over and over. Others imagine people riding exercise bikes or running on treadmills. I rarely hear someone mentioning gardening or chopping down a tree as a form of exercise. It just goes to show how well the media has incorrectly conditioned our minds.

Exercising means doing a physical activity with the result that you elevate your heart and breathing rates. However, you should ensure that you involve all the parts of your body. That’s why exercises such as walking, running, swimming, cycling, lifting weights, and aerobics are such excellent physical activities.

There are many benefits of exercising. I’ll share with you two that quickly came to mind.

●     Physical Activity Maintains Bones and Muscles

Exercise can help your body to release hormones that are responsible for facilitating the absorption of amino acids. Remember that amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. As you may know, proteins are responsible for building muscles. When the body absorbs amino acids efficiently, it can build muscles.

Furthermore, exercise helps you maintain strength. You should expect this because every human body part develops with use. A good example is a hand. If you lift weights with one of your hands, over time, it becomes strong and muscular. The other hand will stay weak.

Physical activity also helps build bone density. This means that your bones become stronger and are less likely to develop osteoporosis in the future.

●     Exercise Helps Sharpen Your Brain and Memory

When you’re involved in some form of physical activity, your breathing and heart rate increase. This happens to transport more blood and oxygen to the brain. Also, the blood would transport toxins from the brain cells much faster. Higher brain activity strengthens or sharpens the brain.

Exercise also promotes memory and thinking skills.

I can go on and on listing benefit after benefit of exercising because there are so many. I think you get the idea why physical activity is necessary. Let’s now turn our attention to sleep.

The Importance of Adequate Sleep

What is sleep? This is an important question that we should answer at the start so that we are on the same page as we proceed with our discussion. Sleep is a period when the body repairs itself. During the day, you do many activities that damage the cells of the body. If not removed, this dead material could negatively impact the functioning of your mind and body. Because we do different amounts of activities daily, it follows that our bodies need different amounts of time for maintenance.

There’s very little friction within the body of a person who lives according to the laws of God. So, there will likely be less damage than someone who tries to oppose these laws. As a result, we don’t necessarily have to sleep the same amount of time to feel rejuvenated. I can sleep for five or six hours and feel on top of my game every day. Yet, someone may need nine hours of sleep to feel alive the following day.

Sleep also serves another overlooked function. Have you ever gone to sleep while you were trying to solve a perplexing problem? If so, you may have been surprised the following day to wake up with a clear solution. Where did the solution come from? The only place it could have been worked out is in your mind. So, your brain also helps to solve problems while you are asleep. This happens because, during sleep, the subconscious mind can work with minimal interference from the conscious mind. As a result, it can bring its intelligence to bear much better than it could during the day.

If you don’t believe sleep is good for your health, I have a simple exercise for you to do. For the next two days, do not sleep during the day or at night. Another option for you is to have some children! During those sleepless nights, you will think back to this book!

After, listen to your body and figure out whether sleep is good for your health or not. I don’t think, as people, we should be told everything. In fact, we learn better by experiencing. Do this exercise if you’ve never done it before.

Growth in Your Career

There are many people who work in careers they wish they never joined in the first place. More and more people are realising that their career should be an extension of their life purpose. A career should be a phase of living your purpose. Unless the situation changes and you align your career with your purpose, pain will keep haunting you. I am not talking about physical pain but emotional pain.

These words from Jake Herway at Gallup sum up what the right career for you should look like:

A fulfilling career is one where you take work personally. The more personal your work feels, the more energy you'll have and give, and the more likely you'll be an engaged, top-performer. The more meaningful your work is to you, the more congruent it will be with the rest of your life (Gallup, 2017).

That, to me, is how a career should be. What about you? Do you believe your current career is congruent to your whole life? Are you able to watch your children grow without barriers? Are you able to earn the amount of money to live the kind of life you dream of?

I have met people who became engineers due to family influences and later discovered that their true careers lay elsewhere. One of them gave up civil engineering and began a career as an artist, and he has been doing it for as long as I can remember. Others join their career by accident or for money’s sake. Soon, they discover that they have the money at the expense of their happiness or health. The problem is that they chose, consciously or unconsciously, careers misaligned with their personalities. As a consequence, they never enjoy their job.

The major problem is that your job affects the other areas of your life. Your family life can suffer because you work 16 hours a day and have no chance to spend time with them. Also, doing a job that is incongruent with who you are reduces the chances of doing well in it. You won’t have the energy to do the job as well as you know you should.

At this point in our discussion, you may be wondering what you should do to align your career with your life and purpose. You have already begun the process if you have completed the exercises from section 1 of this book. By now, you should know yourself a whole lot better because of the self-analysis you did. If you have not yet completed those exercises, I suggest you do so now. You need the information to discover a career suitable for you and your personality. This applies even if you’re currently in a career you feel isn’t right for you.

The next step is to figure out the careers that closely match your personality. Imagine you discovered from the MBTI assessment that you are an ENTP. Furthermore, other personality assessments confirm that this is the personality that closely describes you. The careers you could consider include financial analyst, graphic designer, technical writer, lawyer, software developer, or political scientist. The reason these careers may suit you is that ENTPs prefer dealing with creativity and ideas and dislike routine.

Take time with this exercise because you probably spend most of your time at work. Wouldn’t you want to spend most of your time doing something that you enjoy? Even better, you want to be involved in a career related to your purpose so that your work can be fulfilling.

Once you’ve found the right vocation or career, you need to figure out how you can grow in it. It doesn’t help to enter into a field with no growth prospects. As soon as you feel static, boredom will set in, and you’ll begin looking for employers that offer better job prospects. Let me illustrate what I mean by career growth.

Suppose you have discovered that you enjoy teaching and your life purpose has to do with coaching others to succeed. Also, you have figured out that you need to do this full-time. Currently, you are in another career with little teaching involved if any. It should be clear that you’ll need to prepare yourself to enter this new career. As a result, you must create a plan that shows how you’ll get there, a plan that helps you transition seamlessly into a new career.

As you think about what you should do, you figure that you need to take certain classes. Doing so would help improve your reputation, making people trust you with helping them improve their lives. We’ll talk about goals in the section to help you focus on the right activities daily.

I must emphasize that the career you choose will impact your health, finances, relationships, and spirituality. So, recognise that discovering the right career isn’t just about paying the bills but also living an enjoyable life. I am very aware that some people may feel trapped in their current role and position. I have felt the same way; however, if you are proactive and seeking to grow, then, either in your current role or outside of it, there are ways you can start.

Growing in the Finance Area

The world of money probably receives more attention than any other growth area in most people’s lives. It doesn’t take a genius to realise the impact of finances on relationships, health, careers, and people’s spirituality. Finances, when they aren’t in the best shape, can and do break marriages. Surprisingly, most people never receive any financial education either at home or school. These two environments have a huge influence on the habits that children adopt as they mature. Eventually, whether they are adept at managing their finances or not reflects their childhood lessons of the absence of financial education.

That’s why I strongly suggest that to lead time or to lead in any form, you should be a proactive individual. You should act on things rather than allowing them to act on you. Therefore, for your finances to take shape, you will have to take the initiative to educate yourself. We live in exciting times when you have access to books on any discipline you may want to know more about. Whether it is finance, health, or relationships, you are sure to find a book that someone wrote to share their knowledge and experiences.

One of the greatest enemies of strong personal financial management is instant gratitude. There are many reasons we have developed this unproductive quality such as improvements in marketing, advertising, and our understanding of the human mind. It is not surprising that debt has become the new slavery. According to London’s The Money Charity, the average UK household had the following debt situations at the end of December 2020:

●     The average credit card debt was £2,094.

●     The total debt, mortgage included, stood at £60,860.

Debt, for most people, means that they can’t afford to acquire what they want for cash. Instead, they choose to apply for and obtain credit to buy the desired object at the moment they want. Here’s an important question most of us barely ask ourselves: Are there households with no debt? The answer is a definite yes. The next important question is: How do debt-free households differ from the average household in handling money? The answer is that they have the skills to handle money mainly because they are financially literate.

In fact, if you dig deeper, you’ll find that it is not only the financial skills that are important but also the attitudinal qualities such as self-control. These households may even have credit cards but use them like debit cards. So, it is not the easy availability of credit cards and loans that are the problem. It is we who have to change our attitude towards money. Why can’t other households do the same as debt-free homes? There are two reasons that I have been able to identify. It never occurs to them that it is possible to live debt-free, or they have habits that don’t support such a lifestyle. This suggests that altering habits should be as important as becoming financially literate.

Robert Kiyosaki, in Rich Dad Poor Dad, advises, “The earlier you can train yourself and those you love to be masters of money, the better. Money is a powerful force. Unfortunately, people use the power of money against money” (Kiysaki & Lechter, 1998, p. 237). Money is like a knife. It can do good or bad depending on how you use it. You can cut yourself with it if you don’t know how to use it or create a beautiful work of art with it. In the end, money can do good if you handle it with care and skill.

According to a paper by the TIAA Institute, millennials, who form a large portion of the workforce, have embarrassingly low levels of financial literacy. This is shocking considering that these same people are the most highly educated in the nation. Clearly, it is not your level of academic education that will dictate whether you are financially literate or not. You must study financial literacy, both theory and practice.

So, what can you do to improve or grow your finances? I’ll provide you with a skeleton process so you get started right. Here it goes:

●     First, you must be tired of experiencing money issues. If you are married, your spouse should also feel the same way. If not, the best you can do is to share with them your frustrations on your failure to stay on top of your finances. Show them how bad it is with their finances presently. Then, paint them a picture of how life would look if they had control of their finances. This is where the skills of communicating become vital.

●     You need to develop a burning desire to turn your finances around. When you feel this way, immediately work out a plan to educate yourself on money.

●     Next, start a reading and studying program on financial literacy. Your reading plan should include studying budgeting, emergency funds, getting out of debt, and managing debt. Another skill to consider is the art of negotiating. When you feel you understand and are implementing what you learned, begin to study investing. One great book to consider reading is The Richest Man in Babylon. Not only will it teach you about money, but it will also show you the terrible power of unproductive habits.

I know many people who read books but fail to implement the gems of ideas that they contain. So, be different, and apply what you learn. However, whether you use what you learn or not will depend mostly on how badly you want to improve your financial situation. For now, decide to raise your level of financial knowledge, and you’ll soon be richly rewarded.

I want us now to turn our focus to relationships.

Developing Strong Family Relationships

Most people want to have a supportive spouse, well-behaved and respectful children, and healthy family relationships. It does not stop there; they also want wonderful friends and a supportive community. Here’s one important thing each one of them should pay attention to. Great relationships do not begin with others; they start with ourselves. It is easy to expect your spouse to respect and love you. However, you cannot force them to do so. There is a better way to approach relationships.

You become the kind of person you wish others could be. If you want your children to respect others, you first behave that way. My thesis is that people often react to us. If we want them to be kind to us, we must become the first to be compassionate. I want you to keep this in mind as I discuss family relationships. What I’ll say here applies equally to how you relate to society and your friends. You shouldn’t change your principles of operation as you move from your own family to your friends and society.

Healthy family relationships provide support and guidance to each member, especially when they are going through some rough times. Importantly, a family can provide the love you may not find elsewhere. Unfortunately, not many family relationships are healthy. These families can be a source of pain. Instead of living stress-free, such relationships can be a source of mental challenges. I wouldn’t wish to see children being raised in such toxic families or communities. These children are unlikely to grow up to be confident, supportive, and healthy adults.

What qualities should you adopt so that you can have a healthy family relationship with all the members? Let’s look at four such qualities.

●     Support and Commitment

The members of your family all need support in the various things that they do. So, you need to promise that you’ll be loyal to and supportive of them. It should not be mere talk but something you practice. When you give that support, you’ll be sure to see them reciprocate the treatment. That’s how the law of giving and receiving works.

It’s unfortunate that there are people who expect to be treated well while they don’t seem to extend the same favour to others. You can almost say that most of us are selfish. Unfortunately, this kind of behaviour doesn’t help in building healthy relationships.

If you are dealing with family members not yet versed in collaboration, it would be a good idea to involve them in decision-making. This is especially true for your spouse, or else they may feel like you don’t value them.

●     Enhanced Coping Skills

There is no doubt that challenges are a part of life. We cannot prevent them from happening. Therefore, you need to develop resilience. The mark of a mature person is their ability to handle tough situations. If you have this quality in well-developed form, you can expect children to subconsciously copy a good quality.

One of the most robust strategies of dealing with challenges is to realise that you cannot change everything. In fact, the easiest thing to change is yourself. It is near impossible to permanently change the behaviour of another person. You can force someone to do something against their will by using force or a weapon. But they are unlikely to stay that way for long. Effective behaviour change is likely to occur through savvy communication and persuasive skills. Still, the person decides to change by themselves. I highly recommend reading Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and AI Switzler for a deeper treatment of the subject of communication.

It is during tough times, like someone contracting a deadly disease, that the strength of a family comes to the fore. You should lead in the effort to manage the situation through the development of resilience.

●     Appreciation

What we appreciate grows. Appreciation is essentially the practice of the law of increase. Instead of ridiculing your child or spouse, you choose to let them know we all make mistakes. You can go on to explain that tomorrow will be there for another chance at doing better.

Where there is no appreciation, there is low self-confidence. Not many people do well when they lack confidence in themselves. So, be the one to nurture the confidence of your family members, friends, and everyone you meet.

●     Exercise Authenticity

Authenticity is an important quality for anyone who wants to live their purpose. Chances are that family members, including extended family, may not understand why you have ‘changed’. Remember that once you identify your purpose, you stop doing certain things. For example, you may change your career to one that does not pay you as much as the previous one. This may not go down well with some members of your family, especially extended family.

The reality is that you may have stopped doing certain things but still deserve to be treated with respect. In the same way, you need to respect what your family does. If you can’t participate in some family activities, ensure that you are open about your new position and the kind of life you wish to live.

The above areas I have discussed with you should help you get an idea of what it means to grow in important aspects of your life.

I now want to discuss with you the importance of personal development. This is one aspect of human life that helps ensure you do all the other areas well.

Personal Development - Staying Mentally Sharp

Personal development is about becoming a better person through activities calculated for your growth. The keyword in there is growth. No one is more interested in your growth than yourself. This means that it is your responsibility to work on each of the areas of your life to grow. The best investment you can make is to invest in yourself and your development. When you are skilled in handling your health, you become better in that area. The same applies to all the other areas. So, the focus of personal development is to develop your skills and competency in handling your life.

Although personal development covers all areas of your life, I want to focus here on developing the mind. This means we’ll be talking about the mental food necessary to strengthen your mind. The method of sharpening your mental faculties that works is reading. Of course, reading involves listening to audiobooks, audio programs, and attending seminars.

There are many people who stop reading once they find their first jobs after completing secondary school or university. They never develop the habit of studying and reading. Instead, they feed their fertile minds with information that is not necessarily good for growth. This is dangerous because the information may not help you stay on purpose. Let me take you through five benefits of reading. You’ll be convinced that this is one good way of investing your time.

Four Benefits of Reading and Listening to Audiobooks

There are many benefits to reading books. I have selected four that I believe you should know about. Let’s begin with the first one.

Reading Minimizes Stress

We live busy lives with many responsibilities. The pressure to perform at the highest level at work and home is relentless. Some people choose to relax and relieve the tension in their minds by taking stimulants such as alcohol. The problem is that these substances may have detrimental effects on the body. What if you chose to read instead?

Reading a good book allows you to shift your focus away from whatever may be depressing or stressing you. As you probably know, where attention goes, our energy goes. So, when you read, your energy goes to the literature you are focusing on. You may mentally live the exciting stories of the characters. As long as your mind is on the book, you’ll stop thinking about what was stressing you and begin to feel better.

It Sharpens Your Memory

When you read, you engage several parts of the brain. Because you try to make sense of what you read, the hippocampus, responsible for memory, must be engaged. It works with the power of your will and attention to ensure you remember some of what you read. Your memory benefits immensely if you read literature that interests you.

It is important to exercise your memory because most of what you do depends on it. Just imagine how it would be meeting someone new, asking their name, and then forgetting it in two minutes or less. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing?

Reading Helps You Become a Better Writer or Communicator

I believe that all of us are writers. As long as you can think clearly, speak, and write, then you are a writer. You may not be a Hemingway, but you’re a writer, especially if you ever wrote essays in school.

Reading is an excellent way to improve your vocabulary. It is impossible to read without encountering new words. When you do, it is almost natural that you would look them up in a good dictionary or thesaurus. As you check these words each time you read, inevitably, the number of words you know will increase. As this happens, you automatically become a better writer. What is writing other than putting words on paper or screen in a coherent manner?

When you read a book, you’re essentially having a conversation with the writer. You get your questions answered. As a result, reading is like conversing with someone about a given subject. What if you combine reading with writing? Gary Halbert taught his copywriting students to collect advertisements and copy them by hand. He knew it worked because he did it and became one of the best copywriters in the world.

Malcolm X, when in jail, decided to improve his communication skills. Do you know how he did that? He reasoned that copying a page from the dictionary daily would help him improve his vocabulary. So, he followed through with his plan. As time passed, he slowly began to communicate and write better. I don’t need to tell you that Malcolm X became one of the most eloquent men who ever lived.

There is no doubt that the increased vocabulary and enhanced communication you get by reading help you sharpen your writing skills.

It Broadens Your Mind and Perspectives

Reading books exposes you to various ideas, and some of them can change your life. I remember last year reading some research to determine the influence of diet on blood glucose level. I was astounded to discover that people respond differently to similar types and amounts of foods. For example, one person can have elevated blood glucose after eating a banana, while others could stay the same. This was an important finding because it suggested that there shouldn’t be a common diet. People are different and process food differently.

I’m illustrating that when you read, you discover ideas that can change your life. You are reading a book on time leadership because you realise other approaches haven’t worked for you. Reading introduces you to new ideas that enable you to see life and the world differently. Thus, you may begin to appreciate more of life.

As important as reading is, it is vital to select your reading matter carefully. Your purpose and your goals will guide you on what to read and what books to avoid. Each time you decide to buy or read a book, ensure that you have a reason for doing so. You should read with improvement in mind.

It is not enough to identify your growth areas because this might turn out to be just information. You want to act and grow in these areas. The way to do that is to set goals, the subject of our next section.

Section 3: Setting the Right Goals the Right Way

The next three sections of this book are interrelated. I suggest that you go through all of them first, then come back to this chapter and do what it recommends. That way you’ll have a broader picture of what needs to be done to lead your time effectively.

At this stage of taking back control of your life, you’ve taken time to discover your purpose. Next, you’ve identified all the growth areas necessary to live a life of purpose. If you are like most people, you’ve likely identified at least seven areas to focus your energy on. In this chapter, we take the process a step further. I want you to break down your purpose and growth areas into goals so that you can implement and live your purpose.

Purpose is not a thing to achieve. Purpose is life, and you live it daily. How do you know that you are living your purpose daily? That’s where the right goals come in. Have you noticed how you set goals every year, and in the beginning, you get so excited and feel you have the energy to attain them? However, a few months later, you lose all the enthusiasm you had. A further few months down the line, you shelve all your goals and just live. This happens to you every year. Why?

If you have ever felt this way, you should know that you are not alone. I sure had that challenge myself before discovering the approach I’m sharing with you in this book. There are plenty of people who are like you, and some are worse off. Around 80% of people never try to set goals. This is a group of people that fails even before they begin because they never try. Of the remaining 20%, nearly 70% fall short of nailing their goals. One thing is for sure, those who set goals and attempt to materialize them benefit somehow. You’ll learn why I say so when we discuss the purpose of goals shortly. The important question to ask is: Why do so many people fail to achieve their goals?

Let me share with you a story that will show you what’s possible for a willing person who knows what they want. It was 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953. Sir Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa from Nepal, stood at the summit of Mount Everest, a feat no one had ever achieved before. It was a momentous occasion for the two as they summited the 8,848-metre monster called Chomo-Lungma by the Tibetans.

Many mountain climbers had tried to reach the top of the highest mountain in the world but fell short. Some fell as short as a few feet away from the summit. After several of these failures, a British expedition was organised to attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Included in the expedition were Edmund Hillary and the experienced Tenzing Norgay.

The expedition began in April. Armed with special clothing, communication devices, and oxygen systems, Norgay and Hillary set off to the top on 28 May. At 8,500 metres above sea level, the pair set up a camp. They endured a freezing and sleepless night before heading out again the following day. They managed to reach the South Summit at around 9:00 a.m. Only a steep (about 12 metres high) rocky step stood between them and the top of the world.

Hillary wedged himself in the crack before inching up and throwing down a rope for Norgay to follow. The pair stepped onto the summit at about 11:30 a.m. It was unbelievable. Following this triumph of the human spirit, Hillary was knighted. Since then, numerous mountain climbers have made it to the top of Mount Everest including the first American, James Whittaker.

What does this story tell us about the nature of human beings? One thing is for sure. When you have the desire to achieve your goal, you can do it. There are many lessons to learn from this achievement. The most important is that you have hidden powers just waiting to come to the surface. They will when you set goals that matter to you. Hillary and Norgay had been climbing mountains successfully for years. They saw the British expedition as an opportunity to challenge themselves. In fact, Norgay had tried before to scale Mount Everest but failed to reach the top. It shows that he had the desire to someday get there, and he did. You have the desire to live your purpose, and that’s possible when setting goals and achieving them.

At this time, we must attack the reasons why people set goals and fail to achieve them. But first, let’s go back to the basics and set the foundation right.

What Are Goals and What’s Their Purpose?

Most of us have heard or even used the word ‘goals’ more often than we can remember. Have you ever stopped for a moment and asked what goals are and why we should set them? I know I didn’t in the early stages of my life. Fortunately, as I matured and entered business, I began to ask these questions. I have innocently asked others what goals mean to them. And I often get interesting answers. Nothing surprises me like seeing someone look at me as if I’ve lost my mind when I ask the question. Today, I share my answer to the question with you.

A goal is nothing but a desire you want to materialize in the future. In other words, a goal is something tangible or intangible that you want to achieve. For example, your goal might be that you want to learn how to respect your spouse by the end of the next six months.

There are several reasons for setting goals. Human behaviour can be chaotic without something specific to work towards. We can easily spend our quality time doing abominable things. I am not saying those aren’t goals. They may be, but mostly, they aren’t intentional. Real goals are intentional and represent our desires.

Goals represent concrete ways to realise your vision and to live your purpose. Don’t confuse goals with dreams. As much as dreams are important, they are just wishes and should be turned into goals to become real. Although goals represent future achievements, their purpose is much broader. They serve as a way to grow into the best version of ourselves. You can be sure that Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were never the same people after summiting Mount Everest.

I remember watching a lecture by the late Myles Munroe, a doctor, where he said something that changed my perception completely. He was teaching about the story of Creation as captured in the Bible. He explained the reason God created Adam in a way I had never heard before. Munroe said that he investigated the story by studying from the Hebrew Bible to understand. You may know that God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden after He had created him. Then, He gave Adam a message, which was for Adam to become. Yes, God told Adam to grow. To become is to develop something that does not yet exist in visible form in you. You develop new skills and competencies to be able to handle life at a higher level.

That teaching has taught me that we are all here on Earth to grow. That’s why most employees seek employers who care about their growth. It is not by chance but by design. If you don’t grow, something within you makes a loud noise for you to notice. Therefore, you cannot set a goal that you already know how to achieve. That’s because you won’t grow in the process of attaining it.

It follows from this that goals should be difficult. I don’t mean that they should be impossible to achieve. No, they should be challenging. Gary Latham and Edwin Locke (1991) reported in a study that over 400 studies discovered that when we set hard goals, our performance improves. This occurs when a person’s skill level improves. They argue that we often try harder when faced with difficult tasks. However, they add that commitment is necessary. That’s why you need to set goals that are important to you to have a chance of nailing them.

Before we go through the goal-setting strategy that I have for you, let me share with you some of the wrong ways of setting goals. This will help you avoid falling victim to these unprofitable goal-setting approaches.

Wrong Ways of Setting Goals

Most people approach goal setting with the reverse mindset. What do I mean by this? Is it fine if I ask you a question? Do you believe, wholeheartedly, that you can create a multimillion-dollar business starting with no capital at all? It is astonishing how most people, even savvy entrepreneurs, believe it can’t be done. Without being aware, these people have been trained, deliberately or not, to believe that it takes money to make money.

Conventional wisdom seems to support this notion. For example, to make money in the stock market requires capital, right? So, you need money to make money. In fact, the more money you invest, the more you are likely to make. That may be so in the stock market, but a short investigation into where money comes from reveals an interesting conclusion. Most, if not all, modern governments print money. Let me allow William J. Luther, Ph.D. in economics and director of the Sound Money Project at the American Institute for Economic Research, to sum it up. He says:

Unlike the trillions of dollars the Treasury is spending to save the economy by bailing out companies or beefing up unemployment checks, very little of the Fed’s money actually comes from taxpayers or sales of government bonds. Most of it, in fact, emerges right out of thin air (Luther, 2020).

Pay attention to that last phrase, “... emerges right out of thin air”. If the government can do it, you can do it too without breaking the law. All you need is to learn how.

This story of money creation provides an excellent example to show that you need to know how to do something before you do it. In other words, you need to become, then do, and finally, have. It is for this reason that we go to school and then university, and only then do we find a job and work. No employer wants to hire someone with zero skills. It follows that you get money by serving someone else.

Unfortunately, this is not how many of us approach the goal-setting process. We believe we should begin by having, then doing, then being. This thinking is behind why most of us think we should have money to make money. No wonder there are thousands of people who win the lottery (have), buy things (do), and become rich for a short time (be). You cannot be a happy person if you live by this reverse mindset.

Another reason that people fail at goal setting and achieving the goals is that they believe they need to do more. I am talking about the do, have, and be mindset. This sounds logical, doesn’t it? For example, if I work hard, my boss will increase my salary, and I’ll have a lot of money and be what I want. This feels like that’s how things should work. What about the belief that if you exercise, you’ll have a lean and toned body and become attractive? With this way of thinking, we go out and work extremely hard and get surprised when the things we expected do not happen. If we get the things we want, we lose in certain aspects of life, such as not having enough time to spend with our families.

You can understand why time leadership is an essential ingredient of a happy life. Otherwise, we would spend our precious time fighting fires daily. So, how do we set goals so that we live exciting and valuable lives? We have covered the first two critical elements, which are discovering your purpose and realising that there are specific life areas to attend to regularly. Finally, we come to the next ingredient, that of setting goals the right way.

The proper approach to setting goals is to first become the person who does the right thing to have the things that they want. In other words, the formula is be, do, and have. It is quite simple, isn’t it? The focus shifts from a focus on doing many things or on what you want to become to a person capable of doing and then having the right things.

The other thing to consider when you set goals is that they must be difficult to achieve. Why is that? I mentioned above that you must first become. If you set a goal you already know how to achieve, you are just going to start with doing, not becoming. Thus, it won’t help you feel good about yourself. You’ll achieve the goal, for sure, but you’ll still feel empty. Instead, set a difficult goal. This simple tweak will get you to dig deep into your resources and put more effort in to achieve the goal. As you can tell, you’ll be forced to grow, which is about becoming.

Don’t forget that the goal that you choose must be something that you want. When you imagine yourself having achieved it, you’ll feel a surge of happy emotions running through your whole body. When you feel good, you are a happy person, right? Great. With that in mind, your next important task is to ensure that your goals are SMART. That is, your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic (in your eyes), and time-based. This is a perfect time to discuss this process or strategy in detail.

Setting SMART Goals

You have, up to this point, done the preparatory work by discovering your purpose and reflecting on what needs to improve in all areas of your life. In other words, you have clarified your dream life and know that you need to align your health, relationships, finances, society, spirituality, career, and mind. Purpose by itself says little about exactly what you do to live it. That’s why you need to turn it into goals in each area of your life. Don’t forget to set difficult goals so that you can transform into a person who lives their purpose and enjoys it. This section will take you through the qualities that each of your goals should have so that you can transform and live a purposeful life.

The mind is the most powerful human tool you can ever have. The problem is that it can work for or against you. The best way to get it to work for you is to speak its language. One key about the mind is that it works in images. If you don’t believe me, let me prove it. When I mention the word ‘car’, what do you see on the screen of your mind? A car, right? But there is one problem. What kind of a car is it? A sport utility vehicle (SUV), a truck, a hatchback, or a saloon?

I am sure you already see where I’m going with this. Had I asked three people the above questions, do you think they’d see the same images? Certainly not. If we take the exercise further and ask each to describe the features of the car they see, would they say the same things? Probably not. When you give your mind an unclear image, it has no clue what you are talking about. Therefore, it cannot help you identify the object even if it is right next to you. We see with our minds, our perception, not our eyes.

So, when you set a goal, it must be specific. Specificity immediately helps you form an image if you are describing an object. It should be clear to the mind exactly what you are targeting. A good example of a specific goal might be, “I am happy and excited now that I weigh 10 stone and am lean and strong.” Notice that I have written the statement in present tense. There’s a psychological reason for this.

Ensure the Goals Are Measurable

If you are doing an activity, how do you know whether you are moving in the right direction? How do you know if you have to make adjustments? Most importantly, since the objective of setting goals is to grow, how would you know you are growing? The answer is to measure your progress.

Earl Nightingale, in The Strangest Secret, defines success as the progressive realisation of a worthy goal (Nightingale-Conant, 2009). Therefore, you should measure your goals to realise any progress that you are making. When you realise that you aren’t making progress, you can quickly adjust your plan and activities.

Setting a goal that says “I want to lose weight” isn’t a good approach. The reason is that it is not measurable despite knowing that you want to lose weight. However, once you say “I am happy now that I weigh 11 stone,” the game instantly changes. You know exactly where you are headed, and you can measure the progress you are making either weekly, biweekly, or according to whatever timeline you choose. If the scale doesn’t budge, say from one week to the next, then you know you must change something.

Let’s now turn our attention to the next element of SMART goals.

Ensure Your Goals Are Attainable

If you have been in personal development and studied spirituality, you may think that anything is possible to the mind of a person. In other words, you subscribe to the idea that what the mind of a person can conceive it can surely achieve. That’s the conclusion the likes of Napoleon Hill came to after over 25 years of research into the causes of a person’s success or failure.

Let’s have a look at nature for a minute. If you have observed it, you should notice that certain soils are ready to produce corn. All it requires is planting the corn seed, caring for it, and within a few months, you’ll harvest fresh maize. What if you plant the corn in soil unsuited for growth? Would it give you the kind of corn you expect? Perhaps it would, but the chances are slim unless you fertilise it. So, not all types of soils will give a good harvest of corn.

So it is with the human mind. Not all minds are ready to achieve any goal. Thorough preparation is often necessary first. Some people may or may not have sufficient time to do this preparation. Importantly, they may not have the belief to achieve the goal. For example, let’s say that you are 90 years old and decide to become an astronaut. Furthermore, you have never immersed yourself in the sciences, meaning that you don't have the necessary foundational knowledge to go after the discipline. Would it be reasonable to expect to become an astronaut? In theory, it may be possible. However, will the goal be achievable for you?

Whether it would be or not depends mainly on whether you believe you can achieve it. No one else can dictate to you what goal is achievable. That will be purely based on how much you believe in yourself. Perhaps the 90-year-old can become an astronaut. The bottom line is that you should believe the goal is attainable for YOU, not anyone else.

As Steve Jobs once said during his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition (Stanford University, 2017).

If your inner self tells you that your goal is attainable, even if you don’t know how to do it, go ahead and set it.

Set Relevant Goals

Goals come in many shapes and sizes. How many people do you know who set goals, attain them, and then feel empty? Perhaps you have done the same thing. In fact, it is common for many people who set goals to achieve material things because they seem to be cool.

The goal will still help such people to grow. The big question is, grow into what? The kind of growth that’s good for you if it relates to your purpose? You want to feel good during the journey towards your goal, not just when you attain the object. This is what I see often either at church or work. People set goals, don’t have a life as they strive to achieve it, and then enjoy it for a day when they attain it. If the goal took a year to achieve, that person would have spent 12 months living an empty life.

I don’t want that sort of a thing happening to you. Instead, I want you to enjoy your life every hour and every day. This means that you should enjoy every activity that you do. And the only way to do that is to do what matters to you. That is, all your activities should be related to your purpose. So, set goals that are relevant to your purpose.

Have Time-Based Goals

We don’t have all the time in the world to achieve what we want. Time for everyone is limited. This means that you don’t have forever to achieve your goals. I am talking about achieving goals because doing so would help keep you motivated to keep working. If you don’t see any progress daily, you might give up easily.

Setting goals requires you to decide on the timeline for when you want to achieve the goal. Why is this timing important? If you look around in nature, you’ll notice that everything happens at certain times. Oranges are ready for harvesting at certain times, as are avocados and mangoes. So, goals should also be achievable within certain periods.

Human beings tend to procrastinate. Timing your goals helps you crush this negative habit. And you’ll be on your way to achieving your goals. Some of your goals will be long-term and others attainable over the short term.

I want you to set goals that you can achieve over a year and some that are attainable within six months and three months. The best approach is to set a given twelve-month goal, then break it down into smaller goals achievable in three and six months. All these goals should tie into your purpose. And remember, when you achieve these goals, you’ll be enjoying and living your purpose. As you travel the journey to your goals, you’ll be having fun. That’s what goals are meant for, not to achieve them. Many people mistake goals with achievement and wonder why they remain empty as if nothing took place.

Most people mistakenly believe they can set goals and stop there. To some, this habit may be effective. But this is not so for everyone. You need to reinforce the goals in your mind. Time leadership will help you do that by using a simple tool, your diary. We cover this in the next two sections of this book.

When you commit to your purpose, growth areas, and goals, it becomes easier to make decisions. Here is an example of what it means when you are committed to your purpose and goals.

In the UK, we name all our storms. I remember them only naming the big ones, but now it seems every little breeze gets a name. However, in early 2021, we had a pretty big one. In our part of the country, there was considerable flooding not too far away, and the storm was pretty brutal. Since my health and well-being had often, in the past, taken a back seat, part of my Time Leadership goals for 2021 was to run three times a week, so this flooding could be problematic.

When I was starting my business six years ago, it was normal for me to go to my day job from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and come home. Then, I would see my wife and daughter for the evening until bedtime, and then I would work on building the business from 9:00 p.m. until 3:00 a.m. That went on for months. Thankfully, I was a lot younger, but your body can only take that sort of schedule for so long.

I knew it was only ever going to be for a season. However, it meant that exercise was basically non-existent. Now, I am in a different stage of life, and through leading my time and having the opportunity to lead it in line with my purpose, growth, and goals, I set a target to run outside in the elements.

At the beginning of 2021, in stepped Storm Christoph to try and thwart me. My wife, Rose, was also taking up this challenge, and we had a choice to make. Would we allow a storm raging outside (not to the point of it being unsafe) to stop us from going out for a run?

We had planned our time; the run was in the diary, and the time was approaching. It would be easy for one of us to bail and get the other to agree. However, we both looked at each other with the same thought running through our minds, we are crazy people. But we were living on purpose, so we went for it. It was cold; we were soaked to the skin, but we loved it. It’s those sorts of stories that end up in books, so here it is. Living on purpose provides you with the drive to make the decisions that are best for you.

Now that you have discovered your purpose, identified your growth areas, and set goals, you may plot them on a triangle chart. Here is how you do it.

Draw a large triangle that can fit on an A4 page. Use horizontal lines to divide the triangle into five sections. The top section will be a smaller triangle, and that’s where you write your purpose statement. The next section is where you’ll write your growth areas. If you have three growth areas to work on, divide this section and the following ones into three subsections using lines from the top to the bottom of the big triangle as shown in the diagram below. I’m including this diagram so you see how you should draw the various lines to have the accurate chart.

Figure 6: Time Leadership Model

For more than three growth areas, divide the sections accordingly.

The next part of the chart has your three-month goals. Write goals that correspond with the relevant growth area. For example, on health, you may make a goal to run three times a week. All you are doing is transferring your goals to the appropriate part of the Time Leadership Model.

Speaking of Time Leadership, let’s move ahead and start the process of how you do it.

Section 4: Time

The process gets practical now. You have completed a lot of the preparation work necessary to schedule your time. You know your purpose, have explored the different growth areas in your life, and have set annual, half-yearly, and quarterly goals. The next step is to explore the different roles and responsibilities that you play in life and then apportion your time.

If you have set your goals appropriately, you should find that each goal pertains to the results you want from each role you have in life. Each person has several roles in life they must fulfil. For example, you may have the following roles in your life:

●     Individual

●     Spouse

●     Parent

●     Relative

●     Software developer

●     Volunteer

●     Church event organiser

●     Entrepreneur

●     School board member

You may have a different set of roles, but you get the idea, right? Until you recognise the roles you have in life, your schedule will be wrong. The result will be frustration, especially where other people are involved. Now, if you have set your goals appropriately, each goal will relate to either one or more of the roles that you’ve identified. So, you may want to ensure that there is a goal for each of the above roles. If not, I recommend that you revisit your goals and rework them to ensure that they cover every role that you play in life.

Importantly, if a role does not have goals, then it need not be part of your life. Now, I want you to start scheduling the activities that will enable you to achieve your goals, grow in the right areas, and live your purpose daily. Here’s what you do next.

Create a table with eight columns called the Time Bucket Table. The first column heading is roles, the next one is daily followed by weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, and annually. For each role you have, you allocate activities that you’ll do for each period mentioned above. For example, the personal role might have meditation on a daily basis and Time Leadership Time daily and weekly. If you are running your own business, you might have a weekly review meeting with your team. You can see an example on our website for your reference. It is extremely important to take time with this exercise.

Many people that I have shared this system with initially complain that it is too much work. I agree. However, I also know that after doing it once, the next time it becomes easier. As you keep reviewing your tasks and schedule, it becomes second nature because you are building new habits. Since this is not necessarily easy, it may be hard work initially. The results you’ll get will astound you. I am sure you’ll thank yourself for doing this in six months or a year from now.

Great. Let’s move on with creating your Time Bucket Table.

Think through the different time buckets you may have and the frequency that they occur. See our example Time Bucket Planner chart. Use this guide as a reference to get going quickly. Across the top in columns are the frequencies of the tasks that you do. These cover daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly activities.

Down the side for the rows are your roles:

●     Personal Development

●     Relationships

●     Work

●     Volunteering

Within this table, you can start to list all of the different times that you need to apportion. The most important bit here is to start with your wisdom, health, and relationship growth areas. Assign the time that each deserves.

Priority number one is to assign your Time Leadership Time. We will unpack what this looks like in the next section, but it’s important to schedule 15 minutes at the start of your day, half an hour at the end of the week, and one hour at the end of the month. These time slots are crucial for leading the rest of your time.

Next, add activities like date night (one of my favourite times of the week), holidays (it's so important to rest), personal development (reading and knowledge), health and well-being, and finance and budgeting. All these growth areas are essential to leading your time. This time allows you to lead in the direction to grow in line with your life purpose.

After that comes the things that you have to do that make up your responsibilities such as meetings. We now have a table of all of the time buckets we need to schedule in the diary along with their frequency. We are not done yet.

The next bit that’s necessary is to schedule identified activities on a calendar. You don’t have to schedule the tasks for too long because you need to build in flexibility. So, schedule your activities to cover only a week. It is the built-in adaptability of this system that sets it apart from most approaches. Your schedule should have empty pockets of time to allow for rescheduling. To think that every task will always take place at your preferred time is asking for frustration. For example, your child might get sick right about the time you are about to meditate or hold an important meeting. If your schedule does not allow for flexibility, it’s going to be difficult to enjoy and live a life of purpose.

Now that you have scheduled your activities in the Time Bucket Table and weekly schedule, it’s time to talk about Time Leadership Time (TLT) slots. This is where most people fail to lead their time. Unfortunately, this leads to frustration as the day progresses.

Section 5: Time Leadership Time

If there is one thing that I do not like, it is the cold and rain. When you live in Manchester, England, that is something that you cannot get away from. However, my purpose always trumps the weather.

Recently, we bought our children a trampoline. I feel that we are blessed to have a garden big enough to put this trampoline in. When the trampoline arrived, I promised the children that I would build it for them first thing the following day.

As you can imagine, the children were excited beyond belief. I, however, made a huge mistake. I forgot to look at the weather forecast for the next day. When the following day showed up, it was a typical England winter mixed with torrential rain. It is in these sorts of moments where your purpose receives a few blows. In other words, it is when challenges come that your purpose is tested.

Mine was no exception on the day I had to build the trampoline. My purpose, as I discovered after going through the purpose discovery process, had always been to be a dad. That purpose contains an incredible responsibility. I am not only a dad to my children but also to the church where I serve as a spiritual father. This means that I have to provide, protect, comfort, grow, and lead the church. That’s not an easy task.

I had promised my children to do something for them. As you can tell, it would have been extremely easy for me to bail. That would have been the sensible thing to do. However, I had made the choice out of my purpose. So, the task had to be done and by no one else but me. I knew that by leading my time in the direction of my purpose to be the best dad, I could build that trampoline. The rain was torrential, and it was flesh-numbingly cold. So, I began to build the trampoline. It took way longer than it should have. However, the joy and happiness on those four little faces bouncing up and down was worth the freezing rain.

Do you see what I mean by living your purpose? More powerfully, do you realise the power of Time Leadership Time? I scheduled the task and had to do it. You need to commit to your life purpose because it is a key ingredient to living it. But first, let me talk about Time Leadership Time and how to do it. We are getting practical now, putting the preparation work we did in the first three sections into practice. If you thought this would just be a theory, you are in for a shock. There’s work involved. And that work is yours to do. It is only through work that you develop the necessary competency.

How Time Leadership Time (TLT) Works

Time Leadership Time is the first and most important activity in your diary. This time is designed to enable you to lead your time in line with what you have created. It’s where you take all the work you’ve done in the previous sections and assign it to your diary.

You may do the time buckets on paper, Outlook calendar, or any other tool that you prefer. Whichever way you choose, I’ll provide some ideas and resources to help. You can use any tool for setting up your time buckets from pen and paper to digital calendars. I mentioned these in the last section. We have monthly, weekly, and daily TLT slots.

Here’s how TLT slots work.

Monthly TLT (normally 1-2 hours): I recommend that you have one TLT session a month in the month before you are planning. So if you are leading your time for September, you would do your TLT at the end of August. Doing this with your partner or spouse is important. It will provide accountability and also improve communication between the two of you. Who doesn’t want as good a marriage as is practically possible?

Weekly TLT (30-45 minutes): Life is constantly changing. All of us must adapt or lose focus and direction. So, we also look to spend an hour a week planning the next week. Adjusting your schedule and building in your priorities for the week ahead means your time is led based on purpose and importance and not urgency or other people’s needs. I explain in detail the different categories within which your activities may fall including the not urgent and important tasks.

Daily TLT (15 minutes): Finally, this is where all the hard work pays off. Every day, start your productive time by spending the first 15 minutes organising your day. Once you do, you’ll know how to hit the day with purpose. You don’t only want to be productive; you also want to grow in all areas of your life too.

If we calculate the TLT time we have in the year against all the other time we have, the percentage is minimal, but it will have a dramatic effect on the way we live our lives.

There are 525,948 minutes a year. Of those, we have:

●     5,475 daily TLT minutes a year

●     1,550 weekly TLT minutes a year

●     720 monthly TLT minutes a year

●     7,744 total TLT minutes a year

The total annual TLT minutes equates to 1.47% of your time spent each year on TLT. Think about this for a moment. If I could tell you that spending less than 2% of your time a year can transform the other 98%, would you do it? I think it’s a pretty good deal.

Did you know that the value of time differs depending on the kinds of activities you do? I would like to shed light on this in the next discussion. This is important so that you avoid spending time on unimportant things.

Not All Time Is Equal

The above heading might not make sense to you now. Give me a moment, and I’ll show you what I mean. What do 20 minutes mean to you? Do you think 20 minutes is a lot of time or a little time? For me, it is neither long nor short. The accurate answer depends on what I am doing with the time. If I am sitting on a hot stove, 20 minutes is too long. However, if I am sharing my knowledge with someone, especially the church that I serve, that time is minuscule, especially if I am talking about living with purpose.

Now, if time isn’t equal, how do I know which time is more important? This question is the reason you are reading this book. The way you use your time is a reflection of how good you are as a self-manager. The activities that occupy your time don’t have the same impact on your life. Furthermore, they are a good measure of your competence in leading time. Here are four categories wherein the use of your time falls:

●     Tasks can be both urgent and important.

●     Some activities are not urgent but are important.

●     Other tasks are urgent but unimportant.

●     Finally, you have tasks that are not urgent and are unimportant.

We’ll look at each category in detail shortly. Let me first clarify what I mean by urgent and important so we can have the same perspective. An urgent task is one that you must do now. It requires you to find time to focus on it. How soon you attend to it depends on whether it is important or unimportant. The major challenge for most people is that they spend their precious time attending to urgent and unimportant activities. In other words, they get so busy and become surprised when their lives barely improve.

Whether a task is important is primarily a matter of what you value most. Something low in your value ladder is not as important as another rated high up. For you, this means that anything that allows you to move towards your goals, which are purpose-aligned, is important. Any other activity that’s outside such goals isn’t important; it is unimportant. I cannot see why you would spend a big chunk of your time doing unimportant activities after going through Time Leadership Time. It seems a good time to explore more about the categories I introduced above, and we begin with…

Urgent and Important

We all have activities that are both urgent and important. They are the sorts of tasks that require immediate attention. For example, when you don’t have lights in the house, you are pushed to find ways to illuminate the building, right? Such tasks force us to act to accomplish them. We cannot eliminate these activities because they must be done or things could become worse than they are already.

This is where problem-solving finds a lot of application. Failure to look at these tasks objectively often leads us to believe that we cannot do anything about them. Though this may sound logical, it isn’t true. For example, you know you should take your car for regular service. On the day of the service, you decide or circumstances force you to skip it. A few days down the line, the car breaks a part that would have been replaced during the service. True, when the breakdown occurs, the situation is urgent. But it was not always so if we look at the bigger picture. Do you get my point? What I am saying is that urgent tasks are not always so. Neglect often makes them urgent.

When you spend most of your time doing urgent and important tasks, know that there is important work you are not doing. We call such work preventative maintenance. In health, that’s where the saying “Prevention is better than cure” comes in. In other words, most of the tasks in this category come from elsewhere. They don’t originate in this category. You’ll see shortly which category houses these kinds of tasks.

If you lead or manage anything in life, then you have a responsibility to lead yourself. In his book The Art of Chaotic Leadership, Dee Hock says,

The first and paramount responsibility of anyone who purports to manage is to manage self: one's own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts. It is a complex, unending, incredibly difficult, oft-shunned task. We spend little time and rarely excel at management of self precisely because it is so much more difficult than prescribing and controlling the behaviour of others. However, without management of self, no one is fit for authority no matter how much they acquire, for the more authority they acquire the more dangerous they become. It is the management of self that should occupy 50 percent of our time and the best of our ability. And when we do that, the ethical, moral and spiritual elements of management are inescapable.

Hock suggests the management of ourselves should occupy 50% of our time. That seems an incredible amount of time. However, by leading your time, living through purpose, and growing in your areas, you can weave this into your day-to-day life.

Urgent and Unimportant

How often do you find yourself busy with other people’s activities? Chances are that you do it a lot. If you don’t believe me, take this test and be honest with yourself. Write an hour-by-hour account of what you do with each hour of your typical day. When I did this task, I was astonished by what I found. I spent more time at work and paying attention to other important areas in my life.

Such tasks may be urgent but not important regarding living your purpose and enhancing your life with what matters to you. It is highly important to sort important work from the unimportant. In truth, none of us should spend our time on unimportant activities because they steal this valuable resource from what matters most.

Not Urgent and Unimportant

Spending time on unimportant and not urgent matters is an utter waste. People who feel pressure from the urgent and important gravitate to this category. They want to be busy but choose to focus on low-value activities such as answering some emails that just inform you of something unnecessary like an event you aren’t interested in.

Leading your time effectively calls on you to avoid tasks in this category like the plague. As a rule, only focus on important activities. This requires self-awareness. I’ll show you shortly how to use time leadership to achieve this.

Important and Not Urgent

The activities in this category are important, yet they are not urgent. What kind of activities do you think fall in here? I can think of activities like planning and exercising. Many of us dislike taking time to plan. We choose to act without it. I guess the reason we do this is that sometimes acting without planning works. Yet, as we grow to bigger roles in life, we begin to realise that failure to develop a habit of planning costs us dearly. We totally forget that lack of planning is the root of most failures. Winging it works sometimes. But planning works most of the time.

What about that exercise you’ve been postponing? It is important for your health, yet you may relegate it to the bottom of your to-do list or whatever system you use. You may get away without exercising for months and still feel good. Then, one day you wake up with a troublesome headache. You go to your nearest store to get those little white pills hoping they’ll help. Unfortunately, the problem persists. You decide to go to your doctor, and they check you. To your shock, they discover that one of your arteries isn’t allowing blood to flow normally, and it’s affecting the functioning of your heart. Suddenly, what was once important and not urgent moves into the urgent and important category.

This category is about doing preventative activities. Work you do in this category is like the service you do on your car. You can skip it a few times, but soon, it will catch up with you. Often, the cost of skipping tasks that are neither urgent nor important is huge. It is here where we should spend the bulk of our time. This is what TLT will help you do. Isn’t that exciting?

The reason we began this book with discovering your purpose and the growth areas to work on was precisely to help you tell the important from the unimportant. If you have not taken the time to do the purpose-discovery exercises I gave you, I urge you to return to section 1 and do them. This system won’t be effective without you knowing what’s trivial and what matters in your life. I want you to spend more time on important and not urgent activities.

Top Tips

●     Keep on top of things, but if the urgent things start to overwhelm you, reset and replan.

●     If you don’t complete everything you wanted, keep calm and carry on. However, reassess in your next TLT time.

●     Try scheduling 15 minutes into your day to stop and just think. This is a proven way to help your brain organise everything that needs to be done.

●     Accountability is key. Try bringing trusted people in or get them to do TLT with you. Your partner or spouse is especially important.

●     This is a marathon, not a sprint. If you are currently struggling, take it step by step and try to implement things gradually. This is designed to support you throughout your life, not just for tomorrow!

●     Create space in your schedule for flexibility and spontaneity. The beauty of leading your time is that you don’t have to overfill it!

●     When you have a structured job where you can’t lead those time blocks within it, lead the time in between. Use lunch breaks and evenings to your advantage. I have known people to run side businesses on their lunch breaks. I created and bootstrapped my digital solutions company in the evenings while working a full-time job. These techniques will help you lead in your role too!

Should You Use Pen and Paper or an Online Calendar?

Time leadership does not require you to use any specific program, software, or method. It’s a process and strategy to build into your life. All it takes is for you to choose to do it!

My wife prefers to do her time planning on paper. We have a weekly planner that she plans in during her weekly time for health and well-being, personal development, and everything else a mother of four young kids and a church pastor needs to do. She will use paper to-do lists with priorities highlighted and ordered.

I, on the other hand, run a digital business and love all things digital. I have multiple calendars for my business, for leading our church, and everything else in between. I love to set repeating events to save time and schedule placeholder meetings. I like to use digital to-do lists synced up to my calendar to manage everything I have to do with dates and timescales and owners.

Do whatever works for you. My personal setup uses Outlook calendars, Microsoft To Do, and Microsoft Planner brought together using Microsoft Teams. The paper examples can all be downloaded from the website.

I wouldn’t be doing justice to the content in this book if I didn’t include a part that deals with a two-letter word few people have the courage to use. That word is ‘no’. You see, when you decide to live your purpose, there'll be many things you’ll need to stop doing. You’ll have to stop pleasing others at the expense of what matters most to you and your life. It is part of the process that initially people will misunderstand you. They’ll want to work with you like they used to. So, you’ll need to learn to say no and still enjoy life. Saying no to these unimportant tasks is one of the best ways of freeing up your time to say yes to the activities and tasks that align with your purpose and growth goals. This book is very focussed on you and your time; however, often the fruit of that is outworked in helping others. Learning when and how to say no is an important part of repositioning your priorities.

How to Say No and Still Feel Good About Yourself

Theory suggests that you should help as many people as possible. The problem is that you do not have all the time in the world to do so. Furthermore, your energy is limited, and you get tired. This means that you should rest so that you re-energise for top performance the following day. If you are in business, and everyone is in business, by the way, even if you have a job, you should know that your resources are limited. Therefore, you cannot be available for everyone. As such, you have to learn to say no. Here are three ways you can say no without feeling guilty.

Notice That ‘No’ Is a Full Sentence

Can you fly? If you are like everyone, your answer should be no. That should convince you that you have answered my question completely. Therefore, ‘no’ is a complete sentence that does not require any explanation. The problem is that most of us find it difficult to say no to requests from others.

A big reason for this is that we don’t want to disappoint others. Without realising it, we mistakenly disappoint ourselves because we fail to complete the tasks that we should do. It seems there is no doubt that if you don’t practice saying no, you’ll likely be the person who plays second fiddle to others. Unfortunately, until you care for yourself, you cannot help others effectively.

Many people fail to say no because they don’t have planned schedules for their tasks. So, they can get away with never saying no. However, they cannot get away from the fact that they will fail to live purposeful and enjoyable lives. Someone who has specific and scheduled work to complete can easily say no, especially if they review their schedules daily or whatever frequency works for them.

Ask for More Time to Decide

I get it that sometimes it can be difficult to say no even if you have a schedule. How do you navigate such situations and still say no without damaging your relationships with others? You achieve this by asking for more time to make a decision. There is no law that says you should answer a request immediately. If you have that belief, consciously or unconsciously, it could block you from asserting control over yourself. Look, someone else’s urgency is not your urgency. Did you get that? The fact that your boss wants something now doesn’t mean you should stop everything and attend to their request. They have a duty to help you succeed if they are a good boss.

If you ever find yourself in a tight situation where your boss wants you to do a task urgently, simply share with them your schedule. Ask them which of their many assignments you should set aside to attend to their new request. That may also necessitate extending the deadlines of some of the existing tasks. In fact, when they press for an immediate answer, tell them that you would like to review your schedule and will get back to them shortly. That bit of time allows you to think through your decision instead of reacting. The same process of asking for more time would work if you are presented with an opportunity to invest or something similar.

Make a Counteroffer

There are times when a person may request your assistance and have no other alternative. In such a case, you could say that you wanted to help but can’t. Proceed to suggest an alternative that could still work for them.

This way, you still help them and continue to work on your activities. Importantly, you’ll feel good even after saying no.

Section 6: Celebrate Your Wins

Celebrating your success, no matter how big or small, is so important to living a life of fullness and joy. What’s the point in living if we can't enjoy ourselves now and again?

Our brains and bodies respond in a certain way, a good way, when experiencing joy and happiness. There are many ways you can celebrate your wins. However, you want to ensure that your celebrations are in line with your life purpose and living a life of joy.

Here are two examples where the mode of celebrations isn’t growth-focused but detrimental. Going and getting drunk to celebrate a completed health goal is counterproductive, isn't it? Deciding to take a holiday on your own for a month to celebrate when your purpose is to be the best dad to your young children is, again, violating your purpose. I worked in a company that said “Real success is the success you share”, and it's a wonderful way of thinking about success and celebrating it with those who you are living with and accountable to.

Life is for living. Celebrating and enjoying yourself is part of having a full life. Every three months or whatever period you choose, you can sit back and see how it’s gone and celebrate. This is an important time because if we don’t celebrate success, what can we celebrate? Love the small wins, and if you can, start a celebration board or diary to keep track.

Over the years, I have worked with many people in church, work, and business. I have come to identify at least five reasons some people don’t celebrate their successes. Perhaps the two or three things that most people would celebrate include passing their exams, a university degree, and a marriage on a honeymoon. The rest of the time is about survival and never-ending problem-solving. I wonder when we ever get the time to enjoy our accomplishments.

Here are the five reasons that I believe you should be aware of because one of them might be holding you back.

●     You feel that you have no time to celebrate. I understand this, and it is one of the reasons to adopt the Time Leadership Time approach. This is one of the most common reasons we don’t celebrate our successes as much as we should. You work hard, and someday, you achieve your cherished goal. Instead of taking time out to celebrate and let the achievement sink in, you immediately move on to the next challenge. Sure, we all must move on to other goals, but enjoying must be part of living a fulfilling life.

●     Some people are scared to celebrate wins because they fear that they might slack off and fail to achieve their bigger goal. This applies when you are going after a big goal. Instead of celebrating the wins during the journey, we tend to wait until we nail the big one. Unfortunately, you may have to deal with a lot of frustration and disappointment along the way. Celebrating might be a way to gracefully overcome these challenges and have the enthusiasm to continue towards the big goal.

●     You have subconsciously set yourself up to celebrate bigger goals. To be sure, this is not necessarily bad. The only thing is that it may take too long before you celebrate. As a result, you might lose team members along the way, especially if you are after a group goal.

●     Celebrating appears to be bragging. As long as you avoid caring for yourself, you can’t care for others. Celebrating is self-care, which could easily extend to others.

●     Perfectionism. I look deeper into this in section 7. Here, you focus too much on minute details and forget the bigger picture. In other words, you might take the progress you are making out of context. Furthermore, looking at minute details might often bring up minor issues that are unnecessary for the achievement of whatever goals you are after.

Those are the five reasons that I believe block most people from celebrating. Being aware of them is the first step towards changing them. Let’s now add the benefits of celebrating so that you know what you can enjoy if you celebrated more. But before we do, let me clarify what I mean by a win.

To many, winning means achieving something tangible. I believe that that’s one big reason we live disconcerting lives. If you recall, Earl Nightingale defined success as the progressive realisation of a worthy ideal. One of the keywords in this definition of success is ‘progressive’. To me, a little progress in the direction of your goals is an achievement and deserves to be celebrated. However, you cannot celebrate every little win because you will spend more time celebrating than pursuing your worthy goals. I would like for you to consider success as any successful move you make as you journey towards your goal. It’s up to you to decide when to celebrate, but each win can be celebrated. Now, let’s turn our attention to the benefits of celebrating these wins.

Six Benefits of Celebrating Your Wins

One of the reasons you may not be enjoying life is that you are not yet aware of the benefits you get from celebrating your wins.

I would like to offer you six benefits of celebrating that may change your life.

It Boosts Self-Confidence

Life is filled with a myriad of challenges. It is easy to focus a lot of our time navigating through and around these problems. The problem is you can easily feel less capable. What you focus on expands. This means that what you spend your time focusing on becomes bigger. So, focusing on problems tends to bring more of them, and your confidence takes a knock.

What about if you focus on your wins? Suddenly, you start feeling more confident because you realise that you are doing some things right. With a high level of confidence, you can take on more challenging tasks.

Take time today to write a list of 20 or more small wins you’ve had recently. Transfer each win to a dedicated five-by-five card, fold it, and throw it in a bowl. The following morning during your personal time, take out one of the cards and celebrate the success written on it. It doesn’t have to be a party with cake and champagne. All you have to do is recognise that you are doing some things well in your life.

It Can Help You Stay on Your Purpose

Celebrating wins encourages you to check what matters most in your life. Doing so often will help you weed out the habit of achieving the wrong things. It will supplement the Time Leadership Time process you’ve adopted. Celebrating your wins pushes you to reflect, and this is important in living a purposeful life.

It Can Be an Opportunity to Inspire Others

How many people do you know who live desperate lives? These people lack the inspiration to go after what matters most in their lives. Wouldn’t it be great if you could inspire some of these people to follow your example?

Celebrating wins might just be what you need to inspire these people. When you celebrate, others take notice, especially if you publicise your wins. This may encourage them to reflect on their own successes and realise that they are also good. In turn, this may boost their self-confidence. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone was confident and knew they could achieve what they wished?

It Can Help You Feel Good

When you celebrate, the brain releases chemicals such as oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin. These hormones help you feel good. As a result, you stay a positive individual with less stress and anxiety. Furthermore, you may become a more focused, innovative, and motivated person. That would be great, wouldn’t it?

It May Enhance Your Performance at Work

The act of identifying wins helps you discover how good of an employee or entrepreneur you may be. Sharing these good things with your boss or customers could be impactful in that they may realise the value you are adding to their lives.

Therefore, you might find it easier to persuade your boss when you ask for a raise. In business, your target clients might buy more from you because they sense the opportunity for transformation, real transformation.

It Can Be a Way to Recognise People Who Help You Succeed

Have you ever watched the Emmys or Oscars either live or on television? Surely, you have heard winners thanking a whole list of people who helped them be where they are. How do you think this makes these people feel? Great, right?

I recently bumped into a wrestling award event that was celebrating women wrestlers. I stood in front of the television and watched for a few minutes. The lady who was speaking went through a list of people who helped her become a professional wrestler. Towards the end, she mentioned the support she got from her husband. The TV camera switched to the husband as the lady mentioned his name. Suddenly, I saw his eyes water with tears of joy. I thought to myself, this is wonderful. And I say to you, the people you recognise will feel so good they’ll count you among their life-long friends.

So, celebrate your wins no matter how small they are. These small wins build up to big wins. Let’s now turn our attention to how we can build new habits, something we’ll need to do to move from unhappy to happier people living their purposes.

Section 7: Formation of New Habits

It is typical that when you set new goals, you don’t know how to achieve them. By this, I mean that you often set goals that you have never achieved before. This makes sense because goals aren’t meant for achievement but development. At the core, growth means the formation of new, better habits. Growth is about becoming a new person in one or more areas of your life.

Suppose you have all that you’ve been working for. This means that you have the things you were eager to have such as money, a business to die for, or a great position at work. Of course, you worked hard to have all those things. Yet, you are not as happy as you thought you would be.

To make a correction, you have discovered your purpose, identified areas where you need to grow, and set goals. Now, how do you make all those goals a reality? How do you make TLT a habit? I can easily tell you that you should act according to the plan you have set. However, how many people act on plans that they set? If you ask me, there are few people who do. Why is that?

The answer is that your habits are not yet synchronous with your new goals or decisions. A habit is a behaviour that you perform daily without consciously thinking about it. Your current habits may not be the right ones to take you towards your new goals. Unless you change or replace those habits, you’ll be unlikely to nail your goals and live according to your purpose. Habits are the commanding factors of our lives; you have to change your habits. This means that you should change the way you see the world, the way you see yourself, and the way you think.

Our behaviours are influenced by people around us such as our parents, family, friends, teachers, and pastors. Unless we break the old behaviours that are stopping us from being where we want to be, nothing is going to change. Time leadership skills are learned and can also be unlearned. Most of us fail to achieve our goals because we’re conditioned with the wrong habits. We haven’t developed self-awareness. To nail all your goals, you have to make time leadership a habit. Here are some of the habits that may block you from practicing time leadership.

Perfectionism: The Habit of Perfection

Most people wait for things to be perfect, for all the ducks to line up in a row. Unfortunately, they rarely do. This is a way these people avoid doing what needs to be done. It’s a way of procrastinating. For example, you could spend too much time doing unnecessary research, improving, or polishing. This can easily take time away from projects or work that must be completed. In the end, you do shoddy work because of a lack of time for these other projects.

No one is ever perfect. You start small and usually make a lot of mistakes. That’s fine. It is from these early mistakes where you can improve. So, you should avoid the habit of perfectionism. This is the reason why you don’t have time for anything but your work. You are a workaholic because you always try to achieve perfection. Yes, it is commendable to raise your standards, but they should be reasonable. Because you may be trying to be perfect, you may not achieve the kind of results that you want.

Perfectionism can cost you quality time with your loved ones. What’s worse is that it can negatively affect your relationship with your wife, children, and relatives. This is because you may be busy every day of your life and come home late because of working late. Don’t you think that is too much? Where do you think all those people, especially your spouse and kids, will get love from?

Perfectionists, when they fail to produce the desired outcomes, become frustrated and stressed. This stress is often caused by sleepless nights and not giving the brain the rest it needs. As a result, they may experience serious health problems. In other words, perfectionism can cost you your well-being. No one is perfect; each person has to learn. Long hours of work take more of your time and may make you fail to meet your standards, which will stress you out. Many people are not happy in their life because they focus more on the outcomes. You should remember that “Done is better than perfect.” This applies perfectly to time leadership.

We have a tendency to impress others. Yet, they are, just like you and me, prone to making mistakes. Why, then, do you try to be perfect? How will you grow into the person you want if you approach things with perfection in mind? I am not saying that you shouldn’t do the best you can when engaged in an activity. That’s far from it.

You may have identified your purpose and set goals, but your habit of perfection may be your undoing. Think of a perfectionist leader. By the way, all of us are leaders because we lead ourselves whether we are aware of it or not. A leader who has the habit of perfectionism will likely subject their followers to intense pressure. The followers will want to deliver perfect results each time they have a task to accomplish. This may lead to slow or low productivity and likely result in frustration and tension.

Perfectionism is an unproductive habit that holds people back. Before you can change this habit, you need to know you have it. Once you do, follow the habit change process explained below.

The Habit of Not Listening to Others

I cannot begin to estimate the number of people with the habit of not listening to others. Perfectionists have this habit to a higher degree than most other people. They often prefer to rely solely on their ideas and rarely take advice. Sadly, this may drive people away because they feel unappreciated. For example, your work colleagues or even your children may see you as selfish. You may not know that you have this problem because, like all habits, it happens automatically and at an unconscious level.

You need to recognise that we all need others for a good reason. Human beings are social. We depend on others for many things such as security and survival. Take a moment and look around you right now. Name several objects or things that you notice. In my case, I see pens, books, a cabinet, a laptop, a desk, a phone, and a computer speaker. Now, let me ask you an eye-opening question. How many of those objects did you make yourself? If you are like me, none. This means that other people made them. So, I need other people, and my guess is that you do too. We need to listen to others so that we can serve them better. When we give them what they want, they’ll give us what we want. Isn’t that how life is supposed to be?

Listening to other people can help you grow. You get new ideas and new perspectives. For example, if you are a leader in the workplace, your employees or your followers are comfortable around you. They likely do better work, and their productivity will increase. When someone under your leadership comes to you with an idea, take time to listen to them. However, do it when your daily program permits. You may have to schedule a session with the person who wants to share with you.

The Habit of Being Busy

The habit of being busy should be a thing of the past if you identify your purpose, discover what areas of growth to focus on, set goals, and lead your time. However, I still should say what follows to reinforce what this book has already covered.

The problem with people who are always busy is that they barely stop and ask themselves why they are busy. They are often unclear about the reasons they don’t seem to have time to rest and relax. Yet, their productivity isn’t as good as they would want.

Busyness or the habit of busyness can make us subordinate the important to the unimportant. Some people will tell you that they want to take care of their families, yet they are always at work. They never take time out to be with their spouse and children. They give an excuse that they want money to be able to pay the bills.

I remember one day I was talking with someone about the fact that I love work and often left early and came home late. Without a moment’s hesitation, she said to me, “Ben, you should remember that you are a human being, not a human doing.” I have since kept that thought in my mind. It played a role in the development of time leadership.

The solution to annihilate this bad habit is covered earlier in the book.

What a Habit Is and How It Forms

A habit is a routine of behaviour that you perform regularly without conscious thought. All the things that you do daily without your conscious awareness such as making breakfast, brushing your teeth, and brewing a cup of tea are examples of habits. Your habits originate from the past. Some of the teachings we received have shaped our lives today. These teachings came from many sources such as our parents, friends, teachers, and work colleagues.

Habits can shape your life for better or worse depending on their type. Unless you make a change, nothing will change. Some of the teachings we received at a young age seemed right, but somehow, they were limiting. They diminish our chances of becoming great.

How do habits form? That’s an excellent question, and I’ll explain in a general way how this happens. You see, we’re born with a conscious and subconscious mind. These are not two minds, but phases of the mind. We do things consciously when planning a trip and subconsciously when putting food into the mouth. You can do the latter task in the dark as long as the food is in your hands. Let me briefly explain each of these phases of the mind.

The conscious mind is your thinking mind. You use it to reason and make decisions. This phase of the mind connects with your five senses. When a stimulus enters one of your senses, it gets transported to the conscious mind for interpretation. Then, you decide to act in a certain way. The process occurs quickly, and you may not even realise that you’ve made a decision. Every thought you repeatedly expose yourself to eventually sinks into the subconscious mind. The mind figures the idea must be important enough for it to be acted on automatically and pushes it to the relevant department. When people say you should be open-minded, they mean that you should allow ideas to pass to the subconscious mind.

In contrast, the subconscious mind is the phase of the mind that does not think. It only accepts. We say it is deductive. In other words, it assumes that everything that reaches it is important. Once an idea sinks into the subconscious mind, you act on it automatically. You only have to decide what to do and it gets done. Your subconscious mind is the powerhouse that holds all your wants, memories, and emotions. It controls every aspect of your life. Your subconscious mind is the storehouse of your habits.

Someone, such as the teachers I mentioned earlier, repeatedly planted ideas in your subconscious mind. Whatever arrives at the subconscious will be expressed through some action. The ideas become your deep-rooted beliefs. Joseph Murphy, author of The Power of the Subconscious Mind, once said, “Whatever is impressed into the subconscious mind is expressed.” For habits to become habitual, there must be a repetition of the action for it to become automatic. Write out that idea on a piece of paper and save it somewhere. It is the most important thought you can ever have on changing habits.

The subconscious mind controls most of the decisions we make daily. For example, you walked away from the fight, you blew on your hot tea before drinking, you put your hand or elbow on your mouth when coughing, and you did each of these automatically. Unfortunately, not all subconscious habits are good. If you are always late for work, the action eventually becomes a habit. Thus, you begin to do it automatically. One negative habit I often discover in many people is that they see themselves as worthless or as less than others. They wait for other people’s approval before they do something worthwhile. That’s why many of them procrastinate.

Creating a new habit follows a sequence of steps. Before I share with you these steps, let me tell you a story. I want you to pick out, if you can, what you need to do to form a new habit that takes you to your goals.

How Roger Bannister Broke the Four-Minute Mile Barrier

Sir Roger Bannister was a British middle athlete who was the first person to complete a mile in under four minutes. After having failed to do so in the 1952 Olympics, he took two months to decide whether to continue or quit running. Finally, he decided to keep going. But there was one difference between his next event and the previous ones. He set a goal, and the objective was to become the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes.

The next important thing he did was to devise a plan to achieve the goal. He knew that the only way to achieve the goal was to intensify his training. Importantly, he followed through with this plan and divided the four miles into intervals following what today is called interval training. On 2 May 1953, he attempted the British record, but he was out-paced by Chris Chataway. Still, he ran 4:03.6, breaking the record set in 1945. He said afterwards, “This race made me realise that a four-minute mile was not out of reach.”

The major historic event took place on 6 May 1954, and over 3,000 people watched. It wasn’t a perfect day to attempt such a feat because the weather was bad. The wind blew at about 25 miles per hour before the event commenced. Bannister had initially made it clear to himself that he preferred to not run. He wanted to preserve his energy for a possible future attempt. In other words, Bannister had thought that he wouldn’t nail his goal.

Fortunately, the wind speed dropped before the event took place. As expected, the race took place, and Bannister ran. Among the runners was the future Commonwealth Games medallist Christopher Chataway and Chris Basher, the future Olympic Games gold medallist. Harold Abrahams, the 1924 Olympic 100-metre champion, commented live on the event on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio.

The race commenced at 6:00 p.m., and Brasher and Bannister immediately led the rest of the participants. Brasher headed both the first lap in 58 seconds and the half-mile in 1:58 with Bannister tucked in behind Chataway, a step behind Basher. Chataway moved to the front after the second lap and upheld the pace with a 3:01 split at the final lap bell. Chataway continued to lead around the front turn until Bannister began his final kick with about 275 yards to go. He ran the last lap in just under 59 seconds. The stadium announcer Norris McWhirter teased the crowd by delaying his announcement for the winner as long as possible.

When he finally began to announce the results, the crowd made so much noise it blocked out the rest of the announcement. Bannister’s record was 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. This was the new record set in nine years. Astonishingly, in just 46 days, John Landy broke Bannister’s record in Turku, Finland, with a time of 3 minutes and 57.9 seconds, which was rounded to 3 minutes 58.0 seconds.

This story tells us that before Bannister won the race, people never believed that a person could run a mile in under four minutes. What did Bannister do? Wasn’t he a human being like the rest of us? Of course, he was. However, he differed from other athletes in that he thought differently. He had a dream and turned it into a goal for himself, which was to be the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. Bannister believed and knew he would do it.

This story not only made other athletes believe in the ‘impossible’, but it encouraged ordinary people to believe the extraordinary could be achieved. So, what’s the lesson for you and me?

For an individual to change their habit, they have to first change their inner beliefs. Habits change only when the underlying beliefs shift. Evidence of the need for new beliefs comes from Bannister who said after the 6 May 1953 competition, “This made me realise that a four-minute mile is not out of reach.”

This tells us that Bannister believed in himself, something that you must do if you want to become a time leader. He believed he could do it. So, he challenged his deeply-held beliefs and broke them. It is this conditioning that prevents most people from achieving their goals. Unless you shatter this programming, the chances of nailing all your cherished goals are remote.

Most importantly, Bannister not only set a goal, but he also made a plan to achieve it. That’s important because no action means no results. By achieving his desired outcome, he showed others that it could be done. Some of the athletes changed their beliefs, and they went on to break and set new records. It is now routine to run a mile in less than four minutes.

Now, let’s talk about the steps to form a new habit.

Decide What You Really Want

You have already set goals for the coming three, six, and twelve months. These goals represent what you want to achieve so that you can live your purpose. If you haven’t done so yet, I urge you to do so before proceeding with the formation of new habits. Otherwise, this part of the book won’t add value. Remember that your goal should represent the pain you are leaving behind and the pleasure you’re going to get when you attain it. Attaching these two emotions to your goal provides the urgency that you need to complete the next step successfully.

Create a Plan to Achieve the Goal

When you set a goal, watch what happens in your mind. Your mind either tells you that it can’t be done, or it may start giving you ideas on how to achieve it. The latter happens if you set a goal that you want to achieve.

At any rate, even if you don’t get ideas on how to achieve your goal, there is a way to get them. Ask yourself, “What can I do to achieve this goal?” That question is open-ended and encourages your mind to search for answers. When ideas come through, write them down. Soon, you’ll discover at least one thing that you can do now to realise your goal.

Once you know what you should do, write down the steps necessary to complete the plan daily. Then, do what you plan. Importantly, as we said in the section on Time Leadership Time, you need to reflect on your plans. As you do so, you’ll keep your focus on the things that you should do to achieve your goals and the necessary growth in the areas of your life. Another important step in building a new habit is to strengthen them. Here’s how.

Reinforce the New Habit

You may change your habits successfully, but there is a chance that they might not stick. To ensure your new habit becomes automatic, you must reinforce it. How do you do this? The answer: Reward yourself each time you complete an activity that takes you towards it. If you want to wake up at 5:00 a.m., and you succeed at doing it, pat yourself on the back. Perhaps you might even consider taking yourself out for lunch.

Not everyone enjoys positive reinforcement. If you are one of those people, you may consider negative reinforcement. That is, you punish yourself for doing anything contrary to what you should do. For example, you may want to reduce the amount of sugar you consume daily to control your weight. If you happen to crave more sugar and consume it, you could punish yourself by skipping lunch or something. In the final analysis, negative reinforcement isn’t about punishing yourself but encouraging positive habit-formation.

Conclusion

Sometimes, we need to be reminded of the important things that we learn in life. The latest thing you’ve learned about in this book is Time Leadership Time, which is a way for you to take over your life and time and lead them. In fact, leading your time is synonymous with leading your life. That’s why you had to begin by discovering your life purpose. From here on out, you will take the reins of your life and be the driver.

Once in a while, we need reminding about what matters in life. This is what this section of the book is about. It reminds you of the important ideas and thoughts you captured as you were reading this book.

In section 1, you discovered that there is no enjoyment until you discover and live a purposeful life. Society might have conditioned us to subordinate our purposes to survival, but each of us has the ability to turn this around and lead life from purpose. Discovering your purpose requires tools such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, DiSC personality test, and the Passion Test. Use them to identify your strengths, weaknesses, and passions. From these tests, write down your purpose statement. It is this that will help you sort the important from the unimportant things in life.

The human life has several areas that need constant attention. Unless you grow in each of these, life could still be hard even if you have discovered your purpose. For example, you need to stay healthy, or else you just can’t do the things required to live a purposeful life. Section 2 explained four of the growth areas you should pay attention to, health, finances, relationships, and career. Most importantly, realise that each area affects the others. At the base of all these areas lies personal development. Unless you read and study, you can’t grow.

In section 3, the book focused on setting goals. You can know your purpose and growth areas, but acting on them requires you to set goals. Importantly, do this by following the be, do, and have mindset. If you turn this formula around, you’ll be asking for perpetual suffering even if you have an abundance of material things. Follow the SMART way of setting goals. That is, set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based goals. However, make sure that the goals are difficult to ensure that you grow.

We began the practical side of the Time Leadership Time process by identifying the roles you play in life. Each goal from section 3 will relate to some role you play in life. Make sure that you have no role without a goal. If you do have such a role, get rid of it because it may be out of your purposeful life. Identify the activities that you should do daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly, and annually. These must be entered in your diary or whatever system you choose such as Outlook Calendar. Importantly, the time-leading system requires you to create a weekly schedule of activities that enables you to live a life of purpose daily. The heart of this system is the Time Leadership Time (TLT) slots. These times set up your days, weeks, and months.

The next critical part of the system we discussed was the Time Leadership Time itself. This is the most important activity in your schedule. That 2% of your total annual time can dramatically change your life. That’s the power of TLT. We covered this idea in section 5.

In section 6, the focus shifted to celebrating wins, big or small. Sometimes, we work so hard that we forget to stop, reflect, and enjoy what we achieve. Celebrating is a way to boost your self-confidence. Importantly, this activity can be inspiring for others and help them live lives of purpose as well.

Finally, we talked about the formation of new habits in section 7. This system is new to you. It will require you to install new habits like planning your days, weeks, and months. Unless this becomes a habit, you may give up before you realise the benefits the system offers. Importantly, reinforce the TLT sessions by rewarding yourself each time you do them.

The TLT approach is valuable in my life because it allows me to live a life with purpose and avoid getting stuck in minor things. I know that if you implement it in your life, you’ll enjoy spending time on this wonderful planet. Don’t forget to visit our website to obtain the resources to assist you in implementing the TLT system.

References

British Heart Foundation. (n.d.). Facts and figures. British Heart Foundation. https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/contact-the-press-office/facts-and-figures

Diabetes UK (n.d.). Diabetes prevalence 2019. Diabetes UK. https://www.diabetes.org.uk/professionals/position-statements-reports/statistics/diabetes-prevalence-2019

Gallup. (2017, November 29). Finding your purpose, finding your “fit.” Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/249986/finding-purpose-finding-fit.aspx

Kiysaki, R. T., & Lechter, S. (1998). Rich dad, poor dad. (p. 237). Warner Books.

Luther, W. J. (2020, June 10). How the Federal Reserve literally makes money. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/how-the-federal-reserve-literally-makes-money-140305

Latham, G. P., & Locke, E. A. (1991). Self-regulation through goal setting. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 212–247. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90021-k

Nightingale-Conant. (2009). The progressive realization of a worthy goal. Nightingale-Conant. https://www.nightingale.com/newsletters/356

Stanford University. (2017, June 12). Text of Steve Jobs’ Commencement address (2005). Stanford News; Stanford University. https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/

The Money Charity. (n.d.). The money statistics February 2021. The Money Charity. https://themoneycharity.org.uk/money-statistics/‌

‌