The Power to Get Things Done
How often do you hit a slump in productivity? Worse, how often do you know what you should be doing, but then fail to do it regardless? It happens to the best of us, but the good news is that this is entirely avoidable.
Steve Levinson, PhD, and Chris Cooper recently released a book titled The Power to Get Things Done, and in it, they tackle how to turn your good intentions into actions and ultimately results.
This is one of those books that I stand behind, because I really believe that strong businesspeople can benefit from the tools to help follow through. As I said in my foreword for the book, the ability to turn good intentions into action is one of the most valuable assets that anyone who is serious about achieving their goals can have.
For me, the most impactful tips of the book are the keys to maintaining follow-through mastery. Everyone has done it at least once – you work hard to perfect your ability with something, you reach a level where you are satisfied, and then immediately stop practicing because you reached what you saw as the pinnacle. The thing with skills, though, is that you lose your ability when you stop practicing, or striving for better. What this book teaches is to always have goals in mind, and to always strive for your goals – both valuable suggestions to all business professionals.
The Power to Get Things Done was recently released and is available on Kindle or in paperback.
What goals do you consistently set for yourself to help keep your productivity up? Share with me in the comments below!
Thank you so much Ivan (and Eden) for so kindly reviewing our book and sharing it with your wonderful network.
Ivan, I will never forget our first inspiring Skype conversation. While discussing our book idea, you gave me great confidence that we were on the right track. This was when you explained that, based on your research, the ability to get things done was probably the key difference between highly successful people and less successful people. Given your extraordinary success with BNI and your literary work, I can’t tell you how great an honour it was that you offered to write the foreword for The Power to Get Things Done (Whether You Feels Like It or Not).
One of the most important lessons I learned while running a small business is that I need to create strategies to ensure that my team and I would actually follow through on whatever we intended to do.
I left a corporate career and a first successful small business venture with partners because I wanted more freedom. I had become tired of line managers, appraisals and tough board meetings. (Sound familiar?) Yet after two years of struggling to run my own business, I had a painful realization: Some of the things I had hated the most had also helped me be productive! As annoying as they were, they simply forced me to get things done whether I felt like it or not. And now that I was on my own without those same influences in place, I was really struggling to do the less enjoyable things I knew I should be doing. With help from my co-author and follow through specialist Steve Levinson, I concluded that continuing to rely on willpower alone was not going to cut it. I needed to build strategies into my small business that made me actually feel like I had to follow through. Once I did this, everything changed. Success I had visioned started coming my way, and the idea of this book was born.
I’m convinced that the principles and strategies we lay out in our book will help readers get more things done (whether they feel like it or not). I hope that ‘The Power to Get Things Done’ will enable many members of the BNI network to turn their good intentions into success-producing action. Thank you to all those who have kindly read and shared this blog post.
Chris Cooper co-author ‘The Power to Get Things Done (Whether You Feel Like It or Not)’
Once one has reached that pinnacle point it is even more precious to have those relationships and that power team momentum… And to talk about continuously inspiring the team. I found that talking about possibly picking up one’s feet and coasting is helpful to point out that interrupting the pattern s not useful yet can happen and to take notice of it and keep moving. I am reminded of the cartoon about the duck who seems to be gliding along smoothly on a calm surface – yet underneath those duck feet are paddling like mad… That can be the power of getting things done…