In my recent blog posts, I’ve offered you a good bit of advice for your consulting business. Some of it has been short-term advice, such as what three questions you need to answer before you start designing your website and the right sequence of steps to follow when developing the site.
In one post, I offered a long-term strategy disguised as a short-term strategy—that to be successful in the long-term, you needed to stay laser-focused on being completely present with the task at hand, that you need to realize that the most important person in your business life is always the person right in front of you, and that your job is to do the most good for that person as you can in the time you have with him. Do this, I said (and still say), and you’ll succeed in the long-term, because word will get around that you work hard to help the people who hire you.
In this blog post, I’m going to offer some more advice for your long-term success—this time, in the form of one of my favorite life mottoes.
Intensity, Consistency, Patience
A motto I try to live by is “intensity, consistency, patience.” Over many years, including many successes and failures in a variety of endeavors, I have found this to be great advice.
To succeed at anything you need to (1) bring full focus and energy to whatever task you’re doing (intensity); (2) you need to do this every day over an extended period of time (consistency); and (3) you need to breathe and try not to stress if you don’t get immediate results (patience). I’ve found that, if you apply this mantra to any major undertaking in your life, you’ll very likely succeed in the long run.
Here’s a simple, non-business example. I try my best to stay in good shape physically, so I go to the gym pretty much every day (consistency) and I try to bring my full focus to bear upon the day’s exercises and push myself as much as I can (intensity). Additionally, I keep an exercise log so that, whenever I feel like I’m not progressing as well as I’d like, I can turn a few pages back in my log and see where I was a few months in the past. This invariably makes me feel better and shows me that I just need to continue on the path I’ve set and have patience. Any good physical trainer will tell you that key to getting and staying in shape is intensity, consistency, and patience.
My Mantra and Your Business
So, what does this mean for your business? Simple. It means that if you show up every day to work on some aspect of your business (consistency) and you put in a number of hours each day with good focus on whatever task needs doing (intensity), you will eventually reach your goals if you have patience and don’t give up.
Now, that’s simple to explain, but not always so easy to do. Some people start a new business going strong, but eventually lose their momentum and quit, never achieving success. Sometimes this is because they chose a business because they thought they’d make money at it instead of choosing a business they were passionate about, and then, when the money didn’t flow immediately, they were ready to quit.
But sometimes it’s because they didn’t apply one or more of these three key practices. Maybe they showed up for work every day but spent half their time daydreaming or piddling around online instead of buckling down to work (the consistency was there, but the intensity was lacking).
Maybe they worked hard for a few days, or even weeks, straight, but then took a few days off to “recharge their batteries,” and those few days became a week or more (the intensity was there for a while, but the consistency was lacking).
Maybe they worked hard at it every day for a few months or even longer, but eventually gave up because they didn’t think they were getting anywhere, when if they had just stuck with it a little longer, they might have broken through (consistency and intensity were there, but they didn’t have the patience for the long haul).
Sometimes You Need Help
I realize that, for educational consultants running their own independent businesses, it can be a challenge to apply the intensity, consistency, patience formula. There are so many things to do—from typical office chores such as printing, filing, record keeping, etc. to the “big things” such as writing a book or developing a keynote talk—that a consultant might find herself saying, “I show up for work every day, and I work hard with good focus every day, and I’m trying my best to remain patient, but the reality is I’m only one person, and I can’t do it all.”
Sometimes that’s true, and it’s a lesson I learned the hard way. A few years back, I decided that I needed to take some time to focus more on my writing. But I couldn’t write the number of hours a day I needed to and still do everything else I had been doing in my business, so I let my presentations business slide. Two years later, I had written several e-books that I was proud of, but I found that many of my contacts for my presenting had dried up in the meantime, and I’ve been playing catch-up trying to establish new contacts ever since.
So, what’s a crazy-busy consultant supposed to do? When you can’t do it all, you need to make some decisions about how best to spend your time. I suggest that you first make two lists. On one list, write down all the tasks you need to do in your business, listing them in order from those that you enjoy doing the most all the way down to those you hate doing. On the second list, take all of the same tasks from your first list, and re-order them from those that you absolutely need to do yourself all the way down to those that you’d be happy for someone else to do for you.
Take a look at your two lists. The first thing you need to do is to identify your “wheelhouse”–those tasks that you both thoroughly enjoy doing in your business and feel like you need to be the one doing them. Those are easy. Then you’ll have some items that you don’t really like doing, but you feel that you’re the one who needs to do them. Unfortunately, you’ll probably have to keep doing those.
Now, take a look at what’s left. There are two types of activities remaining: (1) those you enjoy doing but don’t necessarily have to do yourself, and (2) those you don’t enjoy doing and don’t have to do yourself. You might decide to keep doing some on the enjoyable things in your business that you don’t really have to do yourself–that’s your call. You could free up some time in your business for more important tasks by delegating some of these, but it’s perfectly fine to do something just because you enjoy it.
But when you look at the other category (don’t like to do, don’t have to be the one doing them), do you see some possibilities for off-loading some tasks?
For example, if keeping up with non-crucial e-mail correspondence and electronic filing of documents are on your “don’t enjoy and someone else could do” list, could you look into hiring a virtual assistant to take these tasks off your plate? If revising your web copy or creating a marketing campaign for your new book are too time-consuming or outside of your skill set, could you hire someone to do these tasks for you? The more “don’t enjoy/don’t have to be done by me” tasks you can shift to someone else, the more time you free up. This allows you to bring the “intensity, consistency, patience” mantra to bear on the more enjoyable tasks only you can do.
You’ve probably heard that saying, “Work smarter, not harder.” Well, the truth is, to make it today as an independent educational consultant, you have to work both smart (making good decisions about how to spend your time) and hard (applying the intensity, consistency, patience formula). And if you do both, you have a very good chance to succeed.
