Personal Leveraging Engine

Read an interesting article by Nancy Fox, author of the Sixty-Second coach. She writes how most of us under-leverage our resources and contacts to help us with our business opportunities. I think that the key is to do personal due diligience. We do our due diligence whenever we do a deal, and sometimes we close the deal and sometimes we walk away. Why don't we do this for our most crucial and critical personal opportunities?

Here are Nancy Fox's five top tips for revving up your personal Leveraging Engine:

-Shift your thinking.

Your results are not going to improve dramatically with only better time management, working more hours, or longer to-do lists. Once you embrace the perspective that all around you are resources to be leveraged, what blind spots are uncovered? What processes can you simplify or even eliminate? What relationships are waiting to be tapped to assist you in producing the results you desire?

-Make a list of your resources and review them once each month.

Spend at least one hour each month reviewing your resources. Brainstorm with other colleagues on this topic so that you speed up uncovering the blind spots.

Here are some examples of commonly under-leveraged resources:

Your computer (go beyond how you are currently leveraging your computer)
Your hobbies
Your special interests
Your unique areas of knowledge
Your talents (you have more than you acknowledge)
Your service providers, vendors, etc.
Your local college
A current project
Your colleagues
The person to whom you report
The people that report to you
Your entire contact base
Their contact bases
Your brand
Your coach

Keep adding to this list.

-Make one unreasonable request each week.

Very often, we don’t leverage others’ desire to be of assistance. We often give ourselves reasons why we can’t ask for something. However, most people do want to be of service. When you leverage this opportunity, you give the other person a chance to make a difference and be generous. You gain the experience of being powerful and not being stopped by “reasons.”

-Interview people whom you admire and who have accomplished the kind of results you would like to.

Leverage the knowledge and experience of others who have attained what you would like to accomplish. How have they done it? What mistakes did they make? What worked well? Often, people enjoy sharing their history and their path to success, as well as the pitfalls they wished they had avoided.

-Put an implementation program in place regularly.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Without implementation, most good ideas evaporate into thin air. Put a regular process in place weekly where you ask yourself:

What are the biggest challenges I am facing right now?
What am I not leveraging now that I could be leveraging? (What are my blind spots around this?)
What new results would that produce?
Write down your answers. (Writing them down gives them a concrete reality in your brain.)