Recommended Reading: September 2020

At PFD, we believe that continuing to grow and learn is paramount to being able to thrive as a leader. Continuing with our commitment to our business community to provide resources with best practices, for our September Reading List, we recommend these three books: Right Away & All at Once by Greg Brenneman, Personality Isn't Permanent by Benjamin Hardy PhD, and Procrastinate on Purpose by Rory Vaden. These books vary in subject matter, but they all have insights on how you can create the best version of yourself, which will liberate you to more effectively and meaningfully lead your business. 

Right Away & All at Once: Five Steps to Transform Your Business and Enrich Your Life - Greg Brenneman

At PFD, we believe that our businesses should support the lives that we want to live and the impact that we want to make on the world.

Greg Brenneman couldn’t agree more.

In this book, Brenneman writes on techniques that you can do to BOTH grow your business, AND live a rich, purposeful life. He takes his learnings from turning around growing many successful businesses, including Burger King and Continental airlines, to provide a clear roadmap on how to achieve business and personal success. Those steps include:

• Preparing a succinct “Go Forward” plan

• Building a fortress balance sheet

• Growing your sales and profits

• Choosing all-star servant leaders

• Empowering your team
   

  We found Brenneman’s holistic, proven approach to be a practical guide for any leader that has a higher calling for their business and life.

Personality Isn't Permanent: Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story - Benjamin Hardy

In this book, Dr. Benjamin Hardy uses his psychological expertise and research to completely redefine how we think about personality. He dismantles the idea that we have one “true” personality waiting to be discovered, and instead offers a more empowering, action-oriented approach. Personality, as offered by Hardy, is a result of how we can intentionally create our desired selves and achieve amazing goals

He offers science-based advice to for personal reflection, like how to design your current identity based on your desired future self, and how to become confident enough to define your own lives purpose.

At PFD, we believe that as leaders, when we are clear about the future we want to create for ourselves and others, we are then able to take the steps to live into that future. When we define what we want to create, who we want around us, and how we can be resilient in the face of uncertainty, we grow into the person we desire to be. We are actors in our own lives, and we think this book is an empowering and practical look at how we can strategically create the future we want for ourselves.
     

Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time - Rory Vaden

We all have the same 168 hours in the week, Great leaders are able to use that time more effectively. In this book, Rory Vaden has shared his wisdom and actionable tips to multiply the time we have available.

Vaden creates a simple guide to set us free to do our best work, and overcome stalled productivity. This approach takes into account the emotional aspect of productivity and it gives us a clear path forward. Vaden’s model gives us five simple permissions so we can stop wasting time and energy and engage in our most worthwhile work:

   •  Eliminate
   •  Automate
   •  Delegate
   •  Consolidate
   •  Procrastinate (yes, you heard that right)

We at PFD recommend this to our readers to multiply our time so we can focus on doing meaningful work.

Resting and Recharging: How Leaders Can Most Effectively Influence Their Time and Energy

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE REST AND RECHARGE TOOL

Transcript:

We've all been through a lot during Covid-19, including some incredible challenges and amazing opportunities. One thing that I found during this global pandemic is that it has almost been like a cleanse in many ways.  The pandemic has brought a lot of things to the surface that previously may have been hidden. One of those things is a fundamental law: as entrepreneurs and leaders who are creating exciting futures for ourselves, our team, our clients, our families, and our friends, there's truly only two things in our lives that are finite.

The only two things in our life are our time and our energy. 

Everything else we can make more of. And so, during this time of great uncertainty and unprecedented opportunity, how we take care of ourselves, both physically and mentally, are obviously paramount. This self-care really centers in many ways around our time and our energy, which are two of our greatest and yet most limited resources. 

Starting with focusing on recharging, we are making sure that, as great leaders, we are scheduling downtime - fully away from work. We should be spending this time either alone or with the people we love, like friends with family members. It is so important that we schedule our recharge time first. That can look like making sure that every month we take a long weekend,  every quarter we're taking as close to a week off as we can. Taking that time off is not only critical for us as great leaders to recharge, but it also provides a window for our teams to step up and take on new responsibilities. With this time that you are not in the office, your teams will have a better sense of whatever processes are working and what ones really aren't fully developed yet.  

There's no more important time to have a tool to help us to rest, recharge, and focus on those things that truly matter to us. 

As you look at this PFD resting and recharging tool, please take the time to schedule these activities that recharge you. When you do take that time to do these activities, give yourself the gift of being fully present with whatever you choose to do. For example, don't bring technology that's going to distract you into these super critical times. 

There’s an example I would like to share: when I am teaching someone to fly an airplane, we talk about the notion of “the Power Curve”. Typically, many student pilots, as they’re learning to fly an airplane, get behind “The Power Curve”. They get too slow on Final Approach - they have too much drag out with flaps and the landing gear. The engines in the small airplanes can’t overcome that.  The only way to recover: to lower the nose and gain airspeed if you’re getting too low. I think that is the perfect analogy for many of us as leaders. With Covid-19, we've been working almost non-stop and we've allowed our batteries to get too low. The only way to recover is to recharge -  it's to slow down and to intentionally push that nose forward. That is the way to not only take care of ourselves, so we can not only enjoy the journey, but to truly make the impact to which we are committed.