How Do You Get a Business Day on Track?

How to Get a Business Day on Track

What does a regular day look like for you? Is it chaos, or do your business days generally run smoothly?

Why Keep a Day ‘On Track’?

To meet milestones, performance targets, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), we need to keep both people and events aligned. At the end of each day, reflecting on the initial expectations versus the outcomes, we might wonder, “Why did everything go off track?”

Signs of Derailment

The signs are often there, yet we might:

Not notice them at the time.
Notice them but hope the issues will resolve themselves.
Dismiss them as someone else’s problem.

Leadership Responsibility

To be a competent and effective leader, recognize that everything under your watch is your responsibility. What you permit, allow, ignore, or fail to hold accountable shapes the organization. Leaders set standards and accountability or drift until crises force a reassessment.

Causing Positive Change Daily

How we set up our days can significantly influence their effectiveness. Beyond vision, strategy, and process, what’s often missing from traditional business training is the leader’s personal intentions:

Be Intentional with Yourself: Your mental focus, attitudes, behaviors, and communication set the tone for the day.
Set Your Own Purpose: Before addressing business or financial goals, engage in personal reflection to define what you stand for each day.

Setting Up Your Day

Start early:

Visualize: In the morning quiet, visualize your day. Meditate to clear your mind.
Feel the Outcome: Experience the success of your day as if it’s already happening. Pray or mentally request what you aim to attract.
Define Goals: Know your specific targets. Write them down if it helps.
Seed the Feelings: Plant the emotional experience you wish for both yourself and your team.

Daily Intentional Setup Moods:

Be proactive instead of procrastinating.
Confront challenges head-on.
Bring new ideas to energize your team.
Maintain peace regardless of external pressures.
Face your fears.
Be open to others’ contributions.
Trust that necessary resources will appear.

Conclude your setup feeling as though what you’ve envisioned has already occurred. This mindset will positively impact your day.

Don’t Overthink:

Let your intentions be straightforward and natural.

Notice the Synchronicities:

How often do thoughts about someone lead to unexpected encounters?
How do sudden inspirations guide important actions?
How do opportunities align with your morning vision?

These occurrences suggest you’re in the flow of what you’ve seeded.

The Leader’s Purpose

Your role, your day, your life as a leader has a purpose:

Lead others towards goals with passion to avoid mediocrity.
Your behavior sets the stage for others’ actions.

Leadership as Service

Leadership involves:

Service to others.
Goal-oriented effort, belief in outcomes, and perseverance.
Using all your capabilities to enable everyone to achieve collective goals.

For more on how to lead effectively, stay tuned to my blogs.

This version aims to streamline the message, reduce redundancy, and clarify the steps for setting up a successful business day while emphasizing leadership’s personal and professional responsibilities.

Leadership strategies
time management
more concise

What is a regular day anyhow? Is it always mayhem for you? Or do most regular business days go smoothly?

Why do we need to keep a regular day ‘on track’?

To make milestones, creative ideas, performance targets, Service Level Agreement (SLAs) outcomes, we must keep people, and events, on track.

At the end of a day when we look back, and think about what we expected when the day began, and how it turned out, we may wonder how we missed what was coming.

WHY did it go so off track?

The signs are there. Maybe we don’t notice at the time.

Maybe we notice, and we hope danger prompts that we don’t want to deal with, will go away.

Or we dismiss subtle signs as, ‘someone else’s problem’

If we want to be a competent effective leader, realise everything that happens is on our watch.

We have a level of responsibility for it all.

What we permit, allow, ignore, or don’t hold accountable is, where leaders make a difference. We either set the standards and hold others to account, or we drift along until a crisis brings everything into focus that could have been redirected, well in advance.

Here’s how to Cause Positive Seismic Change to a Regular Business Day

Challenging days are WAY MORE EFFECTIVE by the way we SET THEM UP.

Average business leaders will often create vision, strategy, and process.

What’s missing from this text book business training is the personal intentions of the leader?

Leaders COUNT. We leaders, by our personal commitment, and focused vision, on a daily basis, DO make a DIFFERENCE to outcomes.

Be intentional with oneself FIRST.

Leaders by mental focus, attitudes, behaviours, and communication, have a significant influence on the day ahead.

An effective leader sets up their OWN PURPOSE each day.

Before the business purpose, the financial purpose, or the external consultancy guide plan, we do the inner work on ourselves.

You my leader, must own your own purpose for the day. That’s the one YOU operate on.

Its the personal purpose coming from your mind, heart, and will.

Your purpose is what you’re about as a person.

Lets face it

We set up business goals.

We set up career goals.

Do we set up PERSONAL INTENTIONS?

A leader has an evolutionary effect on others, and on the corporate day.

We need to know in our minds what we want to attract today.

How To Setup the Business Day Ahead

Start early in the day, in the quiet of the morning, and visualise what you want.

Maybe meditate for a while to calm your mind.

Then picture the day clearly in your mind.

FEEL what you want to happen, as if its already happening.

Pray, and make mental requests for what you want to attract.

It works.

Know the specific goals.

Seed the outcomes in the mind’s eye.

Write it down if it helps.

Seed the feelings you want for this experience.

Set the tone for you – and the team.

Be conscious of what you’re going for personally each day.

You’ll be inspiring to others when you’re calm, and, at the same time, ‘on fire’ knowing clearly what you’re after today.

The energy of how you’re being causes others to be inspired in their own right, to show up in their own unique, and valuable contribution, to add more value to the team.

When you contemplate the day ahead, imagine the renewed impact on the day YOU’RE CREATING in your mind. You might want to attract particular customers to convert them to transactions. You might want to work more productively with particular associates. You want to crack a big challenge and shift the perspective of stakeholders with what’s happening. As you’re seeding the outcome you want, you imagine how they feel when they see the actions you’re taking, and causing others to take. You might even be having a WOW moment just thinking about it!! You CAN do this, you can change things positively, you CAN cause a change if you know HOW TO.

While doing intentional ‘setup’, as you process what to happen, you might feel in a particular mood :

to ‘kick ass’ instead of procrastinating, to avoid fear of confrontation

to ‘knock ’em dead’ on the team with a new idea

to have a peaceful day, no matter what

to face your fears, and do it anyway

to be open to hearing, and noticing others, so they’re able to contribute more

to having what you need be presented to you, and yet, right now you don’t know its source.

It doesn’t matter. You just need to be intentional, and visualise what you want to happen.

Now, close up the intentional seeding session, feeling it as if its already happened.

Where you’re at mentally and emotionally now, WILL impact the day positively.

Don’t be attached to the personal vision.

Don’t overthink it.

Its ‘just so’.

Later during the day – notice

how we find ourselves thinking about someone, and then bump into them

how we have a brainwave during the day to take a certain action that’s an important contribution.

how someone unexpectedly offers a collaboration opportunity in synchronicity with our vision.

how the resources we need to achieve something ‘miraculously’ turn up on time, ready to go.

These things happen when we’re ‘in the flow’, of what we seeded at daybreak.

The Leader’s Purpose

There’s a purpose to your role, to your day, to your life.

You’re leading others towards a goal, an outcome, a result.

To avoid being ‘average’, each leader needs to bring their inner fire to life.

If you’re not emotionally engaged, its easy to be victim of more purposeful others.

Purpose has a multi-dimensional dimension to it.

The part of it we’re responsible for, is our own behaviour. What happens with other people often depends on how we seed our day, and behave from the beginning of it.

When we focus on what’s the best way we can deliver service to others, we’re intentional about that. We seed personal goals every day, and we go out there, in action, KNOWING we’re ON TRACK because we’ve set it up in our minds.

The best leader is a multi-dimensional.

Leadership is service to others.

Its leading the way, goal focused; with consistent effort, belief in outcomes, and never quitting.

Provide the best service of who you are today, using ALL your capabilities.

Cause everyone to perform their purpose FULL ON to realise collective goals.

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©1-1000 The Way to Business Leadership Excellence – Margaret-Jane Howe