I have been reading this book by Rob Dial, Level Up. He gives good, practical tips on how to improve daily productivity by adopting strategies to focus longer and deeper. He also shares how to avoid self-sabotaging behaviour like picking up your phone to check messages every few minutes. I see so much of myself in what he writes about the habits holding us back from upgrading our lives. The good news is that the tips he shares are small activities that everyone can do. However, I passed on a few, like plunging into an ice-cold bath, sijui ati, to improve concentration. In Africa, we drink tea to do that, hehe.
While he shares many great tips to level up, most of them are things we already know—like going to bed early and keeping our phones away. Yet, we still struggle to follow through. I guess old habits are stubborn. So how do we override the command that’s kept us operating in suboptimal ways for a long time? That’s where it gets tricky: the brain. According to Rob, we can rewire our brains to do the things we require. To do that, we have to start in small doses and keep repeating the actions we want to adopt until the brain accepts them as routine.
I say it’s tricky because our brains follow the path of least resistance by default. So it’s unnatural to adapt to new ways of functioning. And that’s where repetition and hard work to stay the course come in, even when our old ways are kicking and screaming, refusing to break up with us.
One of Rob’s suggestions to be productive is the Pomodoro Technique. You focus for about half an hour, take a short break, and then return for another half-hour before taking another break. You do that several times in the day. During the breaks, you don’t pick up your phone, as that is the equivalent of short-circuiting your brain back to its default unproductive settings. The world will not end if we have a few missed calls, and we don’t have to respond to messages instantly like an emergency service.
I recently saw a post by a fellow coach saying, ‘Coaching might be the doorway, but it doesn’t have to be the whole house.’ The question that followed was, ‘What skill are you building next?’ It stuck with me because I’ve been feeling it’s time to upgrade my coaching skills and offerings. As a result, I enrolled on a team and group coaching certification, and I’ve enjoyed it so far. The class sessions ended last month, and now we are required to put into practice what we have learnt for assessment. If my practicals meet the standards, then I will be certified as a team and group coach, plus organisational development expert as a bonus.
My first group coaching session was on Tuesday. I paired up with my fellow coach and classmate on this course to run a business-coaching incubator. We had six coaches from various parts of the world who wanted to start their own coaching businesses. I was the co-coach on this first session. We were both nervous as we hadn’t done team coaching like this before, but we cheered each other on and showed up for our class.
Swami Kriyananda’s advice on overcoming nervousness is to concentrate on giving out to people rather than on making a good impression. That came in handy. We engaged with the group and applied the learnings we had gained in class. At the end of the 90 minutes, I was upbeat and quite proud of my colleague and me. The participants took away good value, and now we are looking forward to the next session at the end of the month. Having done mostly individual coaching, I’m growing to like team and group coaching quite a bit. Maybe it’s my extroverted nature, but having a small group of people sharing ideas and building one another up was quite cool. I’m glad to be exploring this new room in the house that coaching opened up.
I’m in a season of being stretched. Facilitating that group coaching session and preparing for my upcoming webinar on 25th September has forced me to lean into discomfort—as my buddy Leonard challenged me to do. (By the way, have you registered for it yet? The link is at the end of this post.) I can hear my brain screaming with resistance, urging me to remain comfortable in the work I do now without taking on new adventures. There are times I have cooperated with my brain and sabotaged myself. Folks, our brains do a lot for us, but they can be bad company sometimes.
After that group coaching session, I could almost feel my brain muscles stretching. It’s like the pins and needles I experience after a gym session —kwanza on upper-body days, when my chest feels like it’s going to burst open, hehe.
With this ongoing experience of rewiring my brain, I feel like I am growing rapidly in this season. It’s almost like there are two teenage boys in my house now, as my son is going through his growth spurt into a young man. He’s no longer a baby shark hehe. My buddy told me that boys experience actual pain as their limbs lengthen in their teenage years. His brain is also developing fast, and that comes with its own unique challenges. But he must go through that process to manhood. I can’t remember how it was for me back when I was a teenager. Now I will be more gracious with him, as I can relate in a sense, at least on the brain rewiring part.
Folks, maybe when we learn new skills as adults and apply ourselves, that is our version of growth spurts. While it may be difficult to unlearn, relearn and learn, I think it is what we will have to do if we are to level up. Let us embrace the discomfort of rewiring our brains, so they elevate us rather than sabotage us.
A good start is to explore other rooms in the house that is our life. Don’t just stay in one room. Go somewhere else, do something different and challenge old patterns. And may we remember the caution from computer scientist Grace Hopper, who said, ‘The most dangerous phrase is: we’ve always done it this way.’
Success to Significance Webinar
You've built the career, the title, the reputation — everything success was supposed to give you. So why does it sometimes feel like something's still missing?That's exactly what we're unpacking in Webinar 1: When Success Isn't Enough, the opening session of my new Success to Significance series for African leaders in midlife. In one honest hour, we'll talk about the transition every high-achiever eventually faces — and how to cross it well.
Friday, 25th September12:00 – 1:00 PM (EAT)
Live on Zoom
KES 2,000
Seats are limited. Know a leader who needs this conversation? Forward it their way.
Register Here