Straight Line To Answers

If you are like me, you invested heavily in your employer and your career. You hear how valuable you are as an employee while being asked to do the impossible, ask nothing in return, and leave another bit of your soul at your desk each day.

The pressure has mounted as you’ve done everything you know to do in an attempt to demonstrate value while trying to preserve your job through another round of cost-cutting and downsizing. You’ve inherited more than you can manage. As you look around, you notice that everyone else left two hours ago. It pains your heart to call your spouse and tell her/him you’ll miss dinner with her/him and the kids once again.

You thought you were making provision but it turns out you have just been making excuses:

• about why you had to miss meeting your daughter’s prom date,
• about why you have to work while on vacation,
• about why the call that was only going to take 20 minutes lasted two hours,
• about why you travel on weekends to keep all your appointments during the coming week,
• about why you are traveling a lot more than you expected when you took the job,
• about why you are missing date night with your spouse to do this last bit of work before next week’s presentation.

Your life feels out of control and believe it or not, it’s not entirely your fault.

The Problem

Business is setup to extract maximum value from assets. It doesn’t matter whether that’s a building, a forklift, a computer or a person. The business doesn’t differentiate, that’s up to you! Don’t be surprised when you put in more work than everyone around you and it’s not enough.

The business doesn’t care about your co-workers and their effort. It cares about the 31 tasks that you didn’t complete today. AND if by some miracle, you did manage to get everything done, guess what? There’s another 28 that haven’t even been touched yet.

So go ahead, bring your best – the business will win every contest and suck you dry. If you give 50 hours, the business will require 60. If you ante up, the business will break you down until you coalesce and give it 70.

You catch yourself thinking, “Man, if I could only strike out on my own and go to work for myself. My problems would be solved.” Au contraire my friend. The habits you have developed are going to follow you like an albatross.

How Long Can You Keep Doing This

There’s an acronym that asset managers regularly use. It’s MTBF. It stands for Mean Time Between Failure. Good maintenance programs never replace equipment or perform repairs until the risk of failure is greater than the reward of continuing to operate.

Where’s your MTBF? How many years can you run at the rate you established as a twenty-something trying to make a name for yourself in the company? Can you work all night at 46 years old like you did when you were 25? Will you be able to do it at 53? How many years can you lose vacation days because you are too busy to take one?

Your health (physical and mental) are beat down. You used to have an expectation of greatness and now you just want to make it through another grueling day. As your body cries out for more energy-inducing substitutes (read caffeine, carbohydrates, etc…), it strikes you that you haven’t slept for more than five hours a night during the last week. This has led to poor fueling habits and an even worse body mass index reading then you ever imagined possible.

Wearing stress on your face causes people around you to respond with the same negative energy that you are exuding. As it starts to encroach on you, it’s terrifying to know what’s happening and not be able to stop it.

A Better Way

I’m here to help you find a way through this. Something has to change and it doesn’t have to be dramatic for it to make a big difference.

Dashed hopes and repeated disappointments are not your signature characteristics! Believing these lies has led you to settle for a life that is lacking joy and feels barely survivable.

Would you like to hear that there is a better way? Would it help if you had some tools to restore some order and some control over these circumstances? The good news is that it’s within your grasp.

You’ll benefit from seeing how I overcame these exact experiences in my life restoring sanity and control. The productivity techniques and timeless foundational truths for work, home and relationships will give you fresh perspective. I will inspire you with ideas today that you can utilize to start making a difference in your approach to life.

We will look at how to incorporate current technology where it makes sense to give you hours back each week freeing you to focus on more value adding activities. I’ll show you how my marketing expertise and emphasis on the benefits of serving the right customers will enable you to stop wasting time and start generating more revenue.