OH! Magazine - Australian Version November 2016 | Page 19

(Performance Coaching)

WHAT'S REALLY
STOPPING YOU?
Greg Sellar asks the hardest question of all...

want to ask you this: 'What has
really stopped you from getting to
where you want to be in life?' I don’t think
we ask ourself this question often enough.
Instead, we choose to take things as they
are, assuming that’s the hand that life
has dealt us, rather than questioning how
we can go about doing things differently.

I

Tim Gallwey in his book The Inner Game
of Tennis, talks about a person’s
performance being their potential minus
the interference that gets in the way.
Everyone has the potential to be more
than their current experience, but we
usually have ‘stuff’ that gets in the way.
Our job should be to figure out what that
stuff is, and do our best to decrease its
power, or eliminate it from our life.
Sometimes our stuff is physical (e.g. our
actions are misdirected or misaligned to
our goal), or it’s mental (e.g. our thinking
is unhelpful and it’s like trying to drive a
car with the handbrake on).
The first thing you need to do is take time
to self-reflect. Take a good hard look at
what you're doing now to move you
towards achieving your goals. This type of
reflection increases self-awareness, so
taking time to evaluate your thoughts and
actions throughout the day, is a good
starting point for getting your task balance
sheets right. Literally, get a piece of paper
and draw two columns – one for positive
thoughts and actions and the other for
negative. Whenever a positive or negative
thought relating to your goals occurs,
write the thought down, along with the
time it occurred. You may be surprised at
how unbalanced your thinking and actions
are and you just might see why you're
moving away from our goals instead of
closer to them.
The second thing you need to do is to be

brutally honest with yourself. There are
no excuses in weeding out interferences.
They might seem like a great idea at the
time, or an easier course of action, but if
they’re not moving you closer to your
goals and realising your potential, then
they should be minimised if unproductive,
or banished if harmful. The aim is to
avoid procrastinating, rationalising and
compensating, and start replacing old
habits with new, productive behaviours.
The number one thing people say when
explaining why they haven’t done the
work yet, is not having enough time. I’m
here to say that being busy is not an end
destination in itself. It’s an interference
we create by filling our time with things
that make us short-term happy, but long
term unsatisfied. Using busyness as an
excuse to embrace the status quo is a cop
out because most of our interferences are
self-imposed and cause us to waste time
doing useless things that just aren’t
important. It’s these actions that hijack
your success because essentially you're
fill your time doing the wrong things.
Every day we perform tasks that fill our
day, but Pareto’s Rule states that we
spend roughly 80 per cent of our time
doing 20 per cent of our tasks. With so
many activities to perform in your
increasingly busy life, it can be difficult
to know what to work on as a priority. The
first question you need to ask yourself is,
'are your tasks maintenance or progress
tasks?' A maintenance task is one where
after having done it, we’re still in exactly
the same position in terms of our goals,
whereas progress tasks move us directly
forward towards getting what we want.
For example, spending your whole day
doing chores around the house – mowing,
vacuuming, and collecting the dry
cleaning are all things that probably need

GREG
SELLAR

YOU CAN CONTACT GREG VIA:
Web: gregsellar.com
Facebook: greg.sellar
Twitter: @gregsellar
Instagram: @gregsellar

to be done, but they won’t help you
progress towards your life goals. Making a
phone call to a prospective client,
studying for an exam to help you enter
university, or joining a bootcamp group,
might be considered helpful and
important activities that will move you in
the right direction once completed; these
are your progress tasks.
Once you’ve figured out what are
maintenance and progress tasks, you can
then prioritise them. If the amount of
surprises you had in your day were
decreased because you planned better,
imagine how much more you could
achieve?
You can also be held back by your own
mental interference. You can get caught
in fail cycles by convincing yourself that
things are different, that nobody else
could possibly understand the uniqueness
of your situation, and that despite having
tried it all before, nothing has worked.
This type of interference starts in the
mind, but affects your outwards actions.
You need to take the same brutal analysis
and realise that some of the limiting
beliefs you hold onto will need to be
questioned if you're going to become
unstuck.
Whether your interference lay in your
physical actions or your mindset, one
thing we know is that things rarely get
more appealing with time. Your time is
now, so without further adieu, take a look
at your day, your actions and thoughts
within that day, and how you can organise
them to minimise those interferences and
enhance your performance.

OH! MAGAZINE ( NOVEMBER 2016 )

19