by Tom Evans | Aug 22, 2012 | Timing
If you are one of those people who has a To Do List which never gets done, the best way to deal with it is to start a “To Don’t” List.
Listen to this Sixty Second Time Tip to find out more …
… and when you are done, make that list and start Bending Time – it comes with a full 30 day refund guarantee so you have nothing to lose but spending a little time to create loads more!!
by Tom Evans | Jul 2, 2012 | Timing
We give Old Father Time a bit of a hard time. We blame him constantly.
“There are not enough hours in the day.”
“Where did the time go?”
“I would write that book if only I had the time.”
“Time just gets away from me.”
This really unfair on him. He gives us continuity. He allows us to have memories of the past and to dream about the future. He stops everything from happening all at once, which would be ever so confusing for us.
It is humankind, not him, who have enslaved themselves to time. If you wear a watch, you are entrapping yourself ‘in time’. Watch that clock and again, you bond yourself to time. Even our calendar imprisons us in unnatural time. Months of varying lengths are a man-made construct. September, October, November and December should, by rights, be the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months of the year. We have the egos of Julius (July) and Augustus (August) Caesar to thank for that anomaly.
Incidentally, we have a perfectly good clock which orbits the Earth 13 times very year with the cosmic precision. When you live your life by 13 Moon Time, I can testify personally you stop pushing water uphill.
Time is not external and imposed upon us. It is generated by our consciousness. If we want to change our interaction with it, all we have to do is change how and what we think. For example, if you fret over past events or worry about the future, you have taken your focus away from what you are working on right now. You will ‘lose’ and waste time.
Old Father Time has become a bit of a punch bag who never complains. He just keeps marching along silently, probably smiling at our naivety at the way we have allowed ourselves to be entrapped by time.
Just imagine though if we could expand time such that we could get everything we wanted done and more. We would have no excuses and nobody to blame. All of a sudden we would be completely accountable for our actions and deeds. This would have massive implications. Time wasters would have nowhere to hide and those that are productive would get even more done.
In just 35 short years, Mozart composed over 600 works, many praised as masterpieces. Bearing in mind he started around the age of 5, that’s 30 or so compositions a year. Now he had no Internet, TV or computer games to consume his time, but that is pretty amazing output by any standards.
It’s said, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. Why this works is that busy people, like Mozart are not frittering time away on other things, they are focussed on getting things done.
For many people, having an external clock superimposed upon them is the most brilliant excuse. The reality is this however. We can all choose to to run our consciousness at a different rate and to get more done in less time. When we do this in a team or group, time dilation effects multiply.
If you sit in your left brain, with your ‘inner devil’ focussed on detail, you get nothing done. When you live a right brained existence with your head in the clouds, nothing gets done either. However, when both brain hemispheres work in harmony, our efficiency increases by 400% or so.
What’s even more amazing about achieving such efficiency gains is that the techniques required are largely free. They involve breathing and learning to get in the zone by entering the meditative state with our eyes open. These techniques also have health benefits by reducing stress and even lowering blood pressure. It’s thought that every minute spent in the meditative state adds at least a minute to our life spans.
So just imagine what you might do and what you might achieve if you no longer had the excuse that there was not enough time. There’s no time like the present to find out.
Living Timefully is a revolutionary time management programme that shows you how to change your experience of time by changing the way you think.
Start Living Timefully today
by Tom Evans | Jun 21, 2012 | Timing
If you run a business where you charge by the hour, there is a fundamental limit to your annual turnover based on your hourly rate.
Let’s say you could work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and 48 weeks a year and you charge £50 an hour. If you were lucky enough to have 100% client bookings, you could earn £96,000 a year. This is not a bad level of income but you might burn out in the process.
This also leaves no time for client acquisition, any admin or even a tea break! Those that are lucky enough to have a full client diary end doing their admin and marketing in the evenings and weekends and end up becoming their own employee.
Now there are some conventional ways out of this quagmire:
- You can outsource your admin
- You can of course put your hourly rate up and do less hours for the same turnover
- You can take on other consultants, train them in your methods and take a percentage of their earnings
- You can even write a book, or design an eproduct or three, and make money while you sleep
There is though a radical and revolutionary way to get more done in less time and, as a result, become more profitable. This method is initially useful where you are billing for work commissioned by the client and not in face to face meetings. When you get confident in the techniques, I will explain how you can pull this trick off in front of a client too!
It’s a common misconception that time is fixed. If you’ve ever been in a waiting room with nothing to read, minutes can stretch into seeming hours. Conversely busy weekends can fly by and Monday come around all too soon.
What and how we think directly affects the perceived passage of time. Spend time fretting about the past or worrying about the future and you will at least half your efficiency and output right now.
On the other hand, when you ’get in the zone’ however, you can double, triple or quadruple your output. So, rather than increasing your hourly rate, you can keep it the same but more of the same work in less time. The client will be happy too, not least as the quality of the work we do when we are focussed increases several-fold.
The secrets of how to pull off this magical feat are revealed in Living Timefully, a revolutionary time management programme. This self study course turns time management on its head. Note that it’s not yet another methodology on how to better prioritise and how to manage interruptions. It shows you how you can change the speed of your thoughts so you can get more done in less time.
The proof of how it works is in tasting the pudding but just imagine if it’s true, how could you use possibly use this in face to face interactions?
When you learn the simple mindfulness techniques, something amazing happens when you switch your internal time clock, the ’clocks’ of people around you also switch to match yours. So, for example, if you have a non-chargeable sales or project scoping meeting, you can reach consensus in half the time. This way you can get back to billing work more quickly.
When you are in a chargeable session with a client they get more from the session and feel they get great value from you. They value their time too so your seeming efficiency, focus and clarity gives you an edge over your competitors. You might even consider putting your rates up when the inevitable testimonials come flying in.
So what are you waiting for? As for planting a tree, the best time to start creating more time is yesterday. The second best time is today!
Create as much time as you need and get more done
by Tom Evans | May 7, 2012 | Illuminating
If you read and acted on the last post in this series, Seven Ways to Block Light Bulb Moments, well done – you’ve set up the conditions whereby light bulb moments to come your way.
Rather than waiting for them to come in randomly though, there’s a few things you can do to stir them up and encourage them to occur.
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1. Environment
There is clutter and clutter. A completely sterile and clinically clean environment might look nice but will not stimulate the brain. On the flip side, a desk with piles of unfinished business piling up in an In Tray or covered in Post It Notes of things to do, can have a negative effect. A balance is recommended which implies a buzz is happening with positive results and sales wins are clear for all to see. Fill your office with creative resources such as white boards and a book library and ensure a room or space is available for people to meet and be inspiring.
2. Celebrate Success
In our busy days, we sometimes forget to take time out to pat ourselves on the back. This doesn’t mean you have to take the whole team down the pub every time you get a sale in. Have a stack of Mar Bars or a pile of iTunes or Amazon vouchers and dish them out appropriately.
3. Map your Minds
Mind Mapping is one of the most powerful and coolest tools for stirring up creativity. They can either be used for free association or to get your thoughts in order, plan a project or design a product or service. See Mapping your Mind for more on this. They become especially powerful when you work on them collectively and collaboratively. The maxim two heads are better than one grows exponentially when more heads get involved.
4. Appreciative Review
We can spend a fair amount of time analysing what went wrong. The culture of public enquiries and tendency of the press to report everything that’s bad just serves to fuel this type of negativity. When something ‘goes right’, there is much to be gained from working out what you did that was so good and then applying that wisdom to other processes in the business. Different parts of the brain get involved with this process and you will be amazed at the results.
5. Breathing
Breathing is something we all have to do, yet most people breathe very shallowly. Our neurons don’t store oxygen yet need it to function so learning to breathe properly and to pump prime your brain has great benefits to both creativity, health and well-being. Listen to this Getting in the Zone visualisation for 11 minutes – and why not play it at the start of your next creative meeting.
6. Meditation
Many people think it’s impossible to meditate and make their minds go quiet. In our busy days, the idea of wasting 10-20 minutes meditating sounds horrendous. I can testify personally that the days that I don’t meditate don’t flow so well and that when I meditate my days seem to be full of good luck, chance encounters and clients that seem to find me ‘by accident’. Listen to How to Quieten Your Mind to experience the meditative state.
7. Trust your Gut
The most successful business people pride themselves on trusting their gut. It is now known by neuroscientists that our gut has more neurons than a cat’s brain and works about 5 to 10 seconds ahead of our conscious awareness. Using a combination of right breathing and meditation, you can tune into your gut mind and communicate ‘consciously’ with it. The results you get from learning this technique are simply mind blowing.
More resources and articles
What blocks light bulb moments
Generating Spin Offs
by Tom Evans | Mar 14, 2012 | Timing
Listen to the latest Moments of Light podcast interview with Davina Mackail, author of The Dream Whisperer.
There are so many benefits of using your dream-time to be creative – apart from just being more efficient by using time we think is wasted, the quality of the information you can receive is quite literally ‘out of this world’ …
Listen to this interview to find out how to remember and interpret them and why buying a dream interpretation book isn’t necessarily a good investment …
Davina Mackail works as a shamanic life coach and healthier home and business expert.
She is also an experienced teacher, writer, presenter and inspirational speaker. Her passion is encouraging the magnificence of humanity and inspiring people to live from their hearts and fulfil their dreams. This has led to a life long study of the human mind, metaphysics, quantum physics, the nature of consciousness, philosophy, psychology and shamanism – a passion that is as much part of her being as breathing.
Her book, The Dream Whisperer, is published by Hay House will help you unlock the treasure house of your dreams.
The Dream Whisperer on Amazon.co.uk
Find out more about Davina and her magical work on her web site AskDavina.com
by Tom Evans | Mar 6, 2012 | Illuminating
When I trained as an iMindmap Instructor a few years ago, I was introduced to the concept of limiting each branch of the map to a single word. At first, I didn’t go along with this idea as I thought the application of any ‘rule’ might limit the creative flow. Once I learned, however, to see it as a discipline as opposed to a draconian rule, the benefits and reasoning behind it became crystal clear.
A year or so ago, I was stuck on chapter 9 of of my book on Light Bulb Moments. It wasn’t flowing so I used Tony Buzan’s technique of free association Mind Mapping on the words “light”, “bulb” and “moment”. Now had I mapped using the phrase “light bulb moment”, my mind might have been lead to “Edison” and then “phonograph” or “Topsy the Elephant” (Google it) or to “Eureka”, “Archimedes” and “bath water”.
Instead, as you can see on the map below, “Bulb” took me to “tulip” and to “Amsterdam”. The word “Moment” in isolation made me realise we have a moment in time and the moment of a lever around a fulcrum. As a result, I started a series of podcasts called “Moments of Light” in which people talk about how they had a light bulb moment and did something with it.
The word “light” as you might imagine provided a deep and wide source of metaphor and association. Light of course can be split into a spectrum of component colours. It made me realise that quantum physicists ascribe many attributes like spin, colour and flavour to exotic particles like quarks. Then a light bulb moment came in.
Is it possible that thought itself has properties like colour or flavours?
At that point, the writer’s block vapourised and the result was a chapter called “Flavours of Thought” which I didn’t plan to write. This led to writing a whole book of the same name a month later that I didn’t plan to write either.
As chefs use a mix of flavours in their concoctions, I also combined the flavours of thought into various recipes too. As a result, about a year later a membership site appeared on the scene called “Recipes for Fresh Thinking” that I didn’t plan to build. I started training “Master Chefs of the Mind” to solve many common mind-based issues prevalent in every day life.
I then came across some esoteric material on something called the Cube of Space. I found I could map my Flavours on to the Cube. As a result, I found I had from nowhere created an amazing tool for personal evolution and advancement. This in turn lead to a new practitioner programme called the Cube of Karma that I had no plan in developing. I see it now as a gastronomic recipe of all the flavours of thought.
None of this was planned, none of it was foreseen. This all shows the power of a true Mind Map.
Related Links:
The Art and Science of Light Bulb Moments
Flavours of Thought
