Business Success Section
Principles of Self-Management
By: Brian Tracy
The starting point of maturity is the realization that “No one is coming to the rescue.” Everything you are or ever will be is entirely up to you.
This life is not a rehearsal for anything else. This is the real thing. The game is on. Time is passing quickly, and all of your decisions and indecisions, your actions and inactions, have added up to create the life you’re living at this very minute. If you want things to be different in the future, you’ll have to make things different in the present. You’ll have to take complete charge of yourself and your life and make things change, because they won’t change by themselves.
Self-management is really personal management, time management, life management. It’s putting your hands firmly on the steering wheel of your life and then taking yourself in your chosen direction. Remember the old Confucian saying, “If you don’t change the road you’re traveling on, you’ll probably end up where you’re going.” Every successful man or woman in America made, at one time or another, a firm decision about where he or she wanted to go and then took deliberate steps to get there. And you can do this for yourself as well.
One of the most useful ideas I ever learned was to view myself as a “bundle of resources.” You can benefit from this idea by standing back and looking at yourself in terms of what you are, instead of what you do. We tend to define ourselves in terms of our work, in terms of what we’re spending most of our time doing at the present moment. When we meet someone, even at a bus stop, we describe ourselves in terms of our jobs. We say things such as “I’m a salesperson,” “I’m a manager,” or “I work in such-and-such a business doing such-and-such a job.” Since we tend to become what we think about, the more we describe ourselves to others as being what we do, the more we think of ourselves as what we do. Perhaps this is why people who are fired or laid off go through a period of shock and emotional turmoil. it’s as though they’ve been cut off from their identities. You may have had that experience.
The fact is that you’re not what you do. Instead, you’re a bundle of resources. You have the combination of ingredients that makes you a unique and remarkable human being, different from anyone else who ever has lived or who ever will live. You’ve undergone a wide variety of experiences, both positive and negative. You’ve had a formal education, and you’ve learned from the various jobs and activities that you’ve engaged in. You have a unique intelligence, much of which isn’t yet developed to the full. You have skills that you’ve acquired through hard work, discipline and practice. You have abilities that you were born with, which make it easy for you to do certain jobs and to accomplish certain tasks. You have energy and ambition and goals and opportunities. You have a philosophy of life, however developed it is, and you have attitudes and perspectives that make you extraordinary. The federal government has identified more than 22,000 different job categories; when you put all your skills together, you’re probably capable of excelling at hundreds of jobs, doing different things in different organizations, businesses and industries.
As the psychologist Abraham Maslow once wrote, “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.” The average person tends to settle for far less than he’s capable of and then wonders why he’s so dissatisfied and frustrated with his life.
The fact is that you have an inborn drive toward the realization of your full capacity. There’s a force within you that makes you restless and discontent, and that drives you onward and upward toward the achievement of your dreams and aspirations. Many people attempt to deaden that ambition by drinking too much alcohol, watching too much television, socializing too much and even resorting to drugs and dangerous activities. But it will not be denied. You have been put in this world to do something wonderful with your life. You have a unique destiny, a special purpose. And the starting point for realizing that purpose is self-management. It is taking full control over yourself and everything that you are doing so that you are moving progressively toward the realization of a worthy ideal, so that you are firmly on the road toward becoming everything you are capable of becoming.
In self-management, you begin by accepting that you are self-employed. You work for yourself. No matter who signs your paycheck, no matter if you’ve worked for a company all your life, you are always self-employed. You are the president of your own personal services corporation. You go out into the marketplace and sell your services to the highest bidder, but you always work for yourself.
One of the great tragedies of our educational system is that almost everyone is brought up to think of himself as an employee rather than an employer, as a company-owning entrepreneur. This attitude that most people accept unquestioningly is a major cause of unhappiness and underachievement in life. The myth of the employee leads people to see themselves as helpless and dependent. From an early age, they look for someone to provide them with work to do and money to live on. They see themselves as cattle being herded into the barn every day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. to be milked and then sent back to the pasture to graze and prepare for the next day’s milking. When you accept complete responsibility for your life and begin to view yourself as self-employed, you automatically move into the top 3 percent of employed men and women in America.
At the point where you see that you’re in charge of your working destiny, you begin to realize that self-management is the vehicle that you need to take you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. You’re not a passive passenger. You’re not an idle dreamer. You’re not subject to the whims and fancies of fate and circumstance. You’re in charge. You determine your own cause of action. You decide where you want to work and what you want to do. Then you, first, prepare yourself and, second, go out to get the job that most satisfies you and allows you to use yourself to your best advantage. You start the process of self-management by looking deeply into yourself and asking, “What do I most enjoy doing? What have I most enjoyed in my work and activities in the past? If I won $1 million in cash tomorrow, what would I choose to work at for the indefinite future?”
Imagine, for a moment, that someone has offered to give you any job in the world and to pay you well at it if you can define that ideal job clearly on paper. By the way, most people find this to be a difficult, if not impossible, task. Most people are so used to accepting the job that is offered to them that the very idea of defining and determining their own job is somewhat overwhelming. But don’t worry. The more often you think about it and jot down your ideas, the clearer it will become to you. Then the most remarkable thing will happen: As a result of your being absolutely clear about what you want to do, you will find yourself moving toward your ideal job, and your ideal job will begin moving toward you.
Another way to determine your purpose in life, once you have accepted complete responsibility for yourself and begun seeing yourself as self-employed, is strategic thinking. Strategic thinkers are those who take the time to sit down and work out where they are and where they want to go. They determine how to achieve their goals in a step-by-step fashion. They look into the future and think about how they could allocate themselves as a bundle of resources to most rapidly move toward the accomplishment of their desires.
In personal strategic thinking and planning, you look at your unique talents and abilities and ask yourself, “Where can I best deploy myself in this marketplace to bring myself the greatest rewards?” A key part of self-management is disciplining yourself to work on only those things that can make the greatest difference in your life. If you are not extremely well-managed personally, you will find yourself spreading your efforts across a wide variety of tasks and getting nothing really important done. Self-management means self-mastery, self-control and even self-denial. It means putting off doing all the things of a lower priority so that you can work on just the one or two things that make all the difference.
Self-management means getting things done through yourself. It means standing back and looking upon yourself as a bundle of resources out of which you want to get the highest possible return. You need to organize, manage and motivate yourself as if you were your own employee.
The manager of an enterprise has seven basic functions, all of which are important. Sometimes one function is more important than another, but all are essential to success in the manager’s job. Those seven functions are: productivity, customer satisfaction, profitability and cost control, quality, people building, organizational development, and innovation. You must become capable of each of those functions in managing yourself so that you achieve the highest possible payoff.
Productivity improvement means constantly increasing output while maintaining the costs of input or even reducing them. You must continually manage yourself to produce more, faster, cheaper and better than you have before. To increase your productivity, you must think every day about the things that you can do to increase your value, to increase your ability to earn money by producing more and better goods and services for yourself and for your company.
One way to increase your productivity is to work on more important things. Another way to increase your productivity is to get better at your key tasks. You can increase your productivity by working longer hours or by working harder during normal business hours. You can increase your productivity by becoming an expert at time management and by always asking yourself the powerful question, “What can I do to increase the value of my service to my company today?”
Remember, you’re being paid today exactly what you’re worth, not a penny more, not a penny less. If you want to earn more tomorrow, you must increase the value of your output. There is no other way. The second self-management task is customer satisfaction. There’s a lot of talk today about total quality management. However, in its simplest terms, total quality management means finding out what the customer wants and then giving it to him or her. In managing yourself, you must be very clear about who your customers are. What do they need from you in order to be satisfied? Also, what does your spouse require from you? What do your children require?
At work, what are your boss’s top priorities? One of the main reasons you’re on the payroll is to please your boss by helping him or her to fulfill his or her responsibilities. The clearer you are about what you need to do to make your boss happy, the more successful you’ll be.
The third self-management task is profitability. That means increasing revenues while keeping costs constant or decreasing costs while keeping revenues constant. Your job at work is to help your company be more profitable, to contribute far more than your company pays you in salary or commission.
Personally, profitability means that you spend less than you earn, that you make a profit from your work. It means that you live within your means and save part of everything you earn. Perhaps the most important part of self-management is financial management. This means that you are 100 percent responsible for achieving your financial independence. And this is possible only by saving and investing part of your income every single paycheck.
The fourth function of personal management is quality, quality in the work you do. Vince Lombardi said, “The quality of a person’s life will be determined by the depth of his commitment to excellence, no matter what the chosen field.”
Your job is to become very good at what you do, to become valuable and then to become indispensable. Your job is to join the top 20 percent of people in your field, and then the top 10 percent, and then the top 5 percent. Excellent work is the key to high earnings, recognition, prestige and the esteem of those around you.
If you want to be successful, as a wise man once told me, “Get good; get better; be the best.” One of the most important self-management responsibilities that you take on is that of becoming very good at what you do.
The fifth job of management is people building. Most managers realize that the business of the company can’t get better unless the people get better. The very best companies in America spend 3 percent or more of their gross sales revenues on training their people. These are the most profitable and fastest growing companies in America.
By the same token, you need to build yourself continually. You need to read at least an hour a day about your chosen field. At least four times per year, you need to attend workshops and seminars given by experts. You need to work on yourself as though your life and your future depended on it, because they do. You must become a lifelong student of your craft just to stay even and, certainly, to get ahead.
The sixth management function is organizational development. For business managers, this involves planning and organizing resources in order to accomplish particular tasks and goals. In self-management, this means that you set clear goals for yourself in every area of your life and you make detailed plans to achieve them. You organize yourself, your time and your resources in order to move rapidly toward achieving the goals that are most important to your life and to your success. You continually upgrade and downgrade your priorities. You continually revise your schedule of activities so that you are always concentrating on the most valuable use of your time.
You determine how much you want to be earning five years from today, and how much you want to be worth in financial terms, and you organize yourself so that you are moving toward those goals every day, every week and every month. You keep saying, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”
The seventh self-management function is innovation. You are born with enormous reserves of creativity that can enable you to improve every part of your life. Constantly seek for faster, better and easier ways to fulfill your tasks and goals. Read, research, and ask questions. Talk to others who are ahead of you on the road of life, and ask for their advice. Look into yourself, and listen to your intuition. You can achieve any goal, you can overcome any difficulty and solve any problem on the path to a goal, as long as that goal is clear. You have the creative resources within you to be, have or do anything that you could possibly want. The only limitations are the ones you place on yourself and your mind.
Today, modern management techniques rule the world. In your personal life, modern self-management techniques can make you rich and happy and healthy and fulfilled beyond your wildest imagination. it’s up to you to learn them and apply them in every area of your life.
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About Brian Tracy
Brian Tracy is the most listened to audio author on personal and business success in the world today. His fast-moving talks and seminars on leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness and business strategy are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that people can immediately apply to get better results in every area.
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