Noah came to me feeling overwhelmed and oh so tired.
No matter how much he worked, he felt there was always more.
He stayed in his office till late, would come home drained, not having time or patience for anyone only to wake up in the morning to the same situation.

What made it worse was that he had been given advice by a coach to put an enough point.
This was essentially a goal where you say, this is enough, I can rest now.
But Noah didn't like that advice as he felt it was playing small instead of giving him space to reach his potential.

By the end of our signature 90-day program, Noah found himself going home at responsible hour and feeling really good about the work he’d done.
At night he was able to sleep well, knowing he made good use of his time and was working towards incredibly ambitious goals.

While you are doing any task, you (without even realizing it!) are using your 28 thinking skills.

When the thinking skills you need to use are strong, doing the task happens easily.
If the thinking skill you need to use is weak, doing the task will be a challenge.

The struggle that Noah had, came from a weak thinking skill of categorizations and understanding reality.

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Categorization is about organizing items, tasks, ideas etc in groups.
We spoke a lot about this thinking skill in recent episodes of 461, 463 and 467.
So, in this episode I’m going to focus on understanding reality and in the end, I’ll show you how it’s connected to categorizations.

Understanding reality is understanding what is.
What is the reality of life? And thereby, what are the consequences?

If you go outside when it’s raining without a raincoat or umbrella, the reality is, you’ll get wet.
If you don’t give your employees feedback, reality is, they wouldn’t know what you want from them.

Once you understand reality you can do something about it.
You can take an umbrella, you can have meeting with your employee etc.

People who have hard time with understanding try to change what is and end up getting very frustrated all the time.
Don’t let the reality stop you. Use it to your advantage.

In Noah’s case, his lack of understanding reality was causing him to plan to much for each day, put unrealistic deadlines for his team and having expectations set up in a way it was impossible for him to them.
That’s why his previous coach told him to have an “enough point” but as we said it only caused him to feel like he was playing and it didn’t help with understanding reality. He just felt choked that this was all he can do it.

What I did with Noah, was ask him to put write out hypothetical cause and effect scenarios.
If I go to sleep late, I’ll wake up tired.
If I don’t keep in communication with the client, they’re not going to know we’re working on solving the issues.
If I work on Task A, which takes about 6 hours to do, I wouldn’t have time to work on task B before the meeting.

See how those statements can be more abstract and less direct but all about understanding reality?

By writing them out in this sort of way it gets your brain thinking in an understanding reality perspective as you go about your day.
Remember, this is NOT about saying you can’t do something, or it wouldn’t work out.
This is about seeing the situation in a way where you understand what is, so you CAN come up with something creative that will work for the situation.

With this little shift, Noah already started seeing changes in how he was doing work and talking to the people around him.
As I told you in the beginning, Noah also worked on his thinking skill of categorizations and organized his work in a smarter way.

Combined with understanding reality, Noah could categorize in the most efficient way based on the reality of what is.
This saved him about 3 hours each day, allowing him to go home at responsible time.
Best part, he felt energized and accomplished when he was done as it was no longer a drain to get the work done.
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