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.
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. For more information, please go to http://www.briantracy.com/.