Take a look at your diary over the past week. What has your week been filled with?

Meetings; telephone calls with customers; conference calls; training; one-to-one's; coaching; research. Then think about how you felt when you were involved with each of these. Some of this "stuff" will be contributing to you doing a great job. Some of it will be simply padding out your time, but not adding any real value. Other activities will be simply draining you from an emotional and time perspective. It's time to do an overhaul of your working week and see what can be done to energise you more – and therefore get you working on the right things! You can do this by simply breaking down your working week into three areas: Stop; Start; Continue.

STOP. These are all the actions/tasks/attitudes/viewpoints that you believe are not helpful. It could be something as simple as your attitude when gearing up for a particular meeting. Are you moaning quietly to yourself as you go to attend? Are you someone who is the "kiss of death" to any new idea that's suggested – always finding reasons for why something won't work, rather than looking for ways to make it work? Is it a task that you're doing out of habit, but it could be stopped, or delegated? Try and identify 1 or 2 of these areas from your week that you can simply stop.



START. What do you need to start doing? This could be linked to the things that you identified in the "Stop" category, such as starting to delegate or coach more. Or they could be completely different. Maybe you've identified the need to start believing in yourself a bit more. Or maybe you've identified a gap in your skills for which you need to start developing in. Or perhaps you need to start looking for the positives in a particular person whom you work with, rather than feeling really niggled by what they say and do. Try and identify 1 or 2 things you could start, which would really make a positive impact in how you feel about yourself and your work.



CONTINUE. What are some things which you enjoy and are good at? Things which you know are enabling you to be successful and effective in your job? This could be dealing with a particular customer; a specific process you follow which has proven time and again to be really effective for you; coaching and developing another member of the team so they can be even more successful in their role. What are some areas you'd hate to give up in your job, because you enjoy them so much? Identify 1 or 2 ways of doing them even more, or even better, so everybody reaps the rewards.

Focused Action:

• Work through your diary from the previous week and identify at least 1 or 2 actions for you to Stop/Start/Continue
• Look at your week ahead. Identify how and when you can put these actions into place, so you start to see a positive impact from them by the end of next week
• Keep a note of what has the best result and do more of it!