Build a Powerful Support Team

This next article is part of an ongoing series here at TSB Magazine called The Success Principles. The series is based on the 64 principles laid out by Jack Canfield in his course of the same name. If youre new, I always suggest starting any series from the beginning.

Principle 41:  Build a Powerful Support Team

We’ve been discussing a lot about focusing on your core genius.  This means spending the majority of your time doing the tasks that you are great at.  These are ultimately the tasks that will produce the most results for you.  In the previous lesson we discussed the idea of managing your days into three distinct categories:  Free days, Buffer days, and Focus days.

Ideally you want to create as many free days and focus days as possible.  In order to this you must implement the idea of delegating the tasks, projects, and activities that you do not excel at.  Every high achiever has a powerful team of key staff members who do the bulk of the work while he or she is free to create new sources of income and opportunities for success.

Canfield lays out what he calls The Total Focus Process

To help you clarify what you should be spending your time on and what you should be delegating to others, do the following exercise.  Your goal is to find the top one, two, or three activities that best use your core genius, bring you the most money, and produce the greatest level of enjoyment.

1.  Start by listing all those activities that occupy your time… whether they’re business-related, personal, or related to your civic organizations or volunteer work.  List even small tasks such as returning phone calls, filing, or photocopying.

2.  Next, choose from this list those one, two, or three things your are particularly brilliant at, your special and unique talents, those things very few other people can do as well as you.  Also choose from this list the three activities that generate the most income for you or your company.  Any activities that your brilliant and generate most of your income are the activities that you will want to focus the most time and energy.

3.  Finally, create a plan for delegating everything else to other people.  Delegating takes time, training, and patience, but over time you can keep chipping away at the low-payoff, nonessential tasks on your list until you are doing less and less of those and more and more of what you are really good at.  That his how you create a brilliant career.