It’s 5am Sunday morning. Jess is getting ready for her sneak run we call it. For me it’s day 5 of covid and day 8 of lockdown. It’s been interesting to say the least. It could have been far worse for underpinning this isolation was a story I needed to change. You see I deliberately got Covid from a child who was deliberately delivered into my care to give me covid. It’s a longer story than you have time for but to have held that story would have been to not just have covid but to be thinking evil (negative) thoughts the entire time. Instead, I had to change the rhetoric. I knew that story would negate my own immune system, ungrateful stories always do. So, I switched it to “I’m blessed to be caring for two little tigers during this immune building week and learning so much from them. Thank you.” That changed things. So, as my body temperature went from Hypothermia ratings to the equivalent of molten lava in a Hawaiian volcano pouring into the sea, as my energy went from struggling to smile to wanting to ride my road bike to the moon, from craving food to wanting to puke it, the back story has been a good one. The most interesting part has been to watch my immune system fighting this amazing bug. As my body got a grip on covid on a daily basis and I started to feel quite ok, the bug would cleverly mutate and take a deeper grip on my entire function. My immune system would fight back and then boom Covid would mutate again. Through all this Jess remained mum. Her #1 priority. She worked in meetings and delivered her engineering solutions while I entertained the tigers between coaching sessions and writing. The days were awesome, as I learned to play Uno again, to soothe tears and settle fights. Once a day we switched on the TV and watched a movie of my choice (that gave Jess another 2 hours to work uninterrupted as she’s not a tv buff) so we watched or rewatched, ANTS, BEE, NEVER-ENDING STORY, MADAGASCAR and PUSS IN BOOTS. What a wonderful dive into my imagination, creative spirit and love for the unseen. My visualisations and affirmation powers and skills multiplied, I felt this wonderful joy in the afterworld as my subliminal mind basked it priority over my subconscious. I know all this seems a little technical for all you high flying business consultants but please hear me as your teacher. The human spirit is a childlike ability to IMAGINE. Without this imagination you become a statistical robot turning up, making repetitive choices and going home. Doing what will be very soon, robotised. Deloitte and all the big consultancies, are investing billions $ in A.I. Artificial intelligence is the machinery to take around 60% of all current white collar jobs and computerise them. That’s called evolution by the way. If your day is composed of choices that can be robotised, like HR, like Motivating others, Like sales. Then you would be wise to Systematise your job too. And use that extra time to get more done. The average Speaking Speed Rate is 150 wpm (2.5 words per second) – The average typing speed is around 40 words per minute (wpm). If you want to be very productive, you should aim for a typing speed of 65 to 70 words per minute. In other words at full speed you can type at half the speed you speak. So it would seem logical that you speak your emails instead of typing them. Are YOU still typing stuff. Well welcome to A.I replacing you soon! That’s not a threat. It’s a promise. But that’s the tip of the iceberg: Because the listening speed of humans is normally faster than the speaking speed, and thus the recording speed of an audiobook, many people listen to an audiobook (podcast) at 1.5 to 2 times faster than the recorded speed. So, here’s the rub. If you are still reading books, you’re wasting time. If you are still communicating inter-office in writing you’re wasting time. If you’re still listening to people on Teams and Zoom at normal speed you are wasting time. Time that you do not have. How to get more done in less time. Talk faster, say less words in the same time. That doesn’t mean you actually talk faster. You talk at the same speed but you get to the bloody point. You structure what you say in a clever way to engage the listener. In other words, you, like me, must learn to be a professional speaker because it will, in daily life, save you time, keep people focussed on you and get your message across. Plus typing is one of the fastest ways to break the energy storage of personal magnetism (another later topic in Success Formula). So why do we resist sending audio messages and listening to others at 2 times speed? Because we don’t know how? Voice text messages are standard on iPhone. Loom videos have replaced emails (you can even draw on the screen while talking). Podcast apps have speed controls and we can even exceed 2.5 times the talking speed. The reason we resist this is because we are not always focussed on listening or speaking and so, for example, typing you can cut away from, boil the kettle and take a pee but talking maybe not. To talk an email or letter you need a structure you repeat that brings focus to the listener. To present at a meeting is different because you can’t speed up what you say, Then you use visuals to help keep focus. So, this is all what you learn with a couple of tigers in the house with Covid isolations. To get to the point. To engage your imagination before you speak. To inspire them in the way I structure my “presentations” and recognise that what they are watching on TV is going at light speed faster than words, faster than listening, it’s going at the speed of sight and that. In business is the future of your job, or what’s left of your job after the Big Four consultancies productise the A.I software they are creating to reduce middle management numbers by 50% over the next 5 years. So, SUCCESS FORMULA is not just about improving your way of communicating, leading and loving your family but about rising up above the tide and not being one of the soon to be unemployed ordinary thinkers. I’m reaching out from within the Lockdown with a great coaching offer, come on, evolve.