So what has trust got to do with saving time!!

The theme of trust has been in the air lately for different clients with different challenges but at the bottom of it is an inability to trust others and this has the ultimate consequence that they are not fulfilling their own business, professional and financial potential.

For example, one client has been successfully running her own design business but has reached a bottleneck. Whenever I see her she is speaking at breakneck speed, travelling from one place to another and describing one practical catastrophe after another - the car breaks down, her mobile phone is been lost.

Whenever we have an appointment, I can plan around the fact that I know she will reschedule during the last minute and delay our meeting at least half an hour.

She said she really wanted and needed help but rescheduled several times because of issues that came up last minute. When we finally got together for her time management consultation (35 minutes later than originally scheduled) we reviewed many of the basics about her situation. For example, we reviewed her personal and professional goals, plans and ambitions, her background skills and education, including communication skills, management and leadership skills. It emerged that although her core business is design, she had a gift for sales and business development but her main weakness was in delegation.

She really found it very difficult to delegate to others in specific important ways related to her work. She was quite aware this held her back but didn't know what to do about it. It emerged that she found it difficult to trust anyone. If she won business from an existing or new client, this was very valuable to her it meant potential and real income as well as reputation and she did not want to risk delegating this work to someone else who may not do it to the same standards of quality as herself. Yet she was facing up to the fact that she was generating so much business and making so many new commitments that she could not fulfil them and quality was actually compromised.

I proposed to her that until she can trust herself she would not be able to trust anyone else. This seemed a revolutionary idea to her, which confirmed to me that we had hit on the way to make a dramatic and quantifiable difference to her time management, her work-life balance and to her income potential. We came up with a number of ways she could learn to trust herself that would fit in to her own personality and current lifestyle.

Lack of trust in others is a very common issue, but we can learn to trust ourselves, it is a learning process that can take time, and may include some painful mistakes, but in the end the implications will make a dramatic impact onto how you manage your time energy and money, and this will have a direct impact on your income not to mention your quality of life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said ‘Self-trust is the first secret of success.’ In The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind,’ Richard Wiseman has found through extensive research that four behaviour traits are characteristic of those who consider themselves to be lucky, and these behaviours can be learned. One of these behaviours is to trust our own hunches and gut feelings. Even in his incredible book about his experiences in concentration camps, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl found that trusting one’s gut feeling or hunches is far more successful as a survival strategy than trying to second guess the prison guards.

Being able to delegate is essential to developing a strong support network and team. So by learning to trust ones self, we are more able to make wise decisions about we else we can trust. We are then better able to share our responsibilities appropriately and save time, energy and money!