Increase Your Personal Energy Levels With This Advice From A Master Coach Gavin Shaskolsky has coached over 1 000 business leaders. This is his advice to getting the most from yourself and your team.
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Vital Stats
Player: Gavin Shaskolsky
What he does: Master coach
Company: Tidal
Visit: tidalpool.co.za and gavinshaskolsky.co.za
As a global leadership coach who has coached over 1 000 business leaders across more than 50 countries, Gavin Shaskolsky believes in transforming and leveraging people capabilities.
Through his affiliation with Tidal, an organisation made up of a pool of like-minded partners, Gavin focuses on shifting behaviours in ourselves and within our organisations.
He chatted to Entrepreneur about what it takes to be a successful, results-orientated leader.
Q. What is the most impactful business advice you have ever received?
To focus on relationships as they are the heartbeat of your sustainable success long term. The more central you make relationships, the more value you will add to your customers, employees, partners and society as a whole.
Related: Video: How Personal Core Values Impact Our Success
Q. What are your key productivity behaviours that help you stay focused and calm?
To make time for reflection and planning on a daily basis. I work on only one thing at a time, especially if I'm wanting to think or be creative – then I switch off everything that might distract me.
I've also learnt the importance of managing devices, especially a phone as it eats away chunks of time and energy.
Make time to exercise and eat well, plus sleep effectively. When you travel, use your transition and in-transit times well to reflect, recover and think, rather than just do stuff.
Q. Have you changed anything in your approach to life and business as you've gained experience?
I have learnt that managing energy rather than time is the critical ingredient to long-term fulfillment and sustainable success.
This means that I manage my energy in my day by having solid habits in place outside of my working day as well as within it. I make sure I oscillate between exerting energy to perform and taking time to recover my energy.
Related: Video: Experts Weigh In On The Best Advice They Would Give Themselves
For example, when I finish an important meeting, I don't hop straight onto my device or email. I take time to capture my thoughts, to take a short walking break or to have a conversation with a key person in the room. This enables me to manage my energy, attention and impact.
Q. What is the importance of modeling behaviours for your team?
It's important to be clear about my values and then build my purpose and vision off this. In this way it's less about role modelling for the sake of it, but more about being clear, authentic and deliberate in how I behave and lead myself and others.
So, in a sense I live aligned to my core values and these behaviours become the role model for the culture and people around me.
Q. Are you purposeful in your own self-learning?
I take time out to attend courses both online and in person, to ensure I am constantly learning and growing.
I love listening to podcasts and enriching myself through the lessons and stories they teach me. I journal and reflect regularly to extract learnings, create ideas and plan things out intentionally. I dedicate time to meditate, which is the best teacher about myself, my leadership and my life in general.
Related: Personal Brand or Business Brand: Which is More Important?
Q. What do you know today that you wish you'd known ten years ago?
That relationships and people are the most important engine for driving my business. Whether it's my clients, partners or key talent, taking time to invest in people is the sustainable key to success.
Q. What would you train your kids from a young age on when it comes to business lessons and why?
To take time out to think and reflect with themselves and with their key stakeholders. Otherwise we land up just doing, reacting and running around in a cloud of noise.
By being deliberate about habits that promote reflection, learning and thinking, we set ourselves apart from the average person who motors ahead without considering past mistakes, successes and how to adjust in a real-time agile way to our world.
I also believe it's important to manage our emotions and put ourselves in other people's shoes. This enables us to build empathy and understanding, which increases the range of alignment, strong relationships and sustainable results we are capable of.
Related: The Best Advice I Ever Got
