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Paul Casey is an expert in time management and leadership and a professional speaker who has spoken for companies like McDonald’s and Subway.  Through his company, Growing Forward Services, he partners with corporations and individual clients to transform their vision, habits, and lives.

In this episode, we talk about the immediate and long-term things you can do to determine what your priorities need to be, how to tell when it’s time to reevaluate those priorities,  what you can do to take back your calendar, the four personality types he uses with his clients, how each type approaches important and urgent things on their to-do list differently, and his main advice for getting people to buy into your vision, which is a big piece of what we talked here at Voice of Influence.

Take a listen to the episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Paul Casey’s Website
• Paul Casey’s Podcast | Tri-Cities Influencer Podcast
• Paul Casey’s Book | Leading with Super-Vision
• Paul Casey’s Book | Maximizing Every Minute
• Paul Casey’s Restore My Sanity Time Management Course
• Paul Casey’s Control My Calendar Checklist
• Ian Morgan Cron’s Enneagram Assessment
• The Myers & Briggs Foundation
• Personal Growth Insights (Animal Style Assessment)
• The Eisenhower Matrix

 

Transcript

People of influence know that their voice matters, but they work to make it matter more.  I’m Andrea Wenburg, and this is the Voice of Influence podcast.

Do you ever feel like your calendar is just out of control?  Like, you think that you have things on your calendar in a way that it’s going to work for you, but then things come up – urgent things, fires that you need to put out – and all of a sudden, the things that you put on your calendar you have to move to a new day, put it on the back burner, and maybe it just never gets done.

Well, today, I’ve got Paul Casey on the line, and Paul is an expert in time management and leadership.  Paul is a professional speaker and has spoken for McDonald’s, Subway, and a bunch of amazing companies. He, through his company Growing Forward Services, really partners with corporate and individual clients to transform their vision, habits, and their lives.  And today, he’s going to share with us some very helpful advice for being more intentional with your time as a voice of influence.

We talk about the immediate and long-term things that you can do to really determine what your priorities need to be.  And we talk about how those shift; it may not always be the exact same thing. So, then also, what are those specific things that you can do to take back your calendar or to make those shifts that you need to make as your priorities change?  We talk about four personality types – they’re fun, very fun personality types – and how each one really approaches important and urgent things on their to-do list differently.

And then finally, he also offers a really valuable tip on how to get buy-in on your vision, which is a big piece of what we talked here at Voice of Influence.  So, I hope that you enjoy this conversation with Paul Casey.

Andrea:  All right, Paul Casey, it is great to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Paul Casey:  Super to be here, Andrea.

Andrea:  Paul, tell us a little bit about what you do.

Paul Casey:  Yeah.  So, my mission in life is to…

Andrea:  I love it.  I love that you’re starting with mission because we’re so in sync with that idea of it all begins with a mission. 

Paul Casey:  It does, it does, yes.  My mission is to equip and coach leaders and teams to spark breakthrough success.  So, that’s my overarching, like, why I do what I do. And I do that through number one; leadership coaching, through team building seminars and workshops, leadership and self-leadership.  Got my own little local podcast here where I interview leaders, and I’ve written a few little mini books on leadership and self-leadership.

Andrea:  Okay, so, you help them spark breakthrough success.  What does that mean?

Paul Casey:  Well, I think that everyone inside of them has this spark that needs to be lit or maybe it’s the match that needs to be lit.  And as a coach, I can come alongside them, and by asking powerful questions, really get them re-familiar with themselves through assessment tools or just sort of probing deep inside them for what they really want to do with their life, or in their business, or as an entrepreneur.

Andrea:  And then it somehow breaks through?   What is it breaking through?

Paul Casey:  Boy, I love it.  Sometimes it’s just the day to day humdrum, you know, “I don’t know if I’m making a difference.  I’m going to my job. I’m going through the motions. I think I am, but I don’t know if this is my life purpose.  I don’t know if this is where I should be on this team forever.” And that breakthrough happens when that insight, like, “Man, I don’t know if I need to be doing this long term,” or “Maybe I should seek that promotion,” or “Maybe I should launch a business.”  It’s so fun to be on the front lines of that.

Andrea:  What kinds of things do you find that have made a difference in helping people become more self-aware, that sort of thing?  It sounds like you were talking about assessments and questions. Does that self-awareness then help them to understand who they are so that they can do those things?  Is that what you’re saying?

Paul Casey:  That’s where I start with people.  I think Ian Morgan Cron – he does the Enneagram survey – he says, “Self-knowledge leads to self-awareness.”  And I had never thought about it that way ‘cause I usually just start with self-awareness, but the self-knowledge piece is all those assessment tools – whether that’s Myers-Briggs or the Disc or I do the animal styles because I think that one is more fun, whether you do mapping of your aspirations…  Got a whole bag of tricks that I utilize with clients until they’ve got this sort of comprehensive snapshot on them, and the client looks at that and goes, “Wow, that’s who I am. So, this is where I need to go.”

Andrea:  Okay.  I know that you’re known as the Calendar Guy…

Paul Casey:  The Calendar Coach.

Andrea:  The Calendar Coach, the Calendar Coach.  Why is that? What is the Calendar Coach?

Paul Casey:  Yeah, I realized that when it comes to leadership training and just your own self-leadership, we live in a context of time.  And most of my clients, if not all of them, if you follow what they’re frustrated about back… you know, follow it down to its rabbit hole, you would find a time management issue somewhere there that they’re either not using their time to do their priorities, or they’re living out someone else’s script, so to speak, and they just don’t have control of their calendars.  So, I thought if I try to niche in this area, it might reduce anxiety in leaders, it might give them more peace of mind that all the priorities in their life are given the focused attention they deserve.

Andrea:  I love that!  What are some of the ways that you do that?

Paul Casey:  Well, I try to give them some structure.  So, I have a little model – it’s a mouthful, but the fulcrum framework for focus – a lot of F words, but they’re all positive F words.  And in this little model, it looks like a teeter-totter, which we all grew up with, which now I think they say is unsafe on playgrounds but I still liked it.

Andrea:  Right.

Paul Casey:  The little triangle in the middle where it balances the two sides, I like to think of that as work and life.  And we’ve heard of work-life balance, I don’t know if I agree with that. It’s more like work-life rhythm or work-life integration.  And a speaker I listened to years ago said, “It’s not balance. You just need to move that fulcrum, that triangle, left or right based on what you need more in your life.”  Do you need more time at work, are you slacking there? Your clients have big deadlines, or you need to move more into the life side where your spouse or plus-one needs more of your time or your children need more of your time.  Or you’ve got a parent that’s going into assisted living, and you’ve got to give that more of your time. So, my model is that fulcrum.

And so, my time management system is based on forming that foundation of what matters most, figure out how you’re going to work your ideal week in your calendar, then daily managing that – that’s the self-discipline part.  And then trying to avoid those barriers that are going to come against your beautiful system of time management when sort of life punches you in the face, and it’s like, “Oh, that didn’t work out how I like to do it.”

Andrea:  The need to re-evaluate comes to mind.  You were talking about how sometimes you need to spend more time with your kids or you need to focus on them more, or you might need to focus on your work more.  How do you know when it’s time to re-evaluate? Do you give people like a schedule, like you should do this on a schedule, or is there a different way that you encourage people to decide when to re-evaluate?

Paul Casey:  I’d say two things; one would be to read your own gauges.  We all have gauges sort of like in a cockpit or in your car on your dashboard.  There are gauges that run a little hot every so often. And for me, like, I’ve got ideas all over the place as an entrepreneur.  And when I go blank, like I just go dark and I have no idea, that’s the gauge for me, that’s like, “Oh my goodness, you are way into the workaholic mode, and you need to get some white space in your life, Paul, in order to get those ideas back”

Or when I’m more irritable…  When I’m usually a peaceful person and I’m more irritable or you know, maybe lash out at someone I love and it’s like, “Well, that’s not me or that’s not who I wanna be.”  So, reading your own gauges – everybody’s got their own gauge that they’re typically a peaceful person now they’re more angry. That would be a time to re-evaluate.

The second thing I would respond to that question by saying is you’ve got to build in these regular checkpoints.  So, I have a daily preview, a weekly preview, and a monthly preview. Actually, I’ve got an annual one as well that I do use around the first of the year.  They call it DWMY; daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. I love that little acronym – DWMY. So, you build in those checkpoints, and that is a time where you stop.  You get to quiet and solitude, and you say, “How am I doing?”

Andrea:  Yeah.  I think that that makes a lot of sense.  I love the metaphor of the gauges. I know that one of those for me is how much tension I’m feeling.  That usually comes out in my irritability like you mentioned. If I’m irritable or feeling tense, then I know that there’s something off, and I need to take a step back and look at it.

Paul Casey:  Yeah, your body’s giving you signals all the time, and that tension probably is one of those signals.

Andrea:  Hmm.  So, what kinds of things can people do to actually move the fulcrum?

Paul Casey:  I would say the first thing – and there’s a few that really move the needle for me as I was studying this for like twenty years – and the one I always start with is have that weekly or that daily review and preview in the last half hour of your day.  So, if you’re a nine-to-fiver and 4:30… I call it the 4:30 preview. And what you do during that half hour is you stop what you’re doing, sort of call the day a hard stop. If you’re an entrepreneur at home, you know, sometime before you go to bed.

And then you look at tomorrow and you decide, “What are my top three priorities for tomorrow?”  If you can nail those down today, there’s help in that work-life rhythm process to say, “I’m done with today.”  When you come in the morning, you’re like, “I don’t have to shift all this paperwork on my desk. I know what my big three are.”  And actually, research shows that your brain works on problems while you sleep. So, sometimes you come up with great ideas that will help solve the problems of the new day while you’re sleeping.  And in the shower you wake up with like, “A-ha, I’ve got the idea.” You know, it’s just such a wonderful feeling to think about like, “My brain’s been working on that while I sleep.”

So, that’s the first one would be the daily preview and that can be a super fun time… actually, it is for me; maybe I’m a nerd at this stuff – but I also use that to clean up my desk, and take all those nasty post-it notes and put them onto one list, and just basically call this day a wrap.

The second thing I would say what to do is to make appointments with yourself.  This was a game-changer for me. And this is where you take your priorities, and you actually build them in your calendar as if it’s an appointment with a friend or a client.  Because you would never stand up a client at a coffee shop and say, “Nope, I’m just not gonna come today.” You know, you would lose clients, you would lose your friends pretty quickly if you just sort of blew them off like that.  So, why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we not respect ourselves enough to honor these priorities? So, I find that by building them into my calendar as if it’s an appointment when it pops up, I either have to dismiss it or snooze it, and I don’t want to do either.  So, I just get down to work and do that thing at that appointed time.

Andrea:  Oh man, calendaring time for yourself to even just think about things that you need to think about, I think, is really, really powerful for somebody who wants to be successful.

Paul Casey:  Yeah.  Thinking time is huge.  And with my leader clients, I would say 100% of them say, “I don’t spend enough time in thinking.  Like when I want to put it on my calendar, that’s what I blow off. Like, I know I need to do thinking time, but then I just blow right through that and do more urgent things instead.”  But that’s where the breakthroughs actually happen is in that solitude, that quiet thinking time.

Andrea:  Okay.  So, people can… if they’re wanting to move the fulcrum, if they are wanting to make a shift, they know that they’ve identified that they need to do that, they need to shift in their focus or in their time – then they need to maybe check in with themselves once a day, maybe pay attention to these internal gauges.  I feel like there must be something else that you do that helps people to actually shift their priority.

Paul Casey:  Yeah.  Actually, to back up, you’re right, I was diving right into the tips.  But I would say that some of the activities that I get to do with clients… like Your One Year Vision for Your Life is a great activity to do.

Andrea:  Sure.

Paul Casey:  This is where people, they really wrestle with, “Well, yeah, a year from now, in 2021, I wanna be a better dad.  I wanna start my own business or a second business. I just wanna be different than I am now. I’ve gotta get more hobbies into my life.”  Whatever it is for them, it’s such a fun activity for them to envision out, and they’ve never taken the time to do it. That way we can back into all these strategies with, “Okay, how we gonna get there?  What’s the first step that we can take in that?”

The other activity I’ll do with them on the front end is what do I need more in my life right now?  I’ve got a list of probably thirty or forty words. It can be everything from affection to purpose. There’s like thirty or forty words, and I have them just circle all the things that when you look at that where you’re like, “Yes, I need more of that in my life right now.”  And those are motivators that sort of tap into your drive to say, “All right, I need to get my time management under wrap in order to get this stuff.”

Andrea:  Cool.  Those are really great tips.  So, how do you see all of this really impacting a person who wants to have a voice of influence?

Paul Casey:  That in order to have a voice of influence, you’ve got to be intentional with everything you do in life.  We all live in the constraints of time. We all have the same amount of hours in the day, we keep hearing that.  So, how are we going to use that? It’s not the amount of time that we have in the day; it’s the intentionality that we tend to use.

So, I find that persons of influence have this…  They live with this sense of intentionality, both in their personal life and in their professional life.  When they go to work, they think about, “These are the things I need to keep on my radar. Development of my people, gotta keep that on my radar.  The vision for the organization, gotta keep that on my radar.” And what I’ve found, Andrea, is it’s not the urgent; that becomes firefighting and that becomes exhausting.  It’s the important.

And I’ll even do that little Stephen Covey graph, you know, of urgent and important.  It’s called the Eisenhower Matrix. It’s a nice activity to make them think about Quadrant 2, which is the non-urgent but important quadrant.  If you do those things, you move the needle forward. If you don’t do them, there’s no immediate consequence, but over time, it’s going to kick your tail.  You’ve really got to put some emphasis on that.

Andrea:  Yeah, I’ve had clients that have really wanted to get into that Quadrant 2 and focus on the important things, but they really struggle because it feels like everything is urgent and everything feels that it needs to be dealt with immediately, I guess.  And the people that are asking them to do that, they feel responsible to or for. I found that there might be some internal stuff going on that keeps people in the urgent quadrant. Have you found that to be true?

Paul Casey:  Yes, and I know that may drift even into a little bit of therapy and counseling and then coaching and mentoring.

Andrea:  Right.

Paul Casey:  But you’ve got to wrestle with that stuff.

Andrea:  We do.

Paul Casey:  Because it could be that I am making excuses for something hard that I have to do that every time I approach something hard, I’m going to find a back door or chicken exit – you know, like in the roller coaster – that I tend to take that chicken exit because I don’t want to deal with that difficult thing because I had a failure somewhere in my past.  Or yeah, there’s some issue that’s holding me back.

Andrea:  Another one that’s come up for me that I’ve noticed is just that desire to be liked, the desire to please people, because it seems like that is more fulfilling in the moment with those urgent things.  If you can say yes right now to this person who’s in front of you, that feels better than saying no to them and saying yes to something that’s more important.

Paul Casey:  Huh, that’s a good one.  That’s a good one. Some of us are pleasers.  Like I said, I do the personality style, the animal one.  And it’s Lion, Otter, Golden Retriever, and Beaver. Yeah, the Golden Retriever style – that one is the pleaser style because they hate conflict, and so they do like exactly what you said.  They just want to please other people and make everything back to harmony again. But when they say yes to all these external people and circumstances, they’re saying no to themselves and their true purpose, and then they get little resentful over time.  And Golden Retrievers are usually pretty quiet, but they can turn into a volcano if they get resentful over time, like, “Man, I’m just giving my whole life away, and I haven’t said no enough.” And it really hurts their work-life balance.

Andrea:  Hmm and then they become resentful and that can be really damaging.  Okay, so Golden Retriever.  Take us into this assessment a little bit here.  What are the four different archetypes that you’re talking about?  Golden Retrievers, which I think we all kind of get it now…

Paul Casey:  Yeah, Golden Retriever – they’re the team players.  They love to listen. They’re everybody’s best friend.  People dump on them all the time, you know, with their problems because they have empathy and just stability and conscientiousness.  Of course, all of our strengths have weaknesses if they’re overdone. They hate conflicts; they hate change; they’re very slow into actions, slow into decisions; and they can become a little passive-aggressive when they get pushed.

The Lion personality style is the driver.  It is the bold, direct, courageous, good decision maker, action-oriented.  They love metric. They love getting it done. But when their strength overdone becomes a weakness, they can be too blunt.  They just blurt out stuff. They can be impulsive. They’re very impatient. They can put feelings to the side, like, “Yeah, we’ll deal with those later.”  And they can become workaholics. So, they really have trouble relaxing.

And then we have the Otter personality style.  I love the otters in the zoo or in the aquarium.  They’re always just playing eating off their chest, you know, having a great time.  These are the playful people. They love to have fun. They make smart-aleck comments a lot of the time.  They’re super creative, super spontaneous. They love the start of things. They’re great salespeople. But overdone, their strength turns into weaknesses by being maybe a little flighty.  They don’t like the details of jobs. They can get bored. They can talk a little too much or be on the drama train maybe a little too much.

And then we have the Beaver style.  Beaver is, of course, busy as a beaver.  So, they are organized, planned, structured, alphabetized, and color-coded.  They’ve got systems for everything. They love a good system. They love a sexy spreadsheet, so it’s all about data and research.  But their overdone strength that becomes a weakness when they can get down in the weeds too deep. When they can get too heady or intellectual, it makes people go like, “Are you okay?”  They can get very critical of themselves in their own head which makes them critical and frowning on the outside of others. And they have that paralysis of analysis. So, those are the four types.

Andrea:  Yeah, those are good.  I mean, I love all personality assessments, total assessment junkie.  But those are fun, and I think that people can probably look at that very easily and say, “This is who I am for sure.”  So, for each of these different people, you talked about the Golden Retrievers and how they’re going to tend toward the urgent quadrant that we were talking about before because they’re concerned about what other people think.  Do you see any particular pitfalls that you would want to point out about the Lion, Otter, the Beaver and why they would focus on the urgent?

Paul Casey:  Yeah, I think the Lion because they’re all about results – if somebody comes in with a problem, they’re like, “Solve it now.”  They’re like, “I don’t need this to they even go on a checklist anywhere. Like, get those people in this office right now.” I actually had a boss like that.  He said, “We need to make budget cuts. We gonna cut $100,000 out of this budget right now.” And I went, “Let me go get my notes.” He closed the door and he goes, “You didn’t hear me, we’re not leaving this office until it happens.”  Now, that’s a Lion on steroids, you know. It made a little scared, actually. So, they’re just so into solving it now because it’s just one more thing on their list.

The Otter deals with it because they’re super impulsive.  I mean, they go into an appliance store and say, “Oh, that dryer is red.  I want that one.” I mean, they won’t even think about the budget or the consumer reports of what makes a good one.  They’re just impulsive, and so they’re just going to deal with it and it’s sort of fun for them like, “Hey, let’s just solve that problem now and let’s come up with a brainstorming session to solve ten things right now.”  So, they don’t use a structure.

The Golden Retriever we said is the pleaser, so they’re going to say yes to everybody.

And then the Beaver – they don’t often deal with the urgent because they have systems for everything.  So, that one is probably the easiest one to apply time management principles.

Andrea: Okay, that’s fun, thank you for sharing that.  So, when you apply all these to leadership, to – again, having that voice of influence – what kind of advice would you give somebody who wants to have a voice of influence?  And maybe they do have a voice of influence, but their calendar is just getting in the way?

Paul Casey:  I think that’s what I said earlier of the vision.  You got to have a vision for yourself, you got to have a vision for your team, and you got to buy-in to the vision of the organization, especially for the middle management and not the CEO.  If you are the CEO, you need that vision for your business. You’ve got to keep that crystal clear in your mind, and it can’t be a binder on a shelf. It has to be in front of you at all times, because influence is only going to happen if you stay aligned with that vision that you have.  Not everybody’s bought into or if it’s on your own that you have to say, “This is who I wanna be someday and this is where my business to be.”

So, that’s where time management kicks in and then you align, “What I’m going to do today and this week and this month and this quarter and this year with that vision?”  And it’s pretty cool how then a year later, you wake up, you’re in a different place, a better place because of all the things you’ve put in place to get to that vision.

Andrea:  Hmm, and you just mentioned getting other folks to buy into that vision.  Do you have any particular tips or suggestions on how people can do that? 

Paul Casey:  Good segway.  I just wrote a book on that, Andrea, Leading with Super-Vision.  And so yeah, there are three things; you’ve got to, of course, have that vision on your own.  You’ve got to craft it and you got to cast it which I think is what you’re sharing and then you got to carry it for the long term.  So that casting has to be pretty strategic because in the crafting part, you’ve got to get your constituents onboard by listening. Listen, listen, listen – what are their aspirations, their dreams for this team and how does their job align with a potential vision.  When you make that vision, then you got to cast it.

I would cast it very strategically.  I would start with the number one influence in your company.   They’re on your team. You’ve got to win that person over first.  If you win that person over, it’s going to downhill from there. It will be good.  Then you’ve got to win over your core team and listen, listen, listen to see if there are roadblocks.  Because if you win over those closest to you, your inner circle, you’re probably not going to win over the masses – the rest of the team.

So, it feels like intrinsic circles working out.  Win over the one in the core team, and then the early adaptors, and then you go out to the whole team.  And by doing it systematically, I found that leaders that do that had better buy-in of the vision.

Andrea:  Hmm, I love that.  I love the idea of getting people to buy-in because how can one really have influence if others don’t truly buy-in.  You can certainly tell people what to do, but that doesn’t mean that they have changed internally about it. So, being able to get those folks who are closest to you first to make sure that they have bought in before you move on, I think – or at least as you’re moving – definitely makes a lot of sense.

Paul Casey:  You’re so right.  I mean, if you don’t do that, people are going to default back to their old habits.  And they’re just going to think, this is flavor-of-the-month and, “Oh, it’s gonna go away in a year.  They’re gonna come up with something new.” “I’m gonna outlive this leader at this company and I can go back to the way that I want do it.”  If they’re not bought in… it’s actually one of the five dysfunctions of a team, you know, that there’s no commitment then.

Andrea:  So true.  Okay, where can people find you and your books and your offerings?

Paul Casey:  Yeah.  I’m at paulcasey.org, not the paulcasey.com because that’s the professional golfer.  And I’m just the duffer, so don’t go there. Paulcasey.org is where you will go to find out all of my services, specifically for time management.  I’ve written a book called Maximizing Every Minute where I’ve put much of my time management hacks into that.  So, you’ll see that on the site. I also have a time management online course called Restoring My Sanity.  And sometimes just that gets people like, “Yes, I so want that.”

There’s entry points during the year to get in on that where I go through all these tools that’s I’ve shared with your listeners today.  And then finally, I’ve got a free gift for everybody. It is a Control My Calendar Checklist if you just want to embark on this journey of getting your life back on track.  And so, they can get that via takebackmycalendar.com or you can text the word “growing” to 72000. So, open a text to 72000 and text the word “growing”.

Andrea:  Excellent.  And does the capitalization matter on that word “growing”?

Paul Casey:  No.

Andrea:  Okay, fantastic.  Well, this has been great.  Thank you so much, Paul, for sharing how people can be more intentional with their time so that they can really have a Voice of Influence.

Paul Casey:  It has been a pleasure.  Keep growing forward, everyone!