by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
I am always looking outside the coaching profession to see what others are doing to reduce the time, effort, and energy it takes to get work done so not only can I try it myself, but so I can share it with you all.
Today, the lesson I want to share with you comes from the world of construction.
Do you know what a jig is? No, not the dance move.
A jig is the mechanism used in construction to reduce effort, minimize mistakes, expedient production, and significantly improve results.
I want to explain this because when you find what your jig’s are, they can give you the same superpowers of highly successful people (that you might think everybody else has that you don’t.) Sound good?
A jig is a device that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such a way to make the action go smoothly the same each time without even having to think about it. When a carpenter wants to cut a half a dozen boards to the same length, he or she won’t measure each one, mark it, and then try to guide their saw along the line, cutting one board at a time.
No, that would end up a mess. Likely each board would come out wonky and all sorts of different sizes. Instead he or she uses a jig to guide the process along.
Even if he or she is on a job site and they’re not in their workshop where they would have access to their jig, they will make a jig with whatever is onsite.
They might use the clean line from a freshly laid cinder block wall as a backstop to butt each board up against, and then lay the boards side by side on top of sawhorses. Then they will make measurement of the first board and the last board, and maybe snap a chalk line in between those two marks. Then she’ll tack a straight piece of plywood along that line, traversing the whole a ray of boards and this will serve as a guide for their saw. Then all he or she has to do is slide their saw. Along that plywood edge taking very little mental resources, accuracy, or precision. And Presto, they have six boards cut to perfectly equal length.
So, why should you care about this and how does it apply to you?
What a jig does is reduce the degrees of freedom, the freedom of movement, the freedom of mental choices and decisions that come up in the environment. It stabilizes the process and in doing so, lightens the burden of both memory and muscular control.
Coach, do you have any jigs set up that help you perform your best day after day?
As a coach, a jig is what you want to guide your actions, behaviors, and habits. You want to jigger your environment, your daily processes and your method of operation. You want to find ways of controlling your surroundings for the sake of achieving your purpose with the minimum expenditure of your scarce mental resources.
With the right jig system, you can execute with excellence using far less energy, far less effort, and yet dramatically improve your desired results.
Excellent execution, improved results, and less effort is what you want. Right?
In this newsletter week by week, I try to give you examples of different jigs you could create.
When I applied all of these jig’s that I have shared through this newsletter (master to-do list, Sunday planning, daily planning, email routine, etc) to my own life when I was a full-time coach, I couldn’t believe the results. Now. I’m not kidding the very next year after applying certain jigs, all my metrics doubled. My impact, my influence and my free time doubled.
These college-coach specific jigs are how I set up my guiding system to keep me on focus with the only most essential priorities of my program so that I could execute with excellence and focused effort with very little chance of straying off course all week.
You see that’s the power of a proper jig or system to plan and guide your execution requiring less effort, less energy and less cognitive functions all along the way.
I’m telling you it is a game changer.
Just consider how you start forcing a jig system on your methods of operation.
How do you set up your desk? Your work environment? How do you plan your week? Your day? How do you get dressed in the morning? What’s your entire morning routine? How do you pack for a trip? How do you plan for a team meeting? How do you stock your backpack or your office or your pantry? All these aspects of your environment can act as a jig to guide your execution of excellence, requiring very little effort, physically or mentally and leaving very little chance of straying off course.
Everybody thinks that those that they see on the covers of magazines, make it to Forbes 400, or are winning national championships, that those people have some sort of superpowers or some innate genius or supernatural power that allows them to be more disciplined than you. Or it may seem that they have more self-control or resolve or fortitude than you.
They don’t have superpowers or more discipline.
What they have is a jig.
You can get you one too, if you want to. I can help. Shoot me an email with some days and times that work for you and we can hop on a call to talk over your specific situation.