1️⃣0️⃣ years ago, I did something that changed the course of my life forever. In 2013, I received two stents due to severe blockages in my arteries. It was a wake-up call that made me realize life is too short to waste.

2️⃣ I decided to follow my passion and become a professional speaker. Being on stage and sharing my story became my purpose. I knew I had to do it. I wanted to inspire others to take control of their lives and pursue their dreams. At the age of 15 my late father Aubrey z"l took me to toastmasters for the first time and I found my place on stage.

Today we're going to look at experts. It took me many years of my life to not only acknowledge the experts around me, and to value them. My immature ego got in the way for many years of being able to acknowledge that there were actually people around me who knew more about a particular topic and could actually assist me in a whole variety of ways.

I often joke that I have the attention span of a goldfish.

Where did that come from? My natural work pattern is a soundbite type where I'm driven by short bursts of high energy to complete short tasks. And having been in finance for the last 21 years, there are often times where I need to change my behavior to suit the tasks that I have to complete.

In simple terms first means deal with the hard stuff FIRST. Deal with the difficult tasks first because once you conquer those then the easy stuff is even easier because you've dealt with the hard stuff.

When I started my financial services group and started employing staff there was no real process of managing files. My staff would walk in every morning and be faced with the mountain of files in one pile. As we got busier I started noticing that the more difficult files just seem to take a lot longer. The natural tendency of the staff was to look at the file and say “Oh, that's too hard. I'll deal with it later” and then put that file at the middle or bottom of the pile.

This got me thinking about the work I do with individuals and business around being excellent. - “showing up as the best version of yourself every day”. If we can show up every time we exercise as the “strongest version of ourselves” then why can't we show up every day as excellent, being the best version of ourselves?

In many sci-fi movies they talk about force fields. How about having an excellence FIELD around you. These five areas will give you some ideas on developing your journey to excellence

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

Most organizations have quite extensive financial reporting systems (the hard stuff), whilst very little to report on the journey to excellence (the soft stuff). The most common measure of performance is financial. The challenge with financial measures is that they show a point in time that is often unrelated to the activity that brought the organization to that point.

I believe that we should be the one who believes in your player’s innate ability and encourages them to be excellent. Each individual member of their team has their own strengths, weaknesses and lived experience that will inform how they show up in any situation. It’s the excellent coach who can harness their team’s innate abilities and balance that with business goals and overarching team desires. That’s how you can create an excellent team.

Unsure how to become the best coach? Or overwhelmed by how to truly tap into the best of those around you? Don’t stress. Coaching, managing, leading a team- whatever word you use, is a skill that needs to be learned and acquired just like any other.

The Business Excellence Indicator (BEI) is, as the name implies, an indicator of the excellence of the business. Excellence is showing up as the best version of yourself (or your company) every day

One of the best leadership lessons I was fortunate enough to learn is that the best way to lead your people is to ask how can I help you fix this? How can I help you through this challenge?

Many years ago, one of my team who was relatively new at the office came in one morning and said “I woke up at 3 this morning and I was worried about client XXX”. My response was “welcome to my world”.

Culture has become the buzzword of the decade and organizations still struggle to find a path to creating rich and robust culture and business excellence. Once achieved this yields a measurable return on culture.