There is a great concept created by Brian Tracy called “Eat that Frog”. If you are a Queenslander, then worse than eating a frog is eating a toad!
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Imagine you have a toad on your dinner plate, along with your creamy mash potato, steaming cob of corn with butter and salt, plus perhaps some pan seared fillet steak. What happens? You push around the ‘yucky’ item over your plate, you procrastinate on it, and probably instead you eat everything else. You don’t enjoy the meal, because there is that disgusting toad yet to be eaten. That feeling of dread stays with you the entire meal time.
Now relate this to business. On our plate each day we have tasks we absolutely dislike. They are our toads. It might be debt collecting, or doing our bookkeeping, or having that unpleasant discussion with a wayward staff member. We know it has to happen, we don’t want to do it, so we just avoid. We keep skirting around that task, dreading it, not enjoying our day and procrastinating. These are things you have to do – if you don’t ring up your debtors and ask to be paid, your cash flow is likely to become so poor, you will soon be in financial strife.
May I suggest instead you eat the toad first! Look at your list of things to do each morning and identify the ‘toad’ in the list. Do it first! Get it out of the way. You now are free to enjoy the rest of your day, be productive and happy and know that the critical things have been done and dusted. Try it this week and see just how effective it is. Once you ‘eat your toad’ it’s a weight that has been lifted and you can move onto the more enjoyable tasks
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