Would you like to reclaim your evenings and weekends?

Reduced stress levels. Improved productivity. Enjoying your working afternoons. Greater control. Reclaiming your evenings and weekends to keep work within working hours. 

This all sounds like a pipe dream, doesn’t it? 

However, it’s perfectly possible, as John Dabrowski will demonstrate at his Vistage Productivity Masterclass on June 25th.

John himself knows very well how vital mental resilience is to success. Born to Polish parents, he was fluent in Polish but couldn’t speak a word of English when he started school. “I remember standing up in class and having to read from a book: I tried my best, but I just couldn’t”, he recalls. “All I remember was the other kids sniggering and laughing.”

By the age of 12, John was 6’3”. “I was gangly and useless”, he says. “In one PE lesson, the teacher lined us up against the wall to be picked. I wasn’t picked at all: the teacher had to put me into a group and that destroyed me.”

After that, he made excuse after excuse to avoid PE lessons, until a trip to Poland to visit his uncle. “He was six feet tall and played basketball for the Polish Army”, says John. “I’d never heard of basketball before, and got excited about this new sport.”

He came back to England, persuaded his mum to buy him a basketball, and practised until he believed he was good enough for the England under-19s trials. He failed the trial. With the mental resilience he’d developed throughout his childhood, though, he persisted, and the following year he made the under-19s team. “I then made the full England team, then the Great Britain team”, says John. “I played professionally for a few years, then went into basketball management, before starting my own business – which failed.”

John spent the next 35 years in sales and marketing: a period during which he was made redundant three times, went personally bankrupt once, married twice and divorced twice. “At the age of 56, I was in thousands of pounds of debt, living with my mum in the same bedroom I grew up in and working as a painter-decorator for £70 a day”, he recalls. 

That was, until he was given a DVD about changing his mindset. “I was in a bad place, so I thought it was stupid at first”, he says. “But then, they said something that changed my life. They told me I could change my future by changing the way I think, the way I speak, the way I act. I decided to prove it didn’t work by following their techniques. I was wrong.”

Since then, John has spoken and trained both in the UK and abroad, published two books, and worked with major businesses including Rolls-Royce and Siemens: living proof that changing your mindset really can change your life. 

Resilience and productivity
John’s career shift began with mental resilience coaching. “However, it always ended up with clients wanting to get on top of their workload, because that’s where the stress was”, he says. 

Mental resilience and productivity are intrinsically linked. Disorganisation, a lack of productivity and a failure to be managed well are among the biggest causes of stress, says John. Business leaders need to be able to deal with stress and adversity while maintaining a calm exterior. 

Our mindset can also affect the way we manage our time and priorities in a high-pressure business environment. “Overwhelm is the classic problem”, says John. “There’s always too much to do and not enough time”. 

There may be 20-30 items on your to-do list, so how do you make this less overwhelming? Here, John introduces Steve Peters’ mind management model, The Chimp Paradox. 

“The Chimp is your emotions”, John explains. “Peters created a model where there are three parts of the brain. There’s the human part, which is the rational, calm part, which eats healthy, exercises, does all the right things. There’s the chimp, who’s a bit naughty, always eats the chocolate, doesn’t exercise, loses its temper, gets frightened: it’s basically all your emotions, and always goes for pleasure.”

The third part is the computer: the memory of all of the experiences you have ever had. 

“In any situation, the chimp is the first one to react”, John continues. “It asks what something is, and if it doesn’t get an answer from the computer, it freaks out. If there are too many things to look at, it’s unsettled, it’s not happy. If you don’t have your work organised, the chimp is like that all day long – even when you’re sitting down in front of Netflix, trying to switch off.”

The aim is to calm the chimp down. “By managing the chimp with this system you regain your evenings and weekends”, he explains. “You’ve organised things in such a way that you list off the things you have to do. The chimp knows everything is organised and it can go to sleep – giving you peace in the evenings and at weekends.”

Further tools for success
The Chimp Paradox is just one of several tools that John will introduce in detail in his Vistage session. Those who attend will reclaim their evenings and weekends, improve their sleep and reduce their stress levels. “They’ll feel at peace and in control”, says John. “While they’ll never get to the end of their to-do list, they’ll establish how to manage it better to feel that they have truly achieved something each day, and so that they can switch off at night, knowing they have planned the next day, too.”

While this kind of control may seem like a pipe dream, John has the evidence to prove its success. Join him for his Productivity Masterclass to discover how you can apply his techniques to both your professional and personal life.

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