Recently, I had the opportunity to visit with personal friend and Internation Business Coach/Strategist, Tony Jeary. Tony is known as “The Results Guy” by those who have benefited from his wisdom and experience in successfully helping clients reduce complexity to simplicity in a strategic manner. TJI clients feature big-name icons, and a few highlights include personally advising the presidents of companies like Chrysler, Ford, Walmart, Samsung, TGI Fridays, American Airlines, New York Life, Firestone, and Sam’s Club. Clients also include well-funded start-ups as well as highly successful small and mid-size organizations.
I have always been fascinated with the art of simplicity and Tony has been a primary mentor through my reading of his books and my observations of how Tony works with clients. The word “simplicity” sounds so simple, and one could easily assume – easy to understand. However, businesses and individuals often find themselves in very complex situations. Tony has authored close to 100 books and one of my favorite pocket size books (Tony Jeary) that Tony has published is titled Strategic Simplicity. This small but powerful pocket book can be summarized with a few of the insights Tony explains so frequently in most of his coaching sessions.
“Often people build too much complexity into their lives, and complexity can pull from their joy and happiness. It can drain the strength that enables them to be their best and impact others. Living simply brings a balance to our lives. It’s more than just a trend called minimalism that might carry its torch for a while and then fade away, as most trends do. I believe we can all benefit from bringing more simplicity to our lives for the long haul. I read somewhere that living simply creates space to live our truth. I like that. It becomes a matter of capacity. How full is your cup (your space)? When we fill up our calendars, our minds, our cabinets, our closets, and even our down time to the point of overflow, we don’t have the space to live out the things that are most important. We become defined by what we do and what we have instead of who we are.”
Perhaps my biggest take-a-way from Tony’s approach to strategic simplicity is expressed by the following: “Change your thinking, change your results.” Tony explains how we can achieve strategic simplicity in our lives and our work with his MOLO formula. “MOLO (More Of, Less Of) is a very powerful—and yet very simple—activity that can literally change your life. It’s basically eliminating activities you shouldn’t be doing. First, you want to determine what you want more of and what you want less of, and then you need to determine what you need to do more of and what you need to do less of in order to get there. The goal of this tool I invented several years ago is to help you create a better allocation of your time, effort, and resources so you can get greater returns and greater results. (It’s about simplicity.) That’s what a MOLO audit can do. It can show you where you’re wasting your efforts, often in small ways, and complicating your life. And it also can help you get clearer on where you should be investing your time to get more “bang for your buck,” so to speak, so you can significantly move the results needle and simplify your life.”
You can easily create your own MOLO plan using a yellow pad. Create a chart that provides you with:
- What do we need to do more of? List the What & Why on separate lines.
- What do you need to do less of? List the What & Why on separate lines.
- What do we need to start doing? List the What & Why on separate lines.
- What do we need to stop doing? List the What & Why on separate lines.
- What do we need to do differently? List the What & Why on separate lines.
You can get to know more about Tony Jeary by visiting one of his many websites. We provided a link to a primary site earlier in this article.
