4 Ways to Increase your Mental Bandwidth

A coworker recently asked me about my ability to handle a heavy workload without being phased or overwhelmed. It reminded me of a 1-on-1 meeting I had with VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk in early 2014. I had just made the move from Community Manager to Assistant Account Executive. Since I started working at VaynerMedia in October 2012, it had always been a goal of mine to work with Gary directly on a project. I admired his personal brand and ability to put out high quality content so seamlessly.

In that meeting, I let Gary know about my desire to collaborate with him. He was flattered but at the same time told me that he didn’t think I was ready yet. Since I just started in the new role, he said I should first focus on getting comfortable in it and mastering my responsibilities so that I could develop the bandwidth to take on more, i.e. work with him. Gary then pointed to himself as an example of someone who has become so efficient with the way he spends his days that he can have a plate that is much more full than a normal person (if you’re skeptical about his hustle, just check out his new Daily Vee vlog content). He asked me to be patient and reassured me that the time would come. It was not exactly what I wanted to hear, but I trusted the guy and had faith that the stars would align eventually.

Fast forward almost two years later (November 2015), and I find myself in another 1-on-1 meeting with Gary. In that time frame, I had become a more experienced member of the account team, having worked on 4 different brands and been promoted to Account Executive. I learned the ins-and-outs of my role and grew in confidence to take on more and more work along the way. Most importantly, I became increasingly better at getting shit done with efficiency and high quality.

While I was continuously working to become a better employee in those two years, I had also been thinking more and more about making strides towards my career vision as a content creator. I loved working at Vayner, but I wanted to get more serious about writing and building an audience. Since Gary is an expert at personal branding and I had established a good relationship with him, I wanted to pitch him again on working together. If I ever moved on from Vayner, I knew I would regret not trying to learn directly from Gary about how to do the thing I was passionate about. I couldn’t not do it.

So I called the meeting with the intention of working on the marketing behind his upcoming #AskGaryVee book (coming out in March). In it, I emphasized how far I had come in the nearly 2 years since we initially discussed working together. I reminded Gary about what he told in that meeting and let him know how I confident I had become in executing as a member of the account team. I was ready to leverage my experience and ability to handle a larger workload to do whatever it took to work on the marketing behind the book. Gary completely understood my POV and drive, and wanted to get me involved.

Now, I’m the leader of the #AskGaryVee Book Squad, his private Facebook group of super fans dedicated to promoting his brand over the next 6 weeks in preparation for the #AskGaryVee book launch. Regardless of my workload in this upcoming period, I’m going to hustle my ass off and make sure I continue to crush my duties on the account team and be the point person for the book squad.

After sharing this story with my coworker, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this idea of “mental bandwidth.” What I mean by the term is one’s ability to take on more and more work and perform consistently at a high level given the same time constraints. I think there’s something to be said here about the human ability to stretch the mind and accomplish things we didn’t think we were capable of doing. After all, pushing the limits of possibility is how you grow.

So how exactly can we work on our mental bandwidth on a consistent basis to elevate performance?

1. DELEGATE

The more you can teach those who work for you how to handle your previous (and even some of your current) responsibilities, the more it frees up your time to take on more. Empowering others leads to empowering yourself. You just need to ensure that you’re managing them properly all along the way and developing enough trust in them that you have full confidence in their abilities to execute.

2. TRIM THE FAT

Audit the way you spend your time. If you’re honest with yourself, I guarantee that you’ll find that you’re wasting energy on something that is ultimately not that important to you. Reducing or removing that will create more opportunity to work on the stuff that really matters to you.

3. WORK SMARTER

I’m a big processes guy who is always looking for efficiencies. Just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean that it can’t be done better. Think about Pareto’s principle: What are the 20% of inputs that are responsible for 80% of my outputs? Go all in on those.

4. GET EXPERIENCE

This is about getting as many reps as you can doing something. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. The easier it becomes, the less time you spend doing it and the more time you have to try the new things that will help you grow. Experience doesn’t happen overnight, so you often have to be patient with this one.

In closing, I challenge all of you to not settle for just being good. I ask that you push the limits of your mental bandwidth to achieve what you didn’t think was possible and become a better human in the process. You owe the world the best version of yourself.

How do you increase your mental bandwidth? What is motivating you to do so?

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