Carey Bentley is the CEO of Lifehack Bootcamp, the top ranked productivity coaching company. Along with her husband Demir Bentley, this power couple team shows high achievers how to bring sanity and freedom back in their workday.
Carey used to manage billion dollar brands. When her chronic illness, ulcerative colitis, came back, her doctor told her to make a devastating decision – give up the long hours, or face an early death.
Today, Carey and Demir have designed a life that challenges the conventional. They refuse to sacrifice freedom for success. They reject the idea that you need to grin and bear it now, delaying happiness until retirement. They have designed a lifestyle that gives them freedom, sanity, and control. They work less than 30 hours a week and travel whenever they want, and in fact have traveled to 19 countries in the last two years.
Their insights are featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, and Wall Street Journal. They are members of the Forbes Coaches Council and speak at international events worldwide.
You can catch them in their free online workshops for managers.
Why is productivity coaching as important as business coaching?
Productivity coaching is about optimizing the most precious resource on earth. Your time.
It’s where you discover hours in your week that you didn’t even know existed, and get you spending your time where it really matters.
Often, our clients realize they could work just 15 hours a week, and move the ball forward more than they do when they work 50 hours, by making simple adjustments in how they get things done.
Business coaching is important, but often when people hire business coaches they really need productivity coaching.
If you see yourself as a champion, but you’re getting mediocre results, the number one reason is that your systems, workflow, and mindset are ready for a productivity upgrade.
The end result is creating the life of your dreams. And I’ve never met anyone who dreams of working harder, longer hours.
How do you describe what you do?
We show high achievers how to bring sanity and freedom back into their lives.
Are you tired of sacrificing everything in your life – your health, relationships, free time – for your career?
When Demir worked on Wall Street and I worked in corporate America, we felt like we were sacrificing everything for our careers. The worst part was we still weren’t seeing the success we wanted.
If life is like a Rubik’s Cube, we were solving for the career side at the expense of all the other sides, like family, health, and relationships. When we had a scary health crisis, we woke up. We realized the conventional path wasn’t for us, and that we wanted more, now.
The lie is that career success requires you to work 12 hours a day.
The truth is you can have more success by mastering your productivity. All while enjoying your life!
Why did you and Demir decide to start Lifehack Bootcamp?
We started Lifehack Bootcamp so that we could shortcut others to success.
High achievers have what we call SPP’s, Successful People Problems. These are problems like not having enough time to go on vacation, or not having enough time to coach their kids’ baseball team. They end their weeks feeling like they didn’t get enough done or didn’t get the right things done, and they beat themselves up for it.
They’re higher order problems, but they’re still problems. And it pains us to see others spending 10 miserable years trying to solve these problems, when they could implement the solution in a few months.
What are some key skills that you impart to clients?
Our number one hack is to develop the four skills that make up Time Mastery. These skills are Focus, Attitude, Stamina, and Time.
Few people understand that what differentiates knowledge workers today is how well they develop these four skills. Highly focused individuals work up to four times as fast. People with a great attitude are the ones who keep getting promoted. Those with a high degree of stamina never get burned out. And those who can manage their time can close their laptops at 1pm everyday.
Our number two hack is to use The Champagne Moment.
The Champagne Moment is a process we’ve developed to identify your number one priority for the week. You start by asking yourself, “What’s the number one thing I could do, that if I got it done, would make me so happy, I would stop by the store on the way home and buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate?”
What challenges do clients typically come to you with, and how do you recommend they overcome them?
Our clients come to us saying, “Other people are taking up so much of my time, I can’t get any momentum on my own priorities. I’m trying to juggle a myriad of projects all at once. I also have 10 team members, but I don’t trust any of them to truly take work off my plate.”
These are complicated problems. The good news is the solution is simple.
The solution is to stop being so stubborn, and stop trying to solve these issues alone. You’re a smart person. If you could have figured it out on your own, you would have done it by now.
When you join a group of like minded individuals who have similar goals, and when you have the best recipes for success at your fingertips, you’ll find that solving this problem is easy and even fun.
It’s not magic; it’s science. As social creatures, we change rapidly when we have positive social accountability and the right social dynamics.
What mindset do you start the week with?
I start by dialoging three questions with Demir to get into a focused, clear mindset.
- What are three things we’re grateful for?
- What would we be excited to do this week?
- What’s the number one thing we can do this week that will really make a lasting difference in our business?
We often complete our number one priority on Monday, which leaves the rest of the week to accomplish secondary priorities – or simply to relax and take time off.
