Creating Margin
Filed under: Family Ministry, Leadership Callling, Life Balance, Marriage, Parenting, Personal Development, Time Management
A simple definition of margin is the space between our load and our limits. It is the opposite of overload because you will have something in reserve for a time when you will need it.
Richard Swenson wrote an incredible book entitled Margin to help us learn how to restore emotional, physical, financial and time reserves to our overscheduled lives. Of all these important areas he believes everything must start with our emotional energy.
Every day we only have so much emotional energy to give to our family, work, friends and other people. Most of these people are making withdrawals from our emotional bank accounts and if we are not careful we become overdrawn with nothing left to give.
We must start each day knowing our emotional balance and then set limits on those people and things that will tend to drain us to the point of experiencing the pain of being overwhelmed. He lists several things that can restore your emotional energy:
1. Cultivate Social Supports
2. Reconcile Relationships
3. Serve One Another
4. Rest
5. Laugh
6. Offer Thanks
7. Grant Grace
8. Be Rich in Faith
9. Hold Fast Hope
10. Envision a Better Future
Some of the emotional drainers in life cannot be avoided but when you build in things that make deposits then you can routinely within your day monitor your balance and make the necessary adjustments to maintain margin.
We must find ways in this wired world we live in to have peace of mind so that we have something left to give to the people that matter the most.
Weisure Lifestyle
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Life Balance, Personal Development, Time Management
Welcome to the latest new term to describe the tension that exist between life and work balance. According to Dalton Conley a New York University sociologist, “increasingly it’s not clear what constitutes work and what constitutes fun time.” You can read the entire article on CNN.com/living.
More and more people are using their smart phones and other technology to keep up with their 24-7 lifestyle that keeps them in almost constant contact with others. At one minute we may be quote at work and receive a text message about last night’s game and then later while at quote home get an important email on major project.
It’s one thing to watch a fellow employee scroll through email during a meeting you are attending but now to see the same thing happening during the evening meal is a little harder to swallow.
Apple is probably not going to come up with an app that will schedule time everyday to unplug from all the information that is available to spend time with people who really matter in your life. We are going to have to discipline ourselves to set some boundaries so that we can have the time we need to wind down and even quietly think without interruption.
Technology can be an incredibly good thing if we use it as a tool to improve our lives. If we let it though it can easily change from a means to the end into the end itself and when it does that we all lose.
The Flywheel
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Leading Change, Time Management, Vision Casting
The concept of the flywheel was used by Jim Collins in his best selling leadership book Good to Great. The major point of the illustration is that significant change occurs when you do the right things repeatedly over time and eventually you will have a breakthrough that results in significant success.
We all would love to have the quick fix strategy work instead, we want instant culture change. For every company that moved from Good to Great there was no single defining action, no grand programs, no celebrity leader and no one killer innovation that produced the results.
“Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.”
A great example that really makes the point is used is from the legendary coaching career of John Wooden at UCLA. Most basketball fans know that he won ten NCAA Championships in twelve years and at one point had a sixty-one-game winning streak.
What most of us do not know is that for fifteen years coach Wooden worked in relative obscurity at UCLA before he ever won his first national title. During that time he was building the foundation for the program of great recruiting, player discipline and refining his style of playing the full court press style of defense.
The real character question for leaders today is how many are willing to pay the price of not demanding short term success at the expense of long term sustainability for the organization? It may keep you off the front page of the business section of your local paper but in this economic environment that can be a very good thing.
Execution
It is amazing to me how all of the most respected people in the field of leadership are so consistently saying the same things about the most important things that all organizations need to be doing. It really started when Steven Covey wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People followed by Jim Collins Good to Great and now every bestselling book on leadership prioritizes the same factors.
Execution is a great read by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. They define execution as the discipline of getting things done.
They start with the number one issue of the day the personal character of the leader. If you are not able to execute your own personal priorities then you will never be able to establish execution as a priority for your organization.
In the spirit of Good to Great they insist that the leader must never delegate their most important responsibility of getting the right people on the team. This factor more than any other will determine if you r people can consistently move beyond creative development and project planning to actually get the job done.
The next priority is to create a culture of discipline where execution is valued. A great insight is that we don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking. Translation, at some point in time we need to stop talking about the problem and start doing something to solve it.
Finally, after the leader has set clear goals and priorities you must evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Then it is extremely important to reward the doers who are actually getting the job done and this will move execution to the top of your leadership core values.
Definition of Balanced Life
Filed under: Family Ministry, Leadership Callling, Life Balance, Marriage, Parenting, Personal Development, Time Management
All of us feel like we have too many things to do and not enough time to do them. We have priorities in many different areas: our career, family, relationships, entertainment, faith and own personal life. We also fulfill many roles as employees, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers, and friends just to name a few.
Somehow we have developed this concept that true happiness and success comes when all of these areas and roles are in perfect balance. It is as if they all have equal percentages of our time, energy and passion.
Realistically we all know that is an impossible goal to accomplish. Our career alone demands a ever growing disproportionate amount of our time and if you have a newborn child in your house all bets are off including time to sleep.
To me a balanced life means that all of these areas as well as our different roles will constantly be changing in the amount of resources they demand. The critical factor is not to let anything that is important in your life be totally neglected to the point that you are now failing in that area because all of the other things have drained you to the point you have nothing left to give.
When you reach that point and we all do from time to time we must reprioritize our lives so that everything important gets its slot on our calendars. This will mean that something else will have to get less or be eliminated all together.
Believe it or not sometimes we need to not go to the new latest and greatest parenting conference and just stay at home and play with our children. Life can be crazy and its demands will change with each new day.
When you have the character and courage to assume the responsibility of leading your total life you will make sure that nothing major falls through the cracks. Enjoy your day!!
Inbox
Everyone knows that getting the important things done each and every day and walking away from everything else is the secret to success. We all have to process tremendous amounts of information all the time and there are so many things we simply cannot fit into an already loaded schedule.
Sometimes we take relatively simple concepts and make them too complicated. This is my conviction about the subject of personal productivity. When something hits my “inbox”, regardless of its source: email, cell phone, mail, interruptions, there are only four possible things I am going to do.
DELETE—If it is not important, I immediately kill it as fast as possible.
DELAY—If if is not urgent that it be done now, I file it for later.
DELEGATE—If it is something someone else can do as well or better than I can, they own it.
DO—If the first three options do not work, then it has to fit into my daily plan.
I will admit this is a very simple process with the exception of one phrase: IS IT IMPORTANT?
Technology and productivity may increase your efficiency but they cannot tell you if what you are doing should be done at all. Only your character and core values personally and professionally can do that.