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.
Twitter Power
I just read this book by Joel Comm on how to dominate your market one tweet at a time. I am really just beginning to understand all the dynamics of social media so I am trying to read all I can.
All social media seems to be trying to either build community on the one hand or build market share on the other. When I see that was a good hamburger tweet or please follow me so I can reach 1,000 followers tweets both seem to add little value.
Occasionally I come across people that really seem to want to help other people by supplying helpful information and encourage them in some personal way. When I find this I think it is extremely positive.
This is a very good book for someone who not only wants to know the basics of microblogging but how can this very powerful tool be used to its maximum potential. Social media in its simplest form is content that has been created by its audience.
In one sense twitter is very restrictive with its 140 characters max on each tweet. However, that small message can reach thousands of people in a matter of seconds and then be resent to thousands of other people all over the world.
My first month on twitter has been a very good experience even as I continue to learn something new every day. It forces me to think about major subjects in very succinct and relevant ways and that has to be a good thing for anyone who wants to communicate information that other people really want and need.
Circle of Influence
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Life Balance, Personal Development, Personnel Development
Several years ago Stephen Covey wrote one of the all time best selling leadership books The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It is a book that I have read several times and refer to often.
The first habit in the book is to be proactive and take responsibility for leading our own lives. He writes, “It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values.”
One of the most practical tips for doing this on a daily basis is what he calls the circle of concern in our lives vs. the circle of influence. The circle of concern represents all the things we really care about but have no control over to change the outcome. If we are not careful we can spend most of our day here with nothing to show for all the emotional effort.
The circle of influence though contains all the things that are important to us as well but we do have the ability to control the outcome. When we focus on what we cannot control during the day that just means there were many things that should and could be done that were not.
The amazing thing about this principle is that the more you prioritize the things you can do and start accomplishing them the things you cannot control proportionally diminish in their importance.
When we are doing the things we know we should do it not only allows us to accomplish something but it also gives us the needed perspective to deal with all the things that are beyond our control.
To quote another Covey principle: WIN WIN
Promises We Make
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Personal Development
This is the third in a series of ten posts on promises we should be willing to make to the people that matter the most in our lives. A promise goes beyond a mere commitment to do something it carries the clear expectation that we are going to pay the price to do what we said we would do.
The first promise was I will sincerely listen to what you have to say. Really listening to someone without a personal agenda communicates to them that they have value in your life and that you sincerely care.
The second promise was I will always tell you the truth. Without this there can be no basis of trust, just ask Elizabeth Edwards how painful that can be.
The third promise is I will apologize when I am wrong. When people hurt us there is genuine pain involved and when they refuse to acknowledge they were wrong then the pain grows deeper and last longer.
When someone sincerely and genuinely apologizes we know two things. They are willing to humble themselves and they want to restore their relationship with us because we still matter to them.
On the other hand when someone says I am sorry and you know in your heart they don’t really mean it the situation only gets worse. They are simply trying to end the conversation and not take personal responsibility for what they did.
Sometimes in relationships the other person may own eighty percent of the blame. Our responsibility is to take ownership of our twenty percent and do the right thing and apologize regardless of how they respond.
Feedback
One of the most successful executive coaches in the country is Marshall Goldsmith. He wrote a great book that I would highly recommend What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
The simple thesis of the book is you competency and skill set is what has got you to where you are now as far as promotions are concerned. What it will take to get you where you need to be in the highly participative leadership culture of the future will be your people skills. This area is where the overwhelming majority of executive men and women hit the wall.
A key tool in helping people with people skill problems is to use some form of 360-degree feedback. This should involve superiors, peers as well as subordinates and sometimes even clients.
If you are one of the executives that clearly sends the message that I don’t like bad news and you consistently shoot the messenger who delivers it then you are probably in the dark about all your serious blind spots.
Everyone involved in the process must commit to the following four things:
1. Let go of the past-forgive.
2. Tell the truth-even if it hurts.
3. Be supportive and helpful-not cynical or negative.
4. Pick something to improve yourself-so everyone is focused more on “improving” than “judging.”
Feedback will tell us what we need to change. Then the moment of truth, Are we willing to do it?
How Much Is Enough?
Filed under: Core Values, Financial Stewardship, Life Balance, Personal Development
The one incredibly good thing about a down cycle is that it always forces us to separate what is important in life from what is not.
This is a very opportune time for you to be incredibly honest with yourself and ask the hard question How Much Is Enough? What do I really need to be fulfilled and content in my life? Take some time on this and make sure you cover every area of your life, personal, family, career, friends, faith and community.
For most of us as Americans we have never had to answer this question before. We have been told the sky is the limit and if you work hard enough you can accomplish anything you want.
I am in no way condoning anything less than your personal best in every area of your life. However, I am bringing into question a consumer driven philosophy of life that is more concerned with quantity of things than quality of relationships.
For too many of us we have been living out the script that someone else has written for us. It could be a parent, peers, corporate culture or society in general. Now is the time to write our own script that includes our own definition of success in life.
Contentment and gratitude are two incredibly important core values in life. If you do not know the answer to How Much Is Enough, then I am afraid you will never truly experience them.
What To Do When You Are Stuck
When some people face dramatic change they choose to live in denial as if this is not really happening to me. On the other extreme others know the change is real to the point of becoming emotionally depressed about their new state of life.
The common sometimes fatal result of both of these mindsets is the paralysis of inactivity. We don’t want to get out of bed, go to work or even talk with anyone.
We must, as Jim Collins said of effective leadership in Good to Great, be willing to confront the brutal facts that sometimes I cannot return to my life the way it used to be.
I must assume personal responsibility to change myself first and start leading myself by making good daily decisions before my life can begin to turn around in different direction. The only way to do that is to do what you can with what you have right where you are and do it today with all your heart.
Change always produces movement. If we let it this movement can be downward and very destructive. The only way to stop this negative cycle is to start doing the simple things that you are able to do right now that will allow you to accomplish something good today.
You must get on offense and use the power of movement produced by activity to turn your life in a new positive direction. You must take some risk today by raising your sails and doing the clear things you know need to be done before you can ever feel the movement produced by the wind taking you to a better place.
The Doom Loop
Filed under: Crisis Management, Leadership Callling, Leading Change
In sharp contrast to the breakthrough impact of the companies that practiced the flywheel effect all of the organizations that could not transition from Good to Great were caught in The Doom Loop. Instead of the consistent daily movement of the flywheel they went for the big impact event that would give the immediate impression of progress only later to regress into failure.
They were not willing to use the deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done and then simply doing it. “The comparison companies frequently launched new programs-often with great fanfare and hoopla aimed at motivating the troops-only to see the programs fail to produce sustained results.”
They wanted the big event or the grand program or the new celebrity CEO that would allow them to skip the daily discipline of the flywheel and move immediately to breakthrough. The repeated pattern of this cycle consistently produced disappointing results and then reaction without understanding starts the loop all over again.
Peter Drucker commented on these companies, “The drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.”
The Doom Loop is a classic example of an organization continuing to do the same wrong things over and over again and yet somehow expecting different results. At the core of this problem is a leadership team that is more concerned with short term personal success than what is best for the long term benefit of everyone involved?
In the end this is not a strategy problem but a character one.
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.