Definition of Balanced Life

Posted by on April 24, 2009

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!!

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Walk The Talk

Posted by on April 23, 2009

Ultimately everything we do outwardly is driven by all of our inner attitudes about what is important and what is not.  If our actions are not what they should be we must first change what we believe to be true before we can see bad habits broken and new good ones take their place. 

I think the most important attitude you must draw from everyday is gratitude.  The media is almost totally focused on all that we are losing in this down cycle.  The pain is real and there are significant problems that must be solved.  However, almost all of us still have plenty to eat, a nice place to sleep and friends and family that care about us.  Think about what is really important today and be grateful.

The second important thing to me is hope.  As we deal with the reality of lost jobs and endless bad news we must have a picture of a better day ahead.  Hope fuels a positive attitude about life when the majority of people are negative.  We may not be able to change the global economy or Wall Street but we can change ourselves. 

Finally we must be people who are committed.  Your passion about life is what will move you beyond the pain of the present.  The promises we make and keep to ourselves and the people we care about the most is the sum total of who you really are as a person.  If what say you believe is not moving you to act everyday then you really did not believe it after all. 

Remember the old saying, what you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.

 

 

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Three Critical Questions For Leading Change

Posted by on April 22, 2009

 

I want to tell you a simple story that illustrates  what every leader must do to lead their team or entire organization through the change process.  You are the leader of a team that has been involved in an outward bound teambuilding session for two weeks.

Your team is out in open and you are eating your lunch on the ground.  The weather conditions are changing and you are monitoring the situation on weather radio.

In first scenario you as team leader say to your team in stern voice get up and follow me right now.  A few people respond but the majority stay in place.  Now you raise your voice and yell I said come with me.

The second scenario you say as the leader we are going to move.  Here is the plan, we are going to stand up together at the same time and form a single file column and make sure no one runs or gets left behind.  The group is very hesitant to get up and it takes time to get everyone in a line and progress is slow.

The third scenario is you say to team there is a tornado less than five minutes from here, follow me to that brick building and we will all be safe.  Everyone moves and no one is hurt.

In the first situation the leader tried to use positional power which almost never works anymore especially with next generation workforce.  The second scene was perfect example of trying to manage the change process instead of leading.  The major reason most change initiatives fail is they are over managed and under led.

The bottom line for me is this based on our simple little story.  Leaders always need to answer three questions when they want an individual or an entire organization to change.  What is the Problem?  How are we going to Solve it?  Why is this important to You?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Parenting Expectations

Posted by on April 21, 2009

It is incredibly important that we all have realistic expectations as parents for our children.  We should want them to develop character, succeed academically, respect authority and grow in their faith.

However, the reality is they are going to fail in every one of these areas and many more on their journey towards becoming successful adults.  When they do fail, we as parents must care enough to take the time to correct them for the mistakes and then encourage them to restore their confidence.  They will need to learn to deal with the consequences of bad decisions and on the other hand not break their spirit so they give up on life.

Many times this process fails because we as parents have placed our own personal expectations on top of the ones we already have for our children.  We are vicariously living our lives through them instead of for them.

If we are honest with ourselves we would admit that when we overreact because they fail it is partially because we have failed as well.  Our own emotional needs to be successful parents have been added to the relationship to the point that our expectations for them are now totally unrealistic.

Constantly check your motives and make sure this is primarily about what is best for them and not about me.  Growing up today is hard enough without them having to take on the extra burden of making us feel good about ourselves.  That is our responsibility.

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Personal Crisis

Posted by on April 20, 2009

When negative things are happening in your life and you feel like you are in a deep hole and cannot see how to get out there are three key personal leadership disciplines that will help you get your positive momentum back.

The first is perspective.  When things are not going well today it is very important to put the present in the context of the long look that includes both the past and the future.  All of life both the good and the bad tend to run in cycles.  You cannot choose many times the circumstances about what happens to you but it is your responsibility to choose how you respond to them. 

Adversity in life will either make you a better person or a bitter one and that choice is within your control.  The key thing about your past is you must learn from it but never live in it.  Failure never has to be final unless we let it.

The same is true about the future.  You can choose to watch the news 3 hours a day and live with fear, worry and doubt or you can be grateful for what you have and face the future with hope and a positive attitude. 

The second personal leadership discipline in dealing with change is priorities.  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. 

We must start by not asking the question what have I lost but what do I still have?  I would encourage you to write down everything that is still in your life that is important and when you see it all you will be amazed by how blessed you really are.

Someone has well said the tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon but we wait so long to begin it.  Regardless of your age or stage of life this dramatic period of change we are all going through is the perfect time for you to decide how you want to spend the rest of your life.  If you need some help get a life coach to walk through this process with you.

The third discipline to deal with change is to be proactive.  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.

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.

 

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Five Keys in Setting Goals

Posted by on April 17, 2009

All of us have experienced the frustration that comes from really wanting to accomplish something important and thinking we are really committed to it only to realize several months later it did not happen.  When I evaluate personally and professionally where the breakdown occurs it usually centers on the disciplines involved in effective goal setting.

These are the five critical things I have learned over the years:

1.      Write it down—if it is not important enough to write down in your personal planner or enter into your cell phone list then it will almost always never get done.

 

2.      Check your resources—do you realistically have the time, energy, knowledge, skills and commitment to make this happen?

 

3.      Make it clear—you must be very specific about what you want to accomplish.  It cannot be I want to lose weight; it needs to be twenty pounds over next six months.

 

4.      Develop your plan—strategy is the realistic intersection of resources and commitment.  There is a big difference in walking twenty minutes five days week and training for marathon.

 

5.      Evaluate your progress—this is where the rubber hits the road.  Do it often until you know you have sustainable momentum and most important celebrate every win.

 

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Leading Change

Posted by on April 15, 2009

The greatest mistake organizations make during difficult times like we are currently experiencing is to try to manage change rather than leading the process.  Sometimes survival is the only critical issue and then you do whatever you have to do to stay alive.

Most of time though we look very short term and develop a bunker mentality that’s only goal is to ride out this storm until things get better.  This means of course reducing expenses through personnel reductions , delays in capital investment, marketing and of course training and development.  Especially, all those bad trips and conferences that congress is railing about.

Leading change recognizes the brutal facts that the fundamentals of global economics have been permanently changed.  Effective leaders will use the urgency and severity of this current cycle to reposition their entire organizational culture for success in the 21st Century and beyond.  The future is incredibly positive for all those who are willing to embrace it.  No going back!

 

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Forgiveness

Posted by on April 13, 2009

One spiritual principle that cannot be violated is that you cannot pass on to others what you have not first received yourself.  This is very hard to do when someone else has hurt us deeply and we find it so difficult to really forgive them.

When we feel the other person is wrong and they are the ones who have caused us pain then why should we give them a release from the debt they so clearly owe?

If we do not forgive them then we will be permanently emotionally bound to them because the issue will never be resolved.  We wake up every day with the memory of this person and our pain as we literally relive the event in our minds over and over again.

The only way out of this bondage is to have the courage to ask ourselves what percentage of the problem is our responsibility.  After all by now we are also wrong because of what we said or the anger and bitterness we feel inside.

If our responsibility is only twenty percent of the problem we must realize that we now have to resolve our relationship with our Heavenly Father.  We can never justify our wrong behavior as a Christian regardless of what someone else has done or said.

Once we have been forgiven and receive the grace we need then for the first time we are in a position to pass that same grace on to the other person.  Now we have peace instead of the pain of the past and regardless of how the other person responds to God’s grace we are free.

 

 

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Execution

Posted by on April 10, 2009

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.

 

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Just Don't Do It

Posted by on April 9, 2009

Just Do It is a phrase that has come to represent the cultural mentality of an entire generation of Americans. The sheer discipline that is represented in those three words has pushed many of us to do things that otherwise we would have walked away from and left undone.

In my life the major point of application is in the area of physical fitness. When it is cold and dark outside most of us do not want to jump out of bed and go for a nice run when the temperature is in the twenties and the wind is blowing. In some small but very effective way, thinking about Just Do It can make the difference between turning over and getting up.

An even bigger problem for most of us is the daily discipline of learning how to say No. Everyday all of us will have more to do than we can possibly get done. It happens at work, at home, with friends and hobbies.

The real secret to success in life is in knowing on a daily basis what to say No to and walk away. The real tragedy of life is when we look back and realize even though we have been incredibly busy we have done so many things that were really not important at all.

I don’t know about you but the Just Do It mentality has pushed me beyond my limits too many times. I do not want to waste my time, energy, passion and relationships on things that do not add value to others.

I encourage you to just pick one thing a day for a week that you can say No to so that you can have the time to find your bigger Yes.

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