Don't be Reactive - Focus on What’s Next

Magnify What’s Best and Focus on Your Future

Most people are busy juggling a life that includes an overwhelming amount of work, home, family, and children, as well as faith-based and community activities. Each event or activity in isolation has priority and importance, however many of us deal with colliding priorities every day. You become instantly stressed. Your competing priorities are not going away. Therefore the question becomes how can you contribute your best to every priority as well as be the best you can be!

Stop and Breathe. Not every situation or competing priority deserves crisis status. Stop… take a deep breath and think. Take an extra minute to think about what the next best step really is. When you take these few minutes to breathe and think, you will be much less reactive and much more proactive. Living in a constant reactive state reinforces feelings of frustration, self-criticism, and self-doubt. Being proactive reinforces confidence and competence.

Forget Perfection: Pursuing perfection is not an asset. Mistakes and challenges are inevitable; therefore, the pursuit of perfection only serves to focus on what did not go well or right.

However, if you give yourself permission to believe you are perfect just the way you are, you give yourself permission to focus on your strengths. Commit to always maximize your strengths and you will find the flaws slip away.

"I swing big with everything I got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.” ~ Babe Ruth

Focus on what is next. Get out of the past and focus on the future. Learn to widen your view so you do not miss any opportunities.

Illuminating the possibilities and opportunities that abound in everyday circumstances increases your options, energizes situations, and inspires you and others.

Develop the habit of looking ahead. Where do you see yourself tomorrow, next month, or next year? All accomplishments begin with an idea, a seed, a dream. Create a Dream inventory and list all of your ideas and dreams that matter to you—no matter how extravagant or insignificant they may seem. It’s impossible to emphasize strongly enough the power of creative and uninhibited imagination. Do not let life stifle yours.

Your unlimited success depends on your ability to magnify your strengths and focus on your future. Start today!

Managing YourSelf - Part V

One of the most important parts of business management is managing yourself. It’s not about managing the business but, it’s about organizing your life so you can accomplish the things that are important.

There are five key critical lessons that I have been posting here one lesson for each day. Click here, if you missed Part I on Thursday; here for Part II on Friday; here for Part III on Saturday and here for Part IV yesterday. 

And, now the last lesson in this mini-series:

#5. “Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system—of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on the facts.” And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.”

The best decision makers don’t make many decisions. They focus on the ones that are important and the ones only they can solve. How can they do this?

Most situations are generic and have a standard solution. Once you understand this and know the standard solutions you can cut through the easy problems and focus on the few unique problems that really require effort.

The effective executive does not need to make many decisions. Because he solves generic situations through a rule and policy, he can handle most events as cases under the rule; that is, by adaptation. “A country with many laws is a country of incompetent lawyers,” says an old legal proverb. It is a country which attempts to solve every problem as a unique phenomenon, rather than as a special case under general rules of law. Similarly, an executive who makes many decisions is both lazy and ineffectual. The decision-maker also always tests for signs that something atypical, something unusual, is happening; he always asks: “Does the explanation explain the observed events and does it explain all of them?; he always writes out what the solution is expected to make happen—make automobile accidents disappear, for instance—and then tests regularly to see if this really happens; and finally, he goes back and thinks the problem through again when he sees something atypical, when he finds phenomena his explanation does not really explain, or when the course of events deviates, even in details, from his expectations.

Managing Yourself - Part II

One of the most important parts of business management is managing yourself. It’s not about managing the business but, it’s about organizing your life so you can accomplish the things that are important.

There are five key critical lessons that I have been posting here one lesson for each day. Click here, if you missed Part I yesterday. 

#2. “Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, “What results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.”

Don’t focus on the work in front of you, focus on results. If you are just doing what comes in, you are on the treadmill, not making a difference.

'If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved. What the executive needs are criteria which enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.'  ~ Peter Drucker

Come back tomorrow for lesson #3. _/|\_