I’ve been fired twice.
Once from a seasonal job in Switzerland – for insubordination. (If you know me, that won’t surprise you at all – and in my defence, I was very young). And a year or so later for not ‘looking the part’ (my ‘just out of student life’ gear didn’t work in the hallowed world of posh interior design).
Do you stick to what you know (the ‘boring, done it for years, can do it with my eyes shut’ stuff) when you’re faced with something ambiguous, vague, scary or new? The ‘out of comfort zone’ task, project or conversation?
Me too!
Does what one of my Facebook group members said recently sound familiar?
Yet another day chasing your tail, wondering how you’re going to get through that meeting, lead your team, talk sense with your boss AND have time to eat lunch?
If someone tells you to ‘manage your time better’ you’re going to scream or run away swearing under your breath.
What’s the cure?
Many people in my Effortless Leader Facebook group are stepping up into new roles with new teams so I produced this checklist to help them focus on the right things.
I recently shared a post giving you 7 ways to significantly reduce your meeting times. One of my loyal (and very experienced) readers Harry Brooks read the article and added these additional tips which I think are great!
We all know that our best learning takes place when we are ‘outside our comfort zone’ – but not so far out that we want to run for the hills. I know my deepest and most long lasting growth has come when I’ve had to confront something I’ve been avoiding or take on a challenge that felt new and scary.
I also know that for me and for many of my clients it’s easy to stay in a ‘comfort zone of busy-ness’. And whilst we say ‘I’d love to be less busy’ or ‘I’d love to have more time for myself/my family’ we just keep on doing ‘stuff’ that we’ve always done.
It never ceases to amaze me how badly led many meetings are. The same people ramble on and on, the same people never say a word, everyone repeats what everyone else says or there are so many tangents you need another meeting to follow up on the meeting…and so it goes on.
I’ve shared some ways to reduce your meeting time before but so many of you have told me recently that one of your aspirations is to get more of the important things done, that I thought they are worth repeating.
Here are seven of my top tips to help you make best use of your meeting time:
MORE >
Many of us think we’re great listeners and many more of us know we have some way to go to improve.
I’ve been working with a group of leaders recently who say they often struggled to really listen. Either they are ‘too busy’ or the person they are listening to ‘waffles on or goes round the houses’ or they’ve simply ‘heard it all before’…It’s easy to tune out.
This week’s blog is of particular interest to you if you are a coach.
There’s a great webinar programme run by ICF Master Coaches this year on the ICF Core Competencies and I’m delighted and humbled that they’ve asked me to deliver one on Coaching Presence.
I have to say I am sometimes a bit cynical about corporate values (there, I said it!). Not because they are not good things to have – in theory they are – but because so often they are words created to sound good, written by the senior team, a ‘project group’ or a bunch of consultants who then think ‘job done’. But everyone else thinks they are being ‘done to’.
No-one in the business really understands them or remembers them and even if they do, they don’t necessarily see those values being lived or breathed on a daily basis.
And we all know that actions speak louder than words.
