Discomfort can be a pain or a springboard for success. When you are uncomfortable you want to change your status. You are not happy with the status quo. This creates the impetus to take action.
When you are comfortable you can easily become satisfied with status quo. This can potentially lead to mediocrity.
Therefore do not view discomfort negatively but rather use it to provide the impetus to change – and change for the better.
To get to the next level of success, you need to leave your comfort zone and learn new things and seize opportunities. You have to make yourself accountable for going the next level or find a mentor who can make you accountable.
When you have tons of things to do, you have three choices on how you execute:
– Get cracking and attack one at a time and see where you end up
– Throw the towel
– Execute effectively.
The last option is the best one. How do you execute effectively?
Plan execution in order of priority and delegate effectively where appropriate. Procrastinate or eliminate inconsequential items!
Having taken this approach you are working with fewer items on your plate which have the highest impact. Also, you have been able to use your team effectively by delegating and empowering them. Finally, you have eliminated or procrastinated things that have minimum consequences. This approach to execution is efficient and effective!
The balancing of home and career is the most common challenge working professionals face. No matter which country you live in or where you are on the corporate ladder, the challenges of balancing home and career prevail.
Many feel compelled to make a choice between home and career. Life Balance will make that stark choice unnecessary.
Technology was supposed to increase leisure time, presumably freeing us to spend more time with our families and less on the job. But technological progress seems to have brought us more things to do and less time in which to do them.
Flextime, which allows people the flexibility to schedule work time around family time, has been a major help in balancing family and work. Flextime, for example, might enable an employee to work 90% of a normal week for 90% of the pay.
This could be enough to allow a parent to spend time with children after school. Flextime could also mean taking every other Friday off or working from home one day a week.
Flextime is especially helpful for double-duty mothers or fathers who frequently are victims of role overload. Life for them can be a daily grind of cooking and cleaning, supervising homework, driving children to school, looking after elderly parents, and running endless errands in addition to earning a living.
We’re living now in the age of burn-out, in which workaholics pursue frenetic lifestyles that hog their time, drain their resources, and leave them empty and unfulfilled.
Luckily more and more companies today are encouraging a healthy work-life balance amongst their employees because they understand that blance is not only important for the wellbeing of the employees but also positively impacts the bottom-line.
Companies like Google, Intuit and Salesforce have worked on paid 12-week maternity and paternity leave, compressed work weeks, and mandatory vacation times.
Yet many people engage in activity for activity’s sake, burying themselves in work or play to avoid facing real personal and spiritual needs.
Others are in love with money, and seek to express that love by spending all their waking hours pursuing their careers.
But truly successful people know that balance is essential to achievement, and they make room for quality time for family, friends, spiritual interests, and hobbies.
When you create balance in your life, you create a whole new life experience, one that has the power to take you to a whole new level of fulfillment and gratitude for life.
Quality remains one of the key differentiators whenever we want to evaluate something or make a choice. We often explore and discuss quality at our workplace, in our processes or in the products or services we consume. But this idea of quality always begins with the individual.
How do you define your quality of work? How do you rate your own quality? How do you make quality your calling card, and the essential ingredient in creating a successful personal brand.
Here are seven tips to improve your quality quotient:
1. Clarify your purpose – You are at your best when your actions are aligned with your purpose. Hence defining your purpose is crucial to starting your pursuit of quality.
2. Prepare a “quality” plan: Spend a day and document all your daily tasks or activities to identify the best practices to enhance the quality of your output? Also, test your ideas and processes regularly to determine the required improvements or interventions. This might include deleting or letting go of certain practices or ideas that have ceased to serve you.
3. Create your quality circle – Surround yourself with positive, proactive people who challenge and inspire you to be your best. If you don’t have a choice of the physical company you keep, there is a whole virtual world at your fingertips. Read good books, watch TED videos, subscribe to quality content and follow best practices.
4. Get feedback – Just as you need a rear view and side view mirror to maneuver around your blind spots while driving, you need feedback to get the complete picture of any situation. Hence, always invite and welcome feedback from your stakeholders and view all complaints as an opportunity to improve.
5. Spend some quiet time alone – Time for introspection, reflection, and deliberation is essential in developing a conscious awareness of the self and how you choose to express it. Meditation is one of the best methods to develop this awareness and guide your actions.
6. Invest in learning – Quality is a continually evolving and ongoing process. Set aside time to continuously learn the latest ways of thinking and doing things. When you stop growing, your business stops growing.
If you want a smooth sailing whether in driving to work or to your dentist, taking a flight and attending a seminar is to start early.
By planning the night before what you need to take with you, the clothes you want to wear, thinking about the potential traffic at the time of your travel would greatly enhance your journey. You will be relaxed and actually enjoy the ride.
It is a myth to think that by squeezing every minute and starting late you are saving time. Actually, you are saving time by starting early because you will be better prepared for the meeting and save time avoiding the traffic.
Finding your life’s purpose will be one of the most important decisions you will make. Once you have found your sweet spot, your holy grail, the next step is to build your life around it because there is a gap between imagining something and making it a reality. What we do to bridge this gap ultimately decides the quality of our reality.
Here are a few tips to make the journey easier:
➢ Articulate your life’s purpose in great detail – We can create all that we can conceive. Writing down your dream helps to crystallize your goals and concentrate your attention. For example, if you want to become a singer, then articulate it in complete details right down to the kind of music you want to associate with, artists you want to work with, the kind of styles you want to experiment with, your lifestyle etc.
➢ Inculcate self-discipline – There will be times when the road ahead will seem difficult and you will be plagued by self-doubt. In times like these, it is easy to give up on your dream. Moreover, when you are working on your dream, the locus of control shifts from the outside world to your inner being, often leading you to slow down on tasks. Disciplining yourself to keep up a daily schedule and consistently following through on all activities will help you remain on track.
➢ Don’t expect immediate results – The starting phase requires your undivided attention. This is the time when you get to work at your craft and hone it to precision. Learn to treat every challenge as a learning opportunity. Do not undervalue this experience as these obstacles carry within them the potential for great self-growth and transformation.
➢ Be resilient if things do not go as expected – Planning for every eventuality is a good beginning, but not a guarantee against perceived failure. Remember, you have the inherent strength to rise up after every fall and learn from each one.
➢ Work hard – The axiom ‘Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life’ does not mean that you will not have to work hard. It means that work might not seem like work at all since you would be enjoying what you do. However, the fact is that every job will contain certain aspects, which you might not enjoy, but which will need to be done.
➢ Keep a backup plan ready – Besides your own role, there are other aspects, which affect the success of your endeavors. Most ideas require a certain running time before they take off. So it’s essential to plan for the long haul, especially if you are supporting a family and need to pay bills. You will need the support of your loved ones.
➢ Break it down – At times the scale of our dream might seem daunting. Often, in the beginning, you might not know how to start. The way forward here is to break up every big plan into smaller tasks based on relevance and immediacy.
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The balancing of home and career is the most common challenge working professionals face. No matter which country you live in or where you are on the corporate ladder, the challenges of balancing home and career prevail.
Sales is the lifeblood of any business.
