After a break from work, you feel refreshed, re-energised and re-focused and the quality downtime has given you the headspace you needed. Take this new energy and focus as an opportunity to introduce four new winning habits…you may be surprised at what you discover both personally and professionally.
Winning habit #1 – look at your business through a fresh lens
When you’re working in your business every day, it is so easy to become blinkered. You start to see what you want to see not what is the reality.
I call this ‘focus distortion’.
It’s like at home when you’ve been away for a while and when you return you notice the pile of old magazines in the corner of the lounge or the DVD’s clogging the shelf beneath the TV. You start to question how long they’ve been there as you’ve failed to notice them previously. You decide to do a spring clean and set about creating a new reality as you look at your world through a fresh lens.
Apply the same fresh lens to your business.
Post annual leave is a great time to do this, to imagine your first day back as your first day ever in the business. Challenge yourself to imagine you’re a new executive who has been newly appointed. With a fresh lens, challenge yourself to question everything, and I mean everything!
Ask quality WHY questions, review systems, processes and procedures and ask is it adding value, helping us to be a relevant, agile, resilient business? Is it adding value for the customer? Challenge the seven most expensive words in business; ’that’s not the way we do things’ or its sister statement; ’We’ve never done it that way before’.
Walking through your business with a restless curiosity and fresh lens is a cathartic experience and will certainly awaken your senses.
Winning habit #2 – question what is truly worthy of your time?
To create the stretch and growth potential for your people and business, you should focus on the things that only you can do. Yes, you’ll have oversight and a contributory role in other areas, but your primary focus should be on the high-value activities which allow you to realise the potential in your business and yourself.
On your return to the office, ask yourself this; what is truly worthy of my time?
If you find you’re spending more time on tasks and activities which quite clearly you shouldn’t be, then now is the time to change this because if you don’t, nobody else will.
(For tips on how to utilise your time better, check out my blog; 7 tips on how to HALVE the number of meetings you have and HALVE the time they take)
Winning habit #3 – design your high performing week
We all come back from annual leave with good intentions; managing our workload more effectively, being home earlier from work to put the children to bed, not travelling as much, and here comes the BUT. But before you know it the first few days and weeks pass, you were so busy catching up after your time off that your good intentions are out the window, and you’re back into your old ways of working.
One of your highest callings is to be conscious and deliberate in how you set your high performing weeks up for success.
How you…
…focus on the things that only you can do, the areas genuinely worthy of your time?
…master the skill of saying NO to the unimportant things so you can say YES to the important things.
…create more time to work ON the business, not just the busy fool working IN the business.
…book quality thinking time in your diary, knowing the time you spend thinking will make the doing more effective.
…are home for bath and storytime with your children or a meal out with your loved one. Time and memories you will never get back.
Remember in life, you make your choices, and then your choices make you.
Winning habit #4 – become your own performance coach
Successful leaders have an insatiable thirst for learning, for showing up every day being the best version of themselves they can be. They spend their life being their own performance coach, ensuring they reach their true and maximum potential.
Maintaining relevance in the fast-moving arena of life is about being fresh, living life with deliberate conscious intent as the architect of your destiny. It’s about learning and developing yourself. Perhaps most importantly, it about applied learning and having the attitude of action.
It’s so easy to get caught up in the mechanics of the working day, and before you know it days, weeks or even months have passed since you spent time on you.
Invest time in you.
One of the six core human needs is the need for growth – for emotional, intellectual or spiritual development. If you are not learning and bettering yourself every day, then you are not growing.
