Ready, Set, Race!

As September comes to a close, I feel like I have worn out my sneakers.

After a slower paced summer, this past month has seemed like a fast sprint. 

I am not only teaching four classes, conducting several corporate trainings, and managing my coaching clients each week, but it seems like I am getting deluged with requests for meetings, Zoom calls, etc. which is eating up all of my “free” time. 

As much as I try to organize my days, I feel like I am just jumping hurdles in order to get to the finish line before it is too late into the night. Then it starts all over the next day.

Many leaders do have staff to help them but giving up control, including decision making, makes them hesitant to hand over the baton. 

In the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey discusses “sharpening the saw” which leaders could benefit from.

The concept means that if you take x minutes to sharpen the saw, the tree will be cut down faster versus taking longer with a dull saw. 

Instead of doing this, I hear from leaders all the time that “it is quicker if I do it myself”.  If they tracked their time, they would log a lot more hours with that dull saw than if they realized they can’t win the race every day effectively.

More importantly, by constantly sprinting all the time these leaders cannot fully give their attention to everything effectively.

Greg McKeown states in his book, Essentialism – The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, that we have “lost our ability to filter what is important and what isn’t”.  He goes on to say that it is not just how many choices we have which has increased over time but also the number of “outside influencers” who provide their opinions on these choices. 

In other words, “it is not just information overload; it is opinion overload.”

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