The Four Aspects of Good Leadership: How to Work on Your Business
This is the first of a series of four posts that focus on the four fundamentals of great leadership. The first aspect that we will cover here is learning how to work on your business. You've probably heard it a million times, "You have to take time to work on your business." Lots of great books talk about the importance of working on your business. You know it's true, but you don't do it. Why not? Because you're likely too busy putting out fires. As a key player in your business or organization, everyone comes to you. You're always busy putting out fires and dealing with things within the business. When you walk through the door in the morning, you don't know what is going to happen, and you're in constant "respond and react" mode. You need to take time to work on your business. You need to have that clarity of where you're going to go. That clarity gives you the confidence to carry through and take your business to the next place, to "break through", if you will. Einstein had a great quote that we should remember, "Insanity. What is it? It's doing the same thing over and over and over and over, expecting a different result." It's not going to happen. So how do we make it happen?
Schedule It
One of the easiest ways is to schedule it. Just schedule a time. It might be one hour a week or four hours once a month. It might be next Friday at 3:00 in the afternoon or at 8:00 in the morning. Get your phone out and get prepared to schedule that time. Just take that little bit of time at first. Baby steps! It doesn't have to be a whole lot of time, but it's got to be sacred to you. You're setting it apart and you're going to spend that little bit of time working on your business, thinking through where you're going, what needs to happen, the things you should start doing, and the things you should stop doing. In a future post, we'll have a whole list of ideas and questions you can ask yourself and work through to make that time efficient and productive. Marie Forleo had a great saying that I really loved. She said, "Everything is figureoutable."
Figureoutability vs. Stuckability
I create this index of what I call "stuckability and figureoutability" that I use in my own life and in the lives of my clients and customers. What it means is this. What is the number one problem in business? Is it employee issues, marketing issues, cash flow? Is it any of those things? No. It's being stuck. Those are simply issues that you have to deal with. The problem is that you don't know how to solve them. You don't know how to break through. So this is your stuckability index. Do you have a high stuckability index? Do you have trouble getting over those things? Most likely, part of the problem is that you don't take time to figure it out and solve the issue. When we take these little breaks and set aside that time to work on the business, we figure out how to break through and get to the next level. When you do that, you're going find that you have a very successful business. In summary, we want to increase the index on the "figureoutability" side, and decrease the "stuckedness".
Make It Happen
Take out your phone or whatever you use for keeping track of your appointments and schedule a time for your first opportunity to just work on your business. Pick an hour a week, four hours a month, I don't care. Go off-site and do it, but schedule it right now. If you take action right now, you're more likely to follow through. If you think you'll schedule it in an hour or sometime tomorrow, you're not going get it done. So do it now. Break through!Thanks so much for visiting. Check out my other videos for more ideas on how to break through and reach the next level in your business. Stayed tuned as we continue our discussion of the four aspects of good leadership. And, if you like this video, please subscribe!