“A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.” ~ John C. Maxwell
Do you ever feel like a juggling act in a circus? You have so many balls in the air that you need to keep an eye on so they don’t fall and embarrass you in front of your audience? I mean imagine if the juggling act at the circus was no good at juggling and he kept dropping balls? Money back please!! Clearly not good at what he does. Do we think the same about leaders?
I’ll fess up here and tell you I was about to create an imaginary person called Olga and tell my story through her but I’ll opt for full transparency. I am feeling like one of the juggling acts at the circus who is fearful of all my balls dropping right in front of you and feeling like a failure! Admitting I am far from perfect, I may have bitten off more than I can chew right now. As an entrepreneur, I think I’ve had a few too many ‘entrepreneurial seizures’ as Michael Gerber calls them, and come up with ‘fabulous ideas’ that are now out there and I need to honour them.
So I have quite a few balls to juggle and it feels like they are all the colours of the rainbow right now. Some are large projects, some are a more manageable size and others on a smaller scale but culminated together they form a large mass of stuff! Given I know what I know and should be smarter than this, why do I do it? Have you ever asked yourself the same question?
We all know what we should be doing but it seems easy to forget when you become busy, distracted, challenged or even a little impatient.
One thing I am good at is taking responsibility for what I have created, good and bad, so I am not asking for sympathy here. However, what it does highlight is no matter how much you know and what your best intentions are you can ‘default’ to less than resourceful activities if you become complacent. The challenge is to be experiencing this less and less.
How did I get into this situation? I had compromised my ‘reflection’ time I have planned on Friday’s for various reasons so I haven’t had full appreciation for what I actually had on until today when my to do list seemed to be incredibly long and very varied! I spend my ‘reflection time’ reflecting on decisions, results and workload that occurred during the week, reflect on what went well and how I can achieve better results the following week, then plan out what needs to be achieved. It works and works well when I do it. Lesson learnt.
To effectively lead and manage others we must first lead and manage ourselves. We won’t be perfect but we simply must have awareness around the behaviours we are likely to ‘default’ back to when not focused, busy or challenged. We need to catch them quickly and revert to the behaviours and actions that will get us closer to achieving our goals. We can get off track easily, but we can get back on track easily too with a bit of hard work and more empowered by lessons learnt.