Welcome to 2007! The first month is over already. New Year resolutions have been made and maybe already broken, and goals set and maybe abandoned. But you can’t give up on this because committing to your career development and being a leader in your field is what we here at People Empowered want to help you achieve. 
 
In this issue:

• Making New Year Resolutions Work.
• Vision and Leadership.
• Singing Our Way to Heightened Well-Being and Successful Companies.
• The Downside of Multi-tasking.
• Some Happenings Worth Exploring.

We want to provide you with the vision, ideas, strategies and solutions – from outside the box, if necessary - that will empower you in 2007 to achieve everything you want for yourself – both personally and professionally – and for your business or organisation.

Maree Harris

Making New Year Resolutions Work

Why have so many of us become disillusioned with New Year resolutions and setting goals? Because after a few months we find we are no longer acting on them. Somehow other things assume a higher priority in our life. What does that mean? Were those resolutions and goals not important in the first place? Yes, they were. So what happened?

Vision First, Goals Second.

We are more likely to committedly work on our goals until we achieve them if they grow out of a VISION we have for our lives, something that we really want, that has an enduring quality about it that will have a long lasting impact if we live it out. Visions are closely related to values and what we hold important. There is usually an emotional dimension to visions. They inspire commitment and passion in bringing them to reality. Once we have our vision clear, we can then ask ourselves how we are going to live out that vision in our personal and/or business and professional lives. That’s where setting the goals for how to do it comes in.

Let’s take an example: After a hectic year in 2006, where you missed many of your children’s school functions, your sister’s 40th birthday celebration, went to sleep on the couch immediately after dinner on the odd nights you were home in the evening, caught up with friends rarely and had a wake up call when one had a heart attack and died, promised your son you’d be there for his basketball grand final but forgot to diary it (even though he reminded you that  morning and plenty of times during the week before), you decide you do not want to live your life that way. As well, you are overweight, never exercise, eat on the run and all the wrong foods. Many of us have been there. What do we do?

A Vision Statement for someone like this may be:
I want a life that is balanced. I want my partner, my children, my family and friends to know that they are the most important things in my life. While my work is also important to me I want to organise it in such a way that it respects that fact. I want to live to see my children grow up and to be part of the life of their children as well so I want to become fit and healthy. I am committed to setting goals that will help me create that life.

The challenge is making that happen. How do you do it?

Stop! Slow down and take some time out to reflect on what is most important to you. Take a holiday or a few days off work. Go fishing and think. Or what about camping? You can’t do this type of reflecting from within the hurly-burly of corporate or business life.

Create a vision for how you want your life to be, not just this year, but from now on. What do you value most and want to preserve or maintain? What would you miss most if you lost it? Work on a vision of your ideal life-style for this point in your life then go back and tweak it with reality and what is possible. But don’t place too many limitations on what is possible! When we ask visionary questions some things become possible they were impossible.

Determine what the challenges and threats would be to you living that life? What would be the benefits, rewards and opportunities such a life-style would offer you? Do some deep reflection by yourself and with your partner and weigh up the challenges and threats against the benefits, rewards and opportunities.

Set goals for how you can achieve this life-style and overcome the challenges and threats. Write this all down.

Make yourself accountable to someone by sharing your vision and your goals for making it a reality – your partner, business associates, your work team, for example. That makes it much more difficult for you to renege on them.

When your goals are challenged by some supposedly very important other priority, return to your vision. What “price” will I pay if I compromise on this vision? Work out a creative way to handle that “other” priority while still remaining committed to your vision.

Revisit this vision and your goals every week for at least two months and then every fortnight after that. Rework and reshape them to ensure you are implementing your vision. If you find yourself reneging on them, focus yourself and get back on track. If you are finding that difficult, and you begin to abandon your vision in favour of other people’s priorities, get yourself a coach or mentor who can keep you committed and accountable to your vision and your goals.

What’s the Outcome from This?

• You have a sense that YOU are in control of your life, not someone or something else.
• You feel much more together as a person, more integrated, more grounded.
• Who you are, what is important to you and what you want to be is aligned. And what you do and how you do it is aligned to that. There is no sense of incongruence.
• There are less tensions and distractions in your life. You can actually experience a sense of peace and joy.
• You are much more productive because you are more focussed.
• You experience a great sense of achievement, purpose and meaning in both your personal and professional life.

Support Essential – Where Can You Get It?

I don’t want to pretend this is easy to achieve. It’s not. Most people need support to do it and maintain it because the challenges today are considerable. This support can come from a number of places.

• Make this process a “joint venture” with your partner, with two of you making sure you both stay with it.

• Alternatively, go through this process with a work colleague, your small executive team, or a cross company group of 3-4 colleagues. Meet once a week for an hour to keep one another accountable and to help one another creatively and proactively handle the obstacles when they present. The Australian Business Women’s Network has a very well organised program of Goals Groups for women members across Australia that meet in groups of 3-4 once a week at 7 a.m. for 1-1½ hours to do this.  It even provides a 3 hour training session to help women to use the time productively and successfully.

• Get yourself a mentor within or outside your organisation to journey with you on this.

• Invest in a coach who not only can support you to stay with your vision, and overcome all the challenges to it along the way, but who can also inspire you to take it further, to take risks, to be creative and innovative and to achieve far more than you ever thought was possible.

Vision and Leadership

Danah Zohar, a physicist, philosopher and management thought leader, asks the question: “What makes a great leader”? She thinks that “great leadership depends primarily on vision – not just any type of vision, but one that we can appreciate intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. A vision”, she says, “is something we aspire to, something that is the glue of our enterprise, the driving force, the vitality within it.  When we are touched by a vision, our deepest values come into play and we have a sense of abiding purpose to our enterprise”. She believes that in our world today “the thing we are most lacking is leaders who can convey vision.”

Her article “Spiritually Intelligent Leadership” can be found on the web-site of Leader to Leader – http://www.leadertoleader.com/leaderbooks/121/fall2005/zohar.html  It is No.38 Fall 2005. This incidentally is an excellent web-site for anyone interested in leadership and the latest thinking in the area.

Singing Our Way To Heightened Well-Being and Successful Companies

In an April 2005 issue of Business Review Weekly (BRW) there was an article called “Beyond the Gym”. It was on preventative health and the way companies are taking a much broader view as they foster the health and well-being of their employees by way of reducing absenteeism and increasing productivity.

It talked about “the ubiquitous corporate badge of honour: the gym”, the sports teams and flu vaccinations and EAP programs, staff massages and a wealth of other strategies that companies are using to increase employee well-being, some more holistic than others.

One of the more creative ideas was used by ANZ Banking Group, book publisher Allen and Unwin and VicHealth where they encouraged staff to participate in group singing to release tension and increase productivity women.

Just before Christmas I had the pleasure of meeting two dynamic young women – Aurora Kurth and Hannah Kelly who in 2005 began a business called Sing Big – www.singbig.com.au – to do just that. Sing Big offers corporate programs, is involved in using singing for team building. It conducts session at workshops and conferences as ice breakers and energiser sessions. It also runs experiential workshops. If your company is interested in something different contact Aurora or Hannah on info@singbig.com.au 

The Downside of Multi-tasking

I always thought that multi-tasking, that allows people to do many things at once, was an extraordinary talent and much valued time-management skill. Women especially are very good at it. They learn it on the second shift, after they come home from work , when they are cooking tea, putting in a load of washing, hearing about what happened at school today, helping kids with various sorts of homework, supervising the internet, managing disagreements about television programs, answering the phone, washing dishes and so on.

I then read this article in a relatively new business magazine for women, Shattered, aptly subtitled “breaking the glass ceiling, balancing the business landscape” (Vol.1. No.4, 2006). It shattered my glowing perception about multi-tasking and got me thinking.

If we want work/life balance, if we want to be productive and successful in our work, is multi-tasking helping or hindering that? Mary Carlomagno, in this article suggests it is hindering it. She does though suggest that there is good multi-tasking (folding washing in front of the television) and bad multi-tasking (answering mobile phones while driving). As a busy corporate executive heading for a crash, she began a concerted action plan to concentrate on one thing at a time. She discovered that multi-tasking

• was distracting, causing her to make mistakes which then led her to have to repeat the work,
• takes a mental toll, and affects productivity,
• saps concentration,
• wastes time, rather than saves it, “because the brain has to constantly get back to speed where it left off”.

She has five recommendations to eliminate negative multi-tasking and become more productive in our work.

1. Learn the difference between healthy and harmful multi-tasking.
2. Determine your big projects and schedule time to work on them, without interruption.
3. Be realistic about how long it takes to complete a project.
4. Check messages, only when ready to respond.
5. Start with small goals, a morning, a day or even a week to start, achieving small steps will cement permanent change.

But maybe the answer is even more simple than that. We need to be in the now, in this moment because it is the only time we can be sure we have.

Some Happenings Worth Exploring

• Women’s Network – VECCI in the City. 21/2/07 at ZINC, Federation Square, Melbourne. 5.30-7.30 p.m. Guest MC: Kirstie Marshall and Guest Speaker: Diana Williams from Ferwoood Women’s Health Clubs. Bookings at www.vecci.org or by phone

• E-Mail Marketing Workshop with Melissa Norfolk Web Design.
  Thursday February 8, 9.30-12.30 St. Kilda Road, Melbourne.  Another on May 10th if you miss February 8.
  
  Check out other workshops by Melissa Norfolk.
  Pay Per Click Marketing To Get On The 1ST Page Of Google In Under Two Hours.
  Saturday March 3. 9.30-12.30
  
  Contact Melissa on info@melissanorfolk.com or phone 03 9816 3488

Copyright © People Empowered-Maree Harris 2007
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