I remember a quote by Oscar Wilde “Be yourself everyone else is taken” and I absolutely agree with what he is saying, where I sometimes have a challenge with this is occasionally being yourself can really get in the way of your success.
When we set out on the journey of business ownership, our leadership style is something that tends to evolve on a day to day basis. You might see examples of great leadership whilst watching your favourite sport, watching a film, reading a book and think to yourself ‘I need to work on adapting that trait’ and you set about practicing that trait. The reason you would practice is because you have learnt that practice makes perfect which is in fact wrong, practice makes permanent! This is just one of the ways we develop bad habits.
In business, very few people have ever been trained to run a business and so they learn ‘on the job’ and sometimes this leads to practicing some tasks in an imperfect way which leads to bad habits that soon become a way of life normally shrouded in the words “that’s how we do things around here.”
Here are just 3 bad habits that you may have developed whilst growing your business. If you find yourself guilty of any of them consider ways in which you could stop or manage so they stop having a negative effect on your business future.
Not having a system for assigning priorities.
As a conscientious business owner when a situation arises that needs your attention you must always get to the bottom of it as soon as it arises right? Wrong. Going about business in this way will severely restrict the growth of your business or you will one day tear yourself apart. You will be the bottleneck within your business for two reasons
- Whilst
you might be paying your people to work for you by jumping in and getting
involved in fixing everything you are in fact training your team to always
leave it up to you to fix things. In actual fact you are paying people to
be your audience!
- Not
everything demands your attention straight away; you need to learn how to
prioritise matters according to their level of urgency and importance.
If you respond to
every concern because of time constraints placed upon you, you will be putting
important tasks which do need your attention on the back burner, “I’ll get
round to fixing that someday” challenge is because of you lack of
prioritisation you will always be reactive to the urgent pressing matters which
innovatively means the important stuff will get pushed back again. It becomes a
vicious circle.
Allowing yourself to get distracted.
You settle down to get on with an important task and the phone rings, your email pings, there is knock at the door the list goes on. There will always be other things vying for your attention. It is up to you to change the environment around you so that you can immerse yourself in your important tasks. This can be as simple as setting blocks of time during the day to check your emails and then being disciplined to only deal with email during these times.
If the door is constantly getting knocked keep a log of who the culprits are and what are the disturbances about. It may be you need to put some more systems in place to stop the disturbances or it could be something as simple as a polite sign on the door!
If you find yourself being drawn to what is happening outside the window turn your desk around.
The key here Is to keep a log of what is distracting you and committing to putting in place strategies to stop these disturbances from taking you off track.
Being a perfectionist
It could be argued that being a perfectionist isn’t a habit yet just like any other behaviour it is manageable. If you set absurdly high standards for yourself and your team you could well be sabotaging any chance you have of success.
Striving for perfectionism will more than likely lead to a great deal of procrastination and you can’t steer a parked car, so progress for your business becomes stalled.
The pressure to be perfect can also freeze up creativity and take all the fun out of doing a task which leads to tasks taking longer because there is little pleasure in doing them.
Make room for imperfections, a lot of successful businesses came from failures. Never be afraid to stumble and fall, because you will learn more from failure than anywhere else.
Allowing yourself to get distracted.
You settle down to get on with an important task and the phone rings, your email pings, there is knock at the door the list goes on. There will always be other things vying for your attention. It is up to you to change the environment around you so that you can immerse yourself in your important tasks. This can be as simple as setting blocks of time during the day to check your emails and then being disciplined to only deal with email during these times.
If the door is constantly getting knocked keep a log of who the culprits are and what are the disturbances about. It may be you need to put some more systems in place to stop the disturbances or it could be something as simple as a polite sign on the door!
If you find yourself being drawn to what is happening outside the window turn your desk around.
The key here Is to keep a log of what is distracting you and committing to putting in place strategies to stop these disturbances from taking you off track.
Being a perfectionist
It could be argued that being a perfectionist isn’t a habit yet just like any other behaviour it is manageable. If you set absurdly high standards for yourself and your team you could well be sabotaging any chance you have of success.
Striving for perfectionism will more than likely lead to a great deal of procrastination and you can’t steer a parked car, so progress for your business becomes stalled.
The pressure to be perfect can also freeze up creativity and take all the fun out of doing a task which leads to tasks taking longer because there is little pleasure in doing them.
Make room for imperfections, a lot of successful businesses came from failures. Never be afraid to stumble and fall, because you will learn more from failure than anywhere else.
If you find yourself confused, procrastinating and would like to
discover how you can take control of your time, become more productive and have
more time for the important thing in your life, join us on Friday 21st
July and we will provide you with the tools, templates and knowledge you need
to gain at the very minimum one extra hour per day!
What’s more we will guarantee it! If you
don’t believe that the tools and information you receive will gain you at least
5 hours back in your working week we will give you a 100% refund, no questions
asked.
To book your place/s simply click here
or call the office on 0151 348 1202 and one of the team will
be happy to help you
