Hunger to Succeed & Plan Strategically
You have the hunger to succeed – now plan your actions strategically.
Are you thinking about your Mental Edge and achieving success through a life-work balanced approach? Because I’ll tell you, that’s not how the majority of the successful business leaders that I’ve come across have done or are doing it. No one I know has been able to schedule an equal number of hours for each of their various work and personal activities that results in a rewarding and realistic life. Achieving success with that mindset is close to impossible. However, success can be achieved by approaching life in a harmonious way.
Harmony implies thinking about the various important aspects of the life as a leader – your role, your organization, your employees, your career, your family, your community, your wealth and your health and figuring out how all these pieces fit together strategically.
It is rare to find a successful leader or any human being where all the facets of life come together equally. It’s a dynamic equation that shifts over time through one’s life. The key is to reflect on how the puzzle fits together – determining what’s important at different times and in fact measure that importance in comparison to the other facets you’ve defined for yourself.
In doing so you are able to reflect and then prioritize your time and effort to ensure you reach your goals and objectives. For a young professional just joining the workforce, their commitment of time and effort may be much smaller for Health, Family and Community, for example. They may be focused on accelerating their careers. For a 35 year old leader the dynamics shift. Family may place a larger dynamic and something else may have to fall in terms of effort. There are only 24 hours in a day!
The hunger to succeed is critical but understanding how you define success is absolutely mandatory for today and in the future. Where things go wrong is when folks set goals and objectives incorrectly and don’t understand the consequences of what they are striving for. Driving your career and/or business and overlooking your family in terms of your overall success sometimes results in unintended adverse consequences. Leaders often believe they are providing for their families. The question is what exactly are they providing and for what purpose? For example working 70-100 hours a week and travelling away from home maybe a fool’s game when considering how a young family is being raised. And when two spouses are working, the equation becomes that much more complicated!
If the providers originally thought that they were doing it for the family, they often realize later in life that their families have become dysfunctional as a result of their lack of presence. So the big questions we often come across as advisors to numerous leaders at PEO, have you strategically defined your personal goals and objectives? How does your business/career strategy fit in within your personal one? Are you thinking harmoniously?
I certainly don’t want to slow down those of us with that hunger for success, we just need to strategically plan to ensure we are indeed on a path that leads to an overall, harmonious success. At PEO we’ve developed a LIFE GPS tool that helps our leaders create their personal path to success. If you’d like to learn more please contact us at info@peo.net.
I’m looking forward to hearing from Yossi Ghinsberg at our annual conference this year. He – an amazon survivor with an insatiable hunger for adventure, and an advisor to many business leaders – might be just the perfect person to remind us to bring harmony to our lives!
