What Does Leadership Take?

You Have to Balance All the Roles you Lead, with and without a title...

Tracy’s great at keeping all the balls up in the air! It was impressive, but occasionally one dropped and it was usually at the most inopportune time possible. She tried to keep all areas of her life balanced all the time, but now it seemed when she was doing well at work, the home life suffered and vice versa.

It’s a common problem. We make sure to balance those things for which there are structured consequences for dropping balls. (i.e. failing at work can get you fired) In the other areas of our life, where we may not have a name tag or title, but are still the leader, we see less urgency in figuring out how to balance. There are no structured consequences usually in our life and our kids aren’t going to fire us.

Further, at work, the “balance” asked of those with a leadership title is based on timelines. It’s the battle waged between the urgent and the important. Yet, when we focus on the urgent, there is little time for the important and when that happens, we develop guilt over not balancing the important which makes us lax and less attentive to the stuff at work which creates dropped balls there. See a pattern? Here are a few ways to lead both parts of your world, find balance and earn the titles you’re really looking for like “Good Person”, “#1 Mom” and more.

Develop Your Patience
The need for instant gratification will get you into trouble. Remember everything has a season, peaks and valleys go together, good days and bad days are a nice balance and that your time frame will not look like everyone else’s.

Be Nice to Yourself
We spend too much time “shoulding” all over ourselves and not enough time giving ourselves credit for the 4 million things we did. Instead, we focus on the one that we forgot. Either improve your memory or simply give yourself a break.

Clarify the Urgent VS the Important for You
Figure out if something is important to you or someone else, or just urgent, period.

You can do this! But, if you are expecting perfection all the time, in all areas… well, that’s another article.

About the Author
Monica Wofford, CSP founded The Contagious Confidence™ Conference for Women, in 2007. She can be reached at www.contaigousconferences.com or (866) 382-0121