This Is A Hilarious Account

Balancing Life With A Strategic Plan

While spending time with a business owner, we got into a discussion about strategic planning.

He was quite convinced tht it was unnecessary to have a strategic plan due to his success that he already had accomplished. Of course, that is not totally true, due to the changing environment and the dynamic world of global business. Every business needs a adaptable and  flexible strategic plan that can guide the organisation or company into the future while anticipating the strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats it will deal with on the way.

But the conversation took an interesting twist, because as I then questioned him further, the personal need for  a personal leadership strategic plan was highlighted.

Do you have a persona strategic plan for your life? No was his asnswer?

Often times that is the case with business leaders,they do well, extremely well with their careers but when it comes to elements of their personal lives outside of their careers they are struggling to keep their head above water. 

How about you?

The worst is that although this maybe the case they often either ignore the fact because they haven’t got time for the problems outside of their career, or they are not aware of the problems because they are too busy building a success for themselves, or they try and compartmentalise their lives and hope to get to the personal areas sometime when they give it the priority it needs.

Maybe, just maybe that there is no one to talk to who will not prejudge, use it as a weapon, misunderstand or tell everyone on the board about what you are dealing with.

The fact is a personal leadership strategic plan will assist you to unveil the issues that need dealing with and keep them in perspective, while keeping a focus on what motivates you and keeps you on the pathway to your full potential, personally and professionally.  

Continuous Improvement For Strategic Living

Nobody should be content to stay where they are, no matter how successful you may seem to be.

Organisations and businesses should be in a constant state of continuous improvement to meet the need of total quality and that involves strategic thinking and planning so they capitalise on their assets and resources.

Basically, every organisation that wants to be competitive in this economic environment will focus on their total quality. Total quality as we know equals continuous improvement, of strategy planning, structures and systems.

But regardless of how superb and fine tuned any of these elements are they involve people. People are the hands and brains of every strategic plan, structure and system. The output and facilitation is only as good as those that see to its application. The output of total quality in any organisation depends on the quality of the people that are found in its various components,.

For an organisation to experience continuous improvement, the individuals involved need to experience continuous improvement. And just as any organisation that wants and needs continuous improvement has to develop and maintain a strategic plan, the leadership has to develop and maintain a strategic personal plan that is inspiring them to a personal environment of continuous change and improvement.

Every organisation and business can only experience the quality that its people carry within it. Personal leadership strategic planning is vital to master your own development and continuous improvement. A personal strategic plan will reduce the personal elements that cause stress and that affect productivity and personal total quality.

Whether it is your personal or professional relationships; your own personal goals and objectives being fulfilled, your recognition, your skill set, your financial mastery, or your own self awareness and objectivity and ability to self-motivate, only with a personal strategy plan by which you discover, and evaluate the various elements can you personally keep on track to accomplish personal continuous improvement.

Strategic Relationships

As I sat with a couple they confided “How could this have happened to us?”

“We don’t know what happened but we don’t love each other anymore and we don’t get along.”

It was a story I had heard many times before. Now the marriage relationship was left to crisis management to try and restore what was ‘missing’ or to play 'catch up' with what was needed in a whole marriage relationship.

Without a focused deposit of the necessary ingredients to keep a relationship at its best, the neglect will result in a relationship starved of growth and vitality. Every relationship including marriage requires daily and regular deposits of communication, companionship, and consideration. Without these basics your relationship will end up shipwrecked. But the investments we need to make are easily overlooked and without us knowing it, the relationship slowly but surely, through neglect, begins to die.

To revive a neglected and starved relationship takes huge amounts of investment of communication, companionship and consideration that at times requires more emotional energy than you can muster at the time.

Proactive leaders do not wait for the crisis; they build into their personal development a strategic plan that incorporates a what and a how for their relationships. Your strategic plan will give you the wise balance of personal resources that will need to be daily invested into your interpersonal relationships.

Crisis Management

For many years I have counselled and assisted people and couples with relationship issues and planning for their future.

Most of these occasions the ‘counselling’ had to be delivered into a crisis situation where the decisions were to be make or break with the outcomes to be negotiated on how the individual felt at that point. The thing with crisis management and counselling is that you do not have time to correct and bring about a process of change that will be suitable for the situation.

Many marriage situations that I would have to deal with would be in crisis simply because the individuals involved had left the mistakes, the failures, without correcting them; the needed deposits to build trust and mutual respect out of the every day actions of their marriage; by the time they reached me, they would be in such dire straits that emergency corrective action would be necessary.

Individuals that would be starting a business would discover that they weren’t properly equipped or had no idea where to begin. Often I would be approached to assist when a career had stale-mated and there was no where to go and now rash decisions were being made to correct the situation.

Too often we leave our lives to ‘chance’ hoping that everything just works out in time. If businesses were to be run this way, well nobody would be making money.

What if your personal life were a business, would you be profitable?

Without a strategic plan for your personal leadership of your life, you tend to live in crisis management and unable to ever reach your full potential. You will be living with “if only I had...” and “I wish I had...” , but you can and should take charge of your life right now; whether young or old.

How do you do that?

By taking time to carefully master the areas of your life with a strategic plan.

Most everyone has a wish or a dream for their life but just do not know where to start or how to implement it. We tend to have a fatalistic concept to life, living without hope and without a determined direction or purpose. Somehow, the programmes that have been written on our lives and hearts tell us that our family, our friends and others couldn’t, so we cannot.

Those that do make it are just ‘lucky’, but when you ask the ‘lucky’ ones, they will tell you that the more they planned and took positive action steps the 'luckier' they got.

You have the power of your future in your own hands.

Every single individual needs to start with their own personal leadership of their lives.

Leadership requires a strategy to be successful and influential.

As an individual you need to become strategic in your thinking and in your choices and decisions.

Every action you take moves you either further from or closer to your desired outcomes. Leadership doesn’t start at work or in sport, but within you. Your strategic plan doesn’t start with your business but within you.

External leadership can only reach its full potential when you as an individual can take leadership of your personal life. This is effected by a personal strategic plan that will give you the tools to take charge of the various areas of your personal life and relationships.  

Personal Leadership

Are you in a constant state of frustration and feel your stomach is in a knot every time you think of your responsibilities and duties at work?

You are efficient and skilled at what you do, but is there a lack of motivation and passion in what you do?

Would you be found doing anything else than what you are doing now?

Is it possibly because you are an efficient manager of your personal life but what you actually need is personal leadership of your life?

What do I mean?

Management tends to focus on how things are done.

How I can better accomplish what I do?

How can I expend an efficient amount of energy to fulfil my tasks and accomplish my managerial objectives? Even personally, we manage our budgets and our relationships and our time.

But have you considered that personal leadership is about purpose, about vision, about direction.

You need first a personal leadership of your life.

Are you in the right field?

Do your values align with the organisational ones?

Do you even know and have you written out your values, what is important to you?

Are you content with the direction you have chosen for your life?

Survival, and especially in this economic environment, your sanity, does not depend just on applying yourself efficiently to accomplish your goals, working harder, but knowing whether the track or path you find yourself on is headed in the right direction.

Often we are so busy making a lifestyle we are not aware of the fact we may not even have a life.

Personal leadership is critical in this rapidly changing environment we find ourselves in today. We need vision and a purposeful direction for our lives that motivates and inspires; a motivation that takes us into the destiny we know should be ours.

A strategic plan will deal with your deepest belief systems, values and strengths and weaknesses. It’s the essence of your deepest desires and passions. It sets the pace of what your future and destiny should and would be.

Management of your life cannot start without a personal leadership strategic plan that sets you on the course of purpose. Many are trying to manage the elements of their lives with frustration and pressures simply because they are managing what they do not believe in and don’t want for their lives. Many are purely in a crisis mode simply because they are in the wrong field trying to ‘fix’ things that never were supposed to be there in the first place.

But if we are caught in a mindset of 'fix-it', we never see the need to develop our leadership; we just do not have time. I cannot tell you how many individuals I have spoken to over the years that are caught in a management-by-crisis mindset, unable to make out the proverbial 'wood for the trees', but do not have ‘time’ to design and evaluate a leadership plan for their lives, of course, it becomes a situation where they are polishing brass on a sinking ship. They never take charge of their lives and never experience the freedom, the quality of life that comes with having and operating according to personal strategic leadership plan for their lives.

Stop! Take out time with a facilitator to begin to review your career, your relationships and your personal foundation to begin to unfold a personal leadership strategy that will highlight who you are, why you are, and where you are and where you want to be and how to get there. Think leadership first and then you can manage the right elements in the right places.

How To Overcome Defeat

Every leader in their personal and professional capacity has to face defeat and disappointment one time or another or maybe even a few times in their lives. As a  leader you are faced with betrayal, criticism, redundancy, divorce or failure. Organisational politics, rejection, misunderstanding and life sometimes dishes out stuff that is hard for us to handle and cope with.

I remember the time when all that I had worked for and devoted myself to was taken away in a seeming moment. My vision came crashing down in flames, my friends turned their backs on me, and it seemed I had had made every wrong decision in the book. Defeat was eminent for me and failure certainly was knocking at my front door.

I knew that everything could be taken, but the elements of who I am and what I do remained within.

What do you do when facing life threatening defeat?

Number one thing you have to do is forgive.

Many times you want to blame everything and everyone for your circumstances, but that just empowers them more. When you are prepared to take responsibility it gives you the power to make the right decisions going forward. As you forgive and release those that have hurt you, the people involved, and those who have rejected you, a tremendous weight gets lifted that allows you to be ceative and innovative again. When we are hurt we need and have to blame someone. But that only keeps you bound to the past.

Number two is you have to focus on what lies ahead.

Without a vision, we perish. Its hard to dream when you are feeling defeated and a failure. But without a dream you have no motivation, no inspiration. Hope and faith are two essential ingredients I found so helpful. Hope is a blueprint, a plan of an expexted end. Faith is the strategy the how to get to that expected end. Depending on your personality, you either may want to just die, or on the other end you may harden yourself and stay angry at the world. If you have a vision that you can begin to imagine, you will keep yourself moving; and a moving ship is easier to steer than a docked one. Vision, hope and faith is a healing in the midst of "crazy" times in your leadership.

Number three is to invest in others.

Find others who need your abilities, skills and personality. Share your journeys with them. Help them through a difficult situation in their lives. Encourage them. Did you see that? En-COURAGE them. Give them courage. The farm principle of sow then harvest applies not to just farming. As you sow inspiration and courage into others, it begins to grow in you.

Are you feeling depressed because of what you have had to go through, give the little bit of courage and life you have left to a friend or colleague, a family member, and like the seed in the farm, start to see your own grow.

Number four is to never look back.

Many times you are tempted to go back and think about what happened to you and you will just begin to experience the feelings of hurt defeat inadequacy and failure all over again. Don’t let your past hijack your future. You still have a great future ahead of you. So many plans to accomplish, so many better choices to make, so many quality relationships to still enjoy, so many goals still to reach. Begin to tell another story. Don’t tell the same story that takes you back and defeats you over and over again.

Although everyone one time or another experiences defeat, its what we do with it that counts.

Live again and move toward a great intended future.