Success Impulse: Your wrong priorities (and the fatal consequences)
Do you and your team always and at all times have the priorities fully under control and are never "externally controlled"? Do you always achieve what you want? Then you don't need to read any further.
Everyone else (about 99.9%) who keeps getting absorbed by the urgent before the important, and who spends too much time on reactive activities, should definitely check out the following. It can change your life.
Program the subconscious mind
Our brain is a fascinating organ: Put simply, you can use your conscious mind to program your subconscious mind, through strong emotions and ongoing repetition. This is important because our subconscious mind is responsible for over 99% of our daily decisions. This mechanism leads you to do more and more of what you have done in the past. This realization is critical to your success.
Example: If you are used to spending most of your time as a leader solving urgent problems and putting out emblematic fires, you will get more of that in the future. You multiply what you focus on.
Further examples from practice
If you spend most of your time on problem-solving and fire-fighting exercises, you will also get more and more such problems. If you keep doing the urgent before the important, there will be more and more urgent things in your life. If you spend a lot of time in meetings where neither the urgent nor the important is discussed most of the time, you will have more and more such meetings.
Learning to set priorities correctly
How can you change this negative automatism, for yourself and your team? In principle, in three steps:
- Know what's important. Most people have a hard time deciding what is really important. You need to have defined your long-term goals and your mission.
- Schedule the important stuff. It sounds almost too simple, but you need to schedule what's important on your calendar for each day. Many people already let themselves be controlled by others by filling their calendar with everything possible.
- Doing the important thing. Doing the important thing usually requires creative thinking and initiative. If you don't do it, often no one else will. You are often breaking new ground. That is exhausting. You'd rather spend the next few hours in meetings again...
These insights are simple to understand, but painstaking to implement. Winning teams have their priorities in check - and produce corresponding success.
Anyone can take this path. If you start today and gradually shift your priorities with your team, you will dramatically improve performance - guaranteed!
To the author:
Volkmar Völzke is a success maximizer. Book author. Consultant. Coach. Speaker. www.volkmarvoelzke.ch
