Working ON rather than IN
When was the last time you took time out to work ON your business, your career, your relationship, your health, your wellbeing, your finances – rather than IN all of those things? People do some of these things all the time though they may not consciously think of it.
Businesses have their away days, couples have second honeymoons, romantic weeknds away, we might even take ourselves off to a health farm or have a holiday. With the exception of bigger businesses and a few well organised couples and individuals these are rarely strategically planned.
For many people the cry “I need a holiday” precedes a frantic search for a last minute deal, a strained relationship precipitates a weekend away, overindulgence at Christmas or an impending beach holiday sends us into a paroxysm of guilt and crash dieting to lose the pounds. Often all too little, too late brought on by some imagined or real crisis. Ironically in the case of businesses a crisis usually prompts a cancelling of the away days and an inward focus as they seek to increase cashflow, cut losses etc. And that’s OK. That’s all right and proper provided that the action is short term and does not divert from strategic goals. If working IN the business becomes the norm we can lose sight of the prize – we get stuck in the DOING and forget about the BEING. If you’ll forgive the somewhat trite cliché we are after all human beings not human doings!
To illustrate the point in a small way, a client of mine recently became concerned about his sales pipeline in that he could foresee a time in a couple of 2-3 months when his current engagements would dry-up and there were none coming through to replace them. His pattern when we first started to work together had been to wait until his contracts had expired with the result that he often had to resort to his “emergency plan” to get some new engagements, ANY engagement, quickly, just to pay the bills. As he also wanted to change the focus of his business, which involved developing a different client base, it was important that my client became more strategic about this. So we used our sessions together to plan not only the actions he would take to keep the pipeline full but also to transition the business to the new desired focus. The point of this story is that my client took regular time out of the business (in this case 1 hour per month) to work ON rather than IN his business.
So what would happen if the next time your business (or your relationships, or your health) hit crisis point or even just a minor blip, you did the opposite of what your instincts tell you to do (fight or flight) and took yourself and/or your management team OUT of the business for a while off, for an hour, ½ a day, a WHOLE day to effectively plan and strategise your way out of the crisis? How much more effective and sustainable would the resulting action be?
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 23 May 2007 )