Transcript
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You're listening to the Her Leadership Coach podcast for the quietly determined career woman who's looking to step up into a first or next level leadership role. If you're looking to make a bigger, more positive difference in your organization, you've come to the right place. Well, hello. Welcome in. It's Rochelle.
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Thanks for joining me on today's episode, where we are talking productivity without the stress. If you caught last week's episode, you might remember it was about the seven types of busyness where we looked at what might be the real reasons everyone is so damn busy. The good news is, every one of those types of busyness can be changed. We can work on it if you're willing to commit to changing. So if you didn't catch that episode, I highly recommend you go back and listen.
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I did get some feedback from one listener about how it's a little bit confronting when you see yourself in one or maybe more of the types of business. So be warned. And also, I know the truth will set you free. You can't begin to fix something until you know what the problem is in the first place. Okay, so over the next two weeks, I'm going to be looking at the six areas that we need to embrace so we can each let go of this busyness epidemic.
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And instead, I want for us to become effective, amazing, productive woman without the stress. And I cover each of these six areas in a course that I run called the Done, Not Dusted course, which is a little bit of a play on words of done and dusted. Well, this is Done Not Dusted because you are not feeling completely exhausted at the end of all the dumbness. And depending on when you're listening to this, that course may or may not be available for you to enroll. And that's okay.
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I will let you know more about that at the end of this episode, so stay tuned. All right, so let's look at the six areas that they all fall under a framework of three, because three is the magic number, and that high level framework of three is who do I need to be, how do I work, and what do I do? Notice that the what, which is where we all tend to want to start, is the last piece of that framework. I find with most things in life, if you don't become the person you need to be first. So working on the who do I need to be?
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Then it doesn't matter how good your intentions are, you're not going to stick to the what. I'll talk about this topic a bit more in a future episode because it's a huge topic and one that I think is a really key concept for a leader to grasp. But we're not going to go into that today, or we will be here for a really long time. Okay, so each question within that framework so who do I need to be? How do I work?
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What do I do? Each of those comes with two areas. Underneath, we'll have a quick look at the whole picture first and then we'll look a little bit deeper at each one. So we start with who do I need to be? The first is you need to be a person of integrity.
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And then the second under that is also someone with a scientist mindset. And we'll talk about that. Next piece of the framework is how do I work? And in that section we have clarity, which is where everything needs to start. And we have with my energy.
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So how do I work? I work with clarity and I work with my energy. And finally, what do I do? And under that falls habits and systems. Okay, so let's start with the scientist mindset.
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Every change we make is made easier by a shift in mindset, a shift in our thoughts, our beliefs about something, a shift in the way we see things. And changing to a more productive yet less stressed woman is no exception to this rule. For a start, if you don't believe you can be both productive and have less stress, then you're going to be subconsciously sabotaging yourself as you go. You probably have heard this quote, but Henry Ford once famously said, if you think you can or you can't, you're right. And that applies with this as well.
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So the all encompassing mindset shift that we're talking about today is the scientist mindset. So what is a scientist mindset? There's quite a few components to this, but we'll start with how a scientist sees the world in terms of experiments. So you have a hypothesis, you put it to the test. So you devise a test and put it to the test.
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And then when the results come in, you learn something from them. You then might tweak the experiment a little, depending on what the results are, or you may even rethink the hypothesis entirely. You'll try again, you'll learn more lessons and that goes on in the circle. So you continue to hypothesize test, learn iterate. So how does that mindset help with productivity without the stress?
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There's a few ways. The simplest is that coming up with a way of working and the systems and habits that support you to get things done. That's all a matter of experimenting. There's no one size fits all as far as time management goes, as far as productivity, as far as getting things done. So there's so many people out there telling you so many different things.
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Some of them are known to work better than others and some of them will not work for you. So you definitely need to start with a scientist mindset of experimenting. However, more than that, one of the biggest areas I see where time is consumed unnecessarily is when we're striving for perfection. So yes, hands up if you're a perfectionist I know many of us are, and I think it's slightly to do with the way society raises our expectations. But often perfectionism stems from a fear of judgment.
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You have this belief, a mindset, if you want, that, if you are less than perfect, people will judge you as lacking, as incompetent and then they won't like you. There are two problems with that belief though. Perfectionism is for the most part at least subjective. And the second is that people will like you or not like you regardless. I think I said before in last week's podcast, but not everybody likes you and you do not like everybody and that is just fine.
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So an example of perfectionism being subjective comes from when I was a project manager and part of my job was to write business cases. So I would gather all the information and then I just needed to pull it into a document so that the project board could make a decision whether to proceed with the project or not. Now, in my early days of being a project manager, these business cases would take weeks, if not over months, for me to pull them together. I would write it, then I would rewrite it, then I would refine it, and then I would go back to rewriting it again, all so that I could hand it to my senior leader for review. Now, why senior leader was reviewing business cases is a discussion for another day.
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But every single time I would put that business case up for review, it would come back with red pen all over it. Move this paragraph up higher, change this word here so much red pen. So yeah, I got to the point where I sat back and I'm like, why am I spending all this time trying to be perfect when clearly my idea of perfect and his idea of perfect just didn't line up. So, according to the Pareto principle, which you might know as the 8020 rule, most things in life are not distributed evenly. And when it comes to time and our tasks, it tends to take 20% of our time to get something about 80% done and then 80% of our time to get that final 20% done.
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Have a think about some of the things that you've done lately and if you weren't aiming for perfection, how much time would you have shaved off that task? Imagine getting 80% of your time back if you were to let go of that final 20% needing to be done so that it was perfect.
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Yeah, the mind boggles. So bringing this back to the scientist mindset, if my mindset was that the business case was an experiment, right, something that was going to be tested by giving it to the senior leader for review, I was going to learn lessons with all of the red pen and I would then iterate it example make the changes based on those lessons that I've learned. Why would I spend all the time in the first place making it perfect if I saw it as an experiment? And I will put in a caveat. I get that some experience do need to be run close to perfect, so it's not to muddy the waters.
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But I'm not going for a perfect analogy here, so let's just run with it, shall we?
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Hopefully you will see how letting go of perfectionism is going to give you back a whole heap of your time. And we work through ways of doing that within the dumb, not dust. Of course, there are a few other ways a scientist mindset helps, which we also cover in the course, and I'm not going to go into them all today. We will again be here forever. But things like staying curious scientists is always curious about things.
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They respond to events rather than react, and also getting comfortable with failure. All really helpful mindset shifts from getting things done without the stress perspective. All right, the second area under the who do I need to be frame is you need to be someone of integrity. Now, there's a lot written about integrity. Trust me, I looked it up when I was preparing for this podcast, and there's a whole lot of philosophizing over what it really means.
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But to keep things simple, I'm just going to define it in my way. Integrity for me, at a layman's level, is about two things. It's about doing what you say you're going to do, even or especially to yourself, right? And it's about doing it even if no one else is going to know one way or the other whether you've done it. And then the second thing, to me, integrity is walking your talk.
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It's not just telling others, this is how life should be, this is how I act, this is what I do. It's not just saying that it's doing it. That to me, is someone that's living in integrity. So how does having integrity help you become more effective, help you to get more done? Well, people of integrity are generally pretty selfmotivated.
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They're sort of their own supervisors, right? They don't need someone telling them what to do because they're telling themselves what to do and they're sticking to it. So when they say they're going to do something again, even if only to themselves, they will get it done. So let's say I commit to myself to doing 30 minutes of exercise every single day, then to remain in self integrity, I'll do it. That means rain, hail or shine.
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Okay, I'd probably wait for the hail to stop. I'm not going out while there's ice pouting on me, but you get the picture. But it's interesting, isn't it, how much more likely we are to see a commitment through when we've made it to others than we do when we make it to ourselves. And I can feel that one. And I'm going to say here that I am a work in progress in this area.
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However, I am far better now than I used to be. We can, though, use that knowledge of being more likely to commit to somebody else than to ourselves to help us stay in integrity. So let's take the 30 minutes of exercise as an example. If I committed to my husband that I was going to do that, or if I committed to maybe my kids who definitely like to keep me accountable, they enjoy that, I'm pretty sure. How much more likely do you think I'm going to do it?
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So today I want to ask you, where are you breaking a commitment to yourself at the moment? And I'm pretty sure something just popped up in your head immediately, what are you saying you will do? And then allowing yourself to let it slide. And I know we have great excuses, great reasons why we can't do something. I have them often.
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It's too cold to go and run. I don't have clean socks. I didn't get a good sleep. I need to get more sleep. And they're all, like, valid, right?
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But if I listen to those excuses, then I'm out of integrity.
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So think about what might you put in place today to stay in integrity? And I know this can be a little confronting. It is for me when I realize what I've committed to doing. And then Renee Donna. But I believe we can do hard things.
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And I believe, as part of a scientist mindset, that failure doesn't mean that's the end. We learn from it and we recommit. Okay, so let's move on to our first piece in the how we work frame. And this is going to be the last piece that we cover in today's episode. We'll come back next week with the other three.
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But the first piece is clarity, and this is a big one and an important one that will help you get the right things done in the right time without all of the stress. So imagine if you're embarking on a road trip. We have plans to go to Kennelworth this weekend to drink coffee out of a doughnut. And if you're drawing right now, you should be, because it looks amazing. But anyway, imagine if we were going on that road trip, but we didn't know where we were going.
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We didn't have GPS to help us get there, no map at all. And we didn't really know why we were going in the first place. We might have had some thoughts of nice coffee, but it's a two hour drive there. Like, what were we really doing there's? Coffees closer.
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That kind of scenario is often what it's like for us, both at work and at home in real life. Not often on a road trip, thankfully, but we're so busy doing stuff that we forget what we're doing it all for. We forget where we're going or why we're going there. And we don't have any markers to help us get there. So if that's the situation, how do we know what's important versus simply filling in time?
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How do we know if what we're doing even matters? If it matters to us, if it matters to our family, if it matters to our stakeholders or to our customers, it's really easy to fill our days with stuff. But if you shine a light on the why and the where you're going, it's suddenly clear that a lot of what we do is getting us nowhere. It's running around in circles. It's spinning plates.
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Right? One of the exercises we work through in the Dunnot Dusted course is called The Wheel of Life, and this is used in a few of my courses because it's a good exercise and you can find this on the web. I do it in a slightly different way, but what I strongly believe is that nothing for us happens in isolation. We don't compartmentalize work from family, from social life, from health. We might think we can, but we don't.
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We want to make sure right up front that you're aware of all the areas of your life. How well are you spending time doing the things that matter to you? What's something you might be feeling, I guess, out of whack with out of I'm not sure that I like the word out of balance because I don't believe it is a balance, at least not an equal balance. But it feels to you as if you're in sync. You're balanced across the areas that you want to be, doing each one with the amount of time that you want to be.
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The thing is, when we feel depleted in one area of our life, it affects all of the areas of our life. So if you think about the times you've been spending too much time at work, particularly if it's doing things that aren't making you all that happy, how have your relationships been during that time? Or maybe you're spending more time socializing than what you feel like is a balance for you, that is aligned for you, and maybe that socializing is taking away from your physical health time. So my question for you as we wrap up this episode is what area of your life do you know you're neglecting right now? And again, I feel like once just come to your mind as I've asked that question.
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So thinking about that one area that you know you would like to be spending more time in right now, to feel more in alignment, I want you to think of one action you can take today to bring that back into your sense of balance.
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I would love to hear from you what that action is going to be. So feel free to email me. My email is in the show notes. And if you're suffering from busyitis, whether you feel you've got too much to do, or whether you feel like you're just not coping with all of the spinning plates. Please take a look at the Done Not dusted course page.
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You'll find the link in the show notes, or you can go to www.herleadershipway.com and you will find a link in there. And if it's not open for enrollment at the time you're listening to this, you can definitely add your name to the waitlist. So you'll be the first to know the next time we open the doors. I know that you can both get things done and decrease your stress levels. This is how I live my life.
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It works for me, it works for my team, and it works for the clients that I've given these tools to. So it will work for you. And it's a personalized journey, right? So this isn't me telling you, you must work this way. This is us figuring out what works for you together and coming up with a plan at the end of it.
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So time for you to stop all the plates spinning. Let's get you feeling like you're on top of the world. Make sure you go and have a look at that. And next week, we're going to look at the other three areas under the down not assisted framework, including the second one under the how do I work? Frame, which is energy.
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I look forward to being in your ears again there's.
