The Manager - Edition 76 - Focus on your pillars of life - by Rob Lambert

Sep 30, 2019

WELCOME

Hi,

I hope you've had a cracking weekend and are looking forward to the week ahead.

It's all go at Lambert HQ as we head in to Autumn. I love this time of year. The leaves are crispy (when it's not raining) and there's a sort of haze in the air that I like. We're still having some warm days but the evenings are getting cooler which is nice.

This week I've been thinking a lot about balance in life and how my very own pillars of life need re-adjusting. More in the next section of the newsletter.

I'm also gearing up to do my SUPER-POWER communication workshop in Prague at the Eurostar conference. I'm revamping it and adding a whole lot more practical exercises. I have a large number of people signed up, but the more the merrier - still tickets available for the event.

Rob..

PILLARS OF LIFE

The core Philosophy of Cultivated Management is based around three things:

Balancing the pillars of life to become the best person you can be. After all, your management is no more or less than you as a person.
Becoming both effective and liked so you can get your job done, and not make too many enemies on the way.
Releasing Agility in your organisation so you can achieve your business results, grow people in the process and ensure on-going success with on-going learning.

When you have an imbalance in your pillars of life everything else becomes harder. It's hard to become effective and liked if you are out of balance. Say for example, you are not well, or you have relationship challenges at home - it's hard to be effective and liked when you're not on form. It's possible, but likely draining.

Here are the pillars:

Your education
Your health
Your family
Your finances and money
Your impact on society
Your effectiveness

As such, it pays to keep revisiting what's important in your life and who you want in it.

Not everyone who is in your life has your best interests at heart and can be seriously affecting your ability to be a balanced human being.

The key thing to remember is that we are all in different seasons of life, have different priorities and have competing stresses. There is no single way to gain balance, you will always be in some form of tension.

Here's some hints and tips on how to work with the pillars of life.

Write down on a sheet of paper what you actually really, truly desire in your life.
1. Get it out of your head and be truthful.
2. Be as clear and specific as possible.
3. Write down as many things as possible.
Read what you put on the paper and look at the pillars.
1. Is anything you wrote down in conflict with anything else
  1. For example, you cannot start a new business, be present for your family every night and go our socialising all the time. Something must give.
2. Is it what you really want?
3. Is anything missing?
From the list choose one or two that you couldn't imagine not having in your life and add those to a new sheet of paper
1. Likely to be family and loved ones
2. A business you're passionate about starting
3. A cause you simply must commit to
4. A goal you want to achieve
5. A skill you want to develop
6. A bucket-list item you want to get done
7. A person you want to spend your life with
On this new sheet of paper cross check the list again with the pillars and make sure you have covered the pillars that are important to YOU right now in your season of life.
1. Do this based on what YOU want, not what others may tell you to do
On another sheet of paper write a list of all of the people who are demanding your time and attention.
1. Go through the list and identify those who align to your pillars and what you want in life. Prioritise those people at all cost. Without those who love us, support us and whom we also love, we are destined for a life of shallow enjoyment, vacuous relationships and unhappiness.
2. Of course, there are always some people who demand our time but may not always bring positivity to us (family members some times come to mind :) )
3. Out of those who are left on the list who you did not see as adding huge value to your life, decide what to do with them. Do you have time to see them all? Are you sacrificing your time with people who are more important to you when you see these people? Are you letting down those you truly love to spend time with those who are just more fun? What are these people adding that others are not? And is this value truly useful.
4. Is fun, love, support, mentoring, friendship etc in alignment with your pillars? If not, again - should you be focused on them more than others in your life
5. Only you can whittle this list down based on what you really want.
6. It can be hard if you're afraid to let people down, but you run the risk of letting down those who love you if you don't focus on them.
You only have so much time in your life to achieve what you want, and as our seasons change so too do our wishes and desires and plans. Keep checking in and balancing the pillars.
Don't neglect really important pillars in the long term. Always focus on health and family and money. Even if it's tiny increments.
1. It can be tempting to neglect those you truly love for a good night out
2. Or your health to grow your business
3. Or your family to nurture a friendship that isn't healthy
4. Or your finances to buy that fancy thing to impress that person who isn't really important to us.
We are weird, biased and unpredictable.
1. Come back and sense check our actual behaviours against what we said we really wanted.
2. Do we need to change our behaviours? (likely a yes)
3. To achieve what you want and balance the pillars you will have to change your behaviours - it's how we get better and grow and enjoy the journey.
I'm a fan of then scheduling a routine to ensure relevant levels of attention on all of the pillars that matter
1. More time gets allocated to those that are more important
2. Less time to those that are less important
3. If there simply isn't enough time in your schedule to fit in everything that is important to you....well, something needs to give. We cannot have it all.
When you make a decision to do one thing, you are saying no to lots of others
1. Be careful that the things you say No to aren't things and people you need in your life
Try to think long term. Short term decisions are usually always at the detriment to our long term goals
1. We want to be healthy but that night out sounds tempting
2. We want to grow a business, but there's a party here I'd like to go to
3. We want to be there for our kids, but work is busy right now
4. We want to save for retirement, but that car looks tempting
5. We want to increase our earnings, but I'd prefer to see friends instead of growing my business
6. There is nothing wrong with any single activity - it is your life to lead, but we must consciously decide what and whom we are saying no to at any given time - your list of what you want in life should guide you.
We have no idea how long we have left to achieve the goals we have
1. Like a sand time with the top half covered up we can only see time going by and time spent
2. It should be important to us that the time spent was with those we love, care for and on things that matter to US (not others, it's your life)
3. We may have years, or months to achieve what we want. We simply do not know.
The key to all of this is ensuring that when we say yes to something we are consciously and actively reviewing these decisions against the pillars of life and what we want.
1. Being present and active in that decision is the important part
2. If we decide consciously we get to make decisions that move our life to where we want
3. If we automatically rely on our reactive behaviours - we could find years go by and we're not where we need to be

So with that, go forth and write down what you want, what you truly want from your life and career. And then check that against the pillars and consciously make a decision to do some things and not others (very few of us have the time and money to balance them all). Choose to spend time and attention and effort with those who matter.

Expect tension, schedule your priorities in your life, keep checking what's important, make conscious decisions, keep close those you love, remove from your life those who are toxic and be consistent in following the path that aligns to your pillars and choice.

I hope this helps you make decisions about your attention in life. And if you get it right, others will benefit from you being balanced. Your management, care, attention, focus and optimism will give others an opportunity to flourish too.

Rob..

FOOD FOR YOUR MANAGEMENT BRAIN

1 - An important side effect of supporting remote working is the health and happiness of the staff.

2 - Speaking at a conference? Well, firstly there's my epic "How to get accepted at a conference guide" and there's this very helpful one also on how people choose submissions.

3 - This is your mind at work

4 - Apparently drinking water is not the best way to rehydrate!

5 - Young people are going to save us all from office life.....hmmm

6 - The race to the bottom in marketing is very real. It sometimes feels to me like the same thing is happening in our world of work too.

7 - How being a working parent changes as the kids get older.

Thanks for reading this week's edition of The Manager.

If you enjoyed this newsletter and you think someone else would benefit from it, then please share it.

If you'd like to support Cultivated Management, consider buying a book - or working with me.

If this is the first time you've seen this newsletter - then you can subscribe here.

Thanks
Rob..

Meeting Notes by Cultivated Management

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