Overwhelmed?

Sacrificing your highest contribution

Dear Leader,

From our visit, I can tell your anxiety levels are up. You’re distracted, dropping emails and everyone seems to want something from you. Based on our conversations, this is happening at home too. You feel overwhelmed because it's overwhelming. You are not crazy.

But let me reflect back to you what I see happening with an example. Those weekly customer status reports you used to do when you were in a support role? You are still doing them. This continues because you can complete them in 30 minutes, and it takes staff 4 hours; "So, I might as well just do it" is what you say.

I want to give you a different perspective. You are the only account executive qualified to walk prospects and clients through their portfolios. But this report, is a task that many of the staff can do, albeit slowly. At what point do you think is it more worthwhile for you to sacrifice 30 minutes of customer facing work in exchange for report writing? I ask you to look carefully at the responsibilities you have adopted. Are they really yours?

Every choice you make with regard to your time and effort means that everything that is not chosen is sacrificed. In other words, when you are not working on your highest calling or value, then the most valuable that you have to give, is sacrificed. Think about that. Your special power and value here is your ability to land clients. Not doing this at 100% fails your team by not bringing in the clients at the rate in which you could. Let me also add that working on these less worthy tasks steals the meaning from your work.

I know that you have capacity which is why we will concentrate on a winnowing of responsibilities. You already know that I am going to ask you to get out some paper and a pen, so just do it. 🙂

List and categorize your responsibilities. Here are the categories.

• Unique - Responsibilities that you are distinctly capable of doing.
• Important - Those things that must be done but many are capable.
• Optional - These are nice to have, but are not directly aligned with your aim. Your myriad of volunteer work for example.
• Inappropriate - These are the items where someone has saddled you with their responsibilities and you didn't have the heart so say "No."

Without a moment's thought, slash the inappropriate category items from your life. Next, remove all but the most meaningful of the "Optional" responsibilities. Do you still have too much? Look carefully at the important items and consider to whom these things can be delegated or outsourced. The real point here is to ensure the responsibilities unique to you are given their proper attention. That requires opening space so that you can do so.

When you are focused, you are powerful. When you combine focus with your unique contribution to the team and business, you are unstoppable. The progress that comes brings meaning to your work. Your stress drops. Courage and confidence rise. And at some point you start thinking, "I've got this!" And, yes, this can be applied at home.

Park Wiker

P.S. "You can do anything, but not everything." David Allen

This is part of the Letters to Leaders series available on 
Substack in written form and audio: wiker.substack.com 

Podcast on Apple, Spotify and Youtube Podcasts as "Letters to Leaders"