4 Positive Habits to bring back to the boardroom after the holidays

4 Positive Habits to bring back to the boardroom after the holidays

By Royston Guest

After a holiday from work, you feel refreshed, re-energised and re-focused and the quality downtime has given you the headspace you needed. Take this new energy and focus as an opportunity to introduce four new winning habits…you may be surprised at what you discover both personally and professionally.

WINNING HABIT #1 – LOOK AT YOUR BUSINESS THROUGH A FRESH LENS

When you’re working in your business every day, it is so easy to become blinkered. You start to see what you want to see, not the reality. I call this ‘focus distortion’.

It’s like at home when you’ve been away for a while and when you return you notice the pile of old magazines in the corner of the lounge or the DVD’s clogging the shelf beneath the TV. You start to question how long they’ve been there as you’ve failed to notice them previously. You decide to do a spring clean and set about creating a new reality as you look at your world through a fresh lens. Apply the same fresh lens to your business.

Post-holiday is a great time to do this, to imagine your first day back as your first day ever in the business. Challenge yourself to imagine you’re a new executive who has been newly appointed. With a fresh lens, challenge yourself to question everything, and I mean everything!

Ask quality WHY questions, review systems, processes and procedures and ask, is it adding value, helping us to be a relevant, agile, resilient business? Is it adding value for the customer? Challenge the seven most expensive words in business; ’that’s not the way we do things’ or its sister statement; ’We’ve never done it that way before’.

Walking through your business with a restless curiosity and fresh lens is a cathartic experience and will certainly awaken your senses.

WINNING HABIT #2 – QUESTION WHAT IS TRULY WORTHY OF YOUR TIME?

To create the stretch and growth potential for your people and business, you should focus on the things that only you can do. Yes, you’ll have oversight and a contributory role in other areas, but your primary focus should be on the high-value activities which allow you to realise the potential in your business and yourself.

On your return to the office, ask yourself this; what is truly worthy of my time?

If you find you’re spending more time on tasks and activities which quite clearly you shouldn’t be, then now is the time to change this because if you don’t, nobody else will.

WINNING HABIT #3 – DESIGN YOUR HIGH PERFORMING WEEK

We all come back from holiday with good intentions; managing our workload more effectively, being home earlier from work to put the children to bed, not travelling as much, and here comes the BUT. Before you know it, the first few days and weeks pass, your good intentions are out the window and you’re back into your old ways of working. One of your highest callings is to be conscious and deliberate in how you set your high performing weeks up for success. Do this by:

– focussing on the things that only you can do, the areas genuinely worthy of your time

– mastering the skill of saying NO to the unimportant things so you can say YES to the important things

– creating more time to work ON the business, not just the busy fool working IN the business.

– booking quality thinking time in your diary, knowing the time you spend thinking will make the doing more effective.

– being at home for bath and story time with your children or a meal out with your loved one.

Time and memories, you will never get back. Remember in life, you make your choices, and then your choices make you.

WINNING HABIT #4 – BECOME YOUR OWN PERFORMANCE COACH

Successful leaders have an insatiable thirst for learning, for showing up every day being the best version of themselves they can be. They spend their life being their own performance coach, ensuring they reach their true and maximum potential.

Maintaining relevance in the fast-moving arena of life is about being fresh, living life with deliberate conscious intent as the architect of your destiny. It’s about learning and developing yourself. Perhaps most importantly, it about applied learning and having the attitude of action.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the mechanics of the working day, and before you know it days, weeks or even months have passed since you spent time on you.

Invest time in you.

One of the six core human needs is the need for growth – for emotional, intellectual or spiritual development. If you are not learning and bettering yourself every day, then you are not growing.

4 winning habits successful leaders bring back to work | Royston Guest https://t.co/B0VKLJknPu via @Royston_Guest

— Royston Guest (@Royston_Guest) September 5, 2019

Royston Guest is a leading authority on growing businesses and unlocking people potential. Entrepreneur, author of #1 best-seller Built to Grow and RISE: Start living the life you were meant to lead, CEO of Pathways Global and founder of The Business Growth Pathway™ . Follow him on Facebook or Twitter. Connect with him on LinkedIn or check out his blog at https://www.roystonguest.com/blog/

More information about Irish Tech News and the Business Showcase

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 16000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully we can share your story too and reach our global audience.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking