Your Wrong Priorities (and the Devastating Consequences)

Do you and your team always have your priorities fully under control and never externally controlled? Do you always achieve what you want? Then you don’t need to read on.

All others (approx. 99.9 percent of you) who are repeatedly absorbed by the urgent things before the important things and who spend too much time on reactive activities should definitely take a look at the following. It could change your life.

The brain is a fascinating organ. Simply put, you can program your subconscious mind with your consciousness through strong emotions and continuous repetition. This programming is important because the subconscious mind is responsible for over 99 percent of our daily decisions. This mechanism causes you to do increasingly more of what you have done in the past, and this realization is crucial for your success.

Here’s an example: if you are used to spending most of your time as a leader solving urgent problems and extinguishing allegorical fires, then you will get more of that in the future. You multiply what you focus on.

Here are some more real-life examples:

• If you spend most of your time on problem-solving and firefighting exercises, then you will get more and more such problems.
• If you keep doing the urgent before the important, there will get more and more urgent things in your life.
• If you spend a lot of time in meetings in which neither the urgent nor the important is discussed, you will have more and more such meetings.

How can you change this negative automatism for yourself and your team? In principle, you can do so in three steps:

1. Know what is important. Most people find it difficult to decide what is truly important. You need to establish your long-term goals and mission.
2. Plan what is important. It sounds almost too simple, but you have to schedule your day in such a way that you tackle the most important thing first. Many people are controlled by a calendar filled with all sorts of things.
3. Do what is important. Doing the important work usually requires creative thinking and initiative. If you do not do that, then no one else will. Important tasks often break new ground, and that work is exhausting. You’d probably rather spend the next few hours in meetings again, so you avoid this work. Don’t avoid it.

These insights are easy to understand but laborious to implement. Winning teams have their priorities under control and generate the corresponding successes. If you want to achieve this success for your team (and yourself), we should talk. Click here to easily request an appointment.