Throughout our life we have millions of decisions to make. In fact each day we have 8,746 decisions. * So, which ones are we being intentional about? Thiswas the beginning of day three of my RVALeadership Lab experience - a joint venture of Floricane, The Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce and Luckstone. We have been gathering for several months to work through our leadership skills and abilities and develop adaptation tools.
This session featured feedback examination and some coaching exercises, but ended with John Fernandez, a local business leader as the guest speaker. Read more about him here (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-fernandez/5/9a1/9b8) John lead us through several stories to drive home the point that we are in charge of our own success. The part that resonated with me most strongly was all about decisions.
"Time, talent, treasure. These are the assets that everyone has. Leadership comes in how you make decisions and choices that define who you are and define whether you are going to be happy or unhappy in your life." said Fernandez.
That sounded like a pretty lofty ideal. But of course, he had a tool to share. Fernandez suggested we complete a time inventory. Here are the steps:
1. Inventory your time for one week.
2. Write down everything you do and how long it takes to do it.
3. Once it is done, review the list and label everything as I, C, E, or U.
Incompetence - hate doing, suck at it
competence - kinda okay at doing it
Excellent - things I am great at
Unique ability - You are excellent at this and you would do this tirelessly, you would even do it if you weren't getting paid.
His suggestion - spend 70-80 % of your time in your unique ability. Ignore and or delegate your incompetence and competence space.
I haven't done this inventory yet, but I've been thinking about it constantly over the past few days and looking at what I was doing and asking myself - is this my unique ability? I have already started making decisions.