People with a high level of personal mastery live in a continual learning mode. They never “arrive.” --Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline.
The application of personal mastery is key to living an effective life and having a successful family business.
Family business owners tend to prioritize themselves last making personal mastery a pipe dream. The biggest obstacle? Prioritizing the time. When it comes to personal mastery carving out the time in the middle of all the busyness and tyranny of the urgent that owning and operating the family business presents seems like a luxury.
The good news is that carving out the time leads to significantly greater impact. Think of what it would be like to find way for “working smarter, not harder”. Examples of personal mastery include:
Continuously setting and achieving goals more efficient
Identifying the highest impact use of your limited time
Understanding what holds you back from freeing up your schedule and prioritizing strategic activities over tactical activities
Removing your blind spots before they create obstacles
Leveraging your strengths to manage weaknesses
Understanding your real impact on others
Moving people onto your agenda with less emotional drama and/or micromanagemen
… and the list goes on…
While this might sound obvious, in reality it takes a significant amount of intentional effort to master these skills.
Your ability to supercharge your productivity will depend on being able to leverage five key areas:
Elimination: Identifying areas in your life that aren’t working well or simply aren’t a good fit and making some changes
Maximization: Identifying your strengths (special talents and abilities) and how to leverage them for greater impact
Optimization: Identifying activities that are currently creating the greatest value and do more of them; or find new potential opportunities you have had time to identify let alone pursue.
Simplification: Delegating, outsourcing and deleting all low value or no value tasks and activities
Multiplication: teaching your people to think like you so that you can exponentially increase their impact, your efficiency, and the bottom line for your business.