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Health and Hygiene
When you go to work each day, do you have clear idea of what it is that you want to achieve? And do you actually finish the day having made progress towards a defined objective? Or do you usually feel like you have managed to survive another day, but looking back, wonder whether you have actually made any real progress? How do you determine your priorities and decide what you should be doing each moment of the day?
For many business owners, there are so many urgent situations that come up each day that any thought of determining their own priorities is a joke. After all, when there is a fire raging, you don’t need to wonder what to do; your obvious priority is to put the fire out. However, for business owners who find themselves in the situation of having to put out fires every day, the best they can hope for is survival rather than success.
If your work day is full of crisis situations or unwanted pressure, it is really a sign that something is very wrong about the way you are running the business.
While that is a worst case scenario and many of us can get through the day without incident or problems arising, when we look back at the day, can we be confident that we have actually achieved anything that takes our business forward? It all depends on how we determine our priorities and plan our day.
As the business owner and manager, the choice is to spend your time working on the business (doing things that improve performance and take your business forward) and working in the business (doing things that happen every day and help your business survive).
For most business owners, there is an endless pressure to work in the business, doing things that are urgent, so much so that we tend to neglect working on the business to help it improve. How we balance these needs is much the same as how we care for our personal health and hygiene.
Hygiene is all about looking after the urgent things that can’t be neglected, such as cleaning our teeth, washing our bodies, grooming, etc. If we neglect these things, our overall health would be affected, as well as getting some funny looks and having people avoid us when we go out. Hygiene demands our attention.
Looking after our health, on the other hand, is something that doesn’t demand our attention until it is urgent. We can go a long time without exercising, we can eat the wrong foods, drink too much, etc. before its affects show up and we find out, suddenly, that our neglect of health has been to our detriment. Why do we put off exercise or maintaining a healthy diet? Most of us know that we should exercise regularly and eat healthily, but we find it difficult to stick to doing the right thing.
The problem is that we are usually operating from a negative base. We are trying to avoid something rather than achieve something. When we are trying to avoid poor health and we don’t exercise one day without apparent ill effect, our mind convinces us that it isn’t necessary to exercise (and usually doesn’t have to try too hard).
I have recently discovered the answer to this dilemma. We need to work towards achieving something definite, rather than work at avoiding some vague undefined negative outcome. I have discovered a health program that incorporates an exercise and diet program based on achieving a definite body shape and weight over a 12 week period. For the first time, I find myself able to stick to the program, because of what I am working towards, not because of what I am trying to avoid. It works the same way in business.
Unless you have a definite goal in mind, you tend to operate on the basis of managing to survive. We look after the hygiene but not the health. As long as we stay out of trouble, make enough to pay the bills, we can continue on for quite a while. But where does this lead us? My experience is that it leads to an existence where there is continual pressure to get the business to perform well enough just to be able to pay the bills, but eventually it leads to having to deal with frequent crises and short term pressures.
On the other hand, when we have a definite goal, we create an inner urgency to work on the business development activities as well as the operational tasks we need to do. We see ourselves making progress towards our goal and we are inspired to do more work on the health of our business and our future.
The business gets healthier and more profitable. Sales come with less apparent effort and there are fewer crises to deal with. We eliminate the cause of so many problems when we work on the health aspects of business development, just like we do when we exercise our bodies. So having a goal and making a plan to achieve it enables us to balance our priorities for both health and hygiene.
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