Personal Development

When most people think to be a good leader or manager, they tend to identify all the different traits leaders have. For someone seeking to be a great manager or a leader in any organization, there are many areas of a person’s life that are affected. Your career goes one way, your personal life is affected by your career and it goes another way. Taking balance into consideration, your spirituality and health are in completely different dimensions than your career and relationships. All of this is hard to manage when you are making decisions on a daily basis that change the direction of an organization.

Or maybe, your thinking involves reflection and has a philosophical twist. For example, during the typical Monday thru Friday work week, you work each day and do what you need to get the job done. After work, you head home and you’ll spend some “you” time doing things you love. At the end of the week, you’ll reflect back and ask yourself what it all meant. “Did my work affect others,” “was what I did this past week meaningful and define me and who I am?” As a manager, two major things must be considered:

1. Verbal Thoughts- This is who you say you are to yourself and to others. Verbal thoughts are the thoughts you say out loud to others expressing your expectations of them in a variety of capacities such as your employee’s quality and quantity of work, your need for competent work to be done, solutions to problems already at hand, etc.
2. Physical Action- This is the act of the manager putting his words into actions. There is nothing worse than to have a boss tell you what to do knowing very well that the reason you are doing it is because he it too darn lazy to do it. This is not the leadership of a good manager. A good manager will leave you with the sense of doing what you are doing because you are great at what you do, you have talent and are an asset to the organization. This can be done by simply being congruent with what you say and what you do.

If you are spending 90% of your time thinking about something and 10% of your time is spent doing, it is difficult to maintain congruence and balance. Trying to achieve balance is hard work because you constantly feel the need to move on from working on one thing to moving on to the next. How many times have you told yourself, uh oh, I’ve been really neglecting my health, so i better work harder now so I get more time later to take care of myself? Or, I’ve got to stop thinking so much and take more action.

The different areas of your life are all fighting for your time. And the longer you neglect one of those areas, the louder it gets and the harder it will fight for your attention. Put off your health and you’ll feel the physical strain it puts on your body. Put off your relationship for too long, and a breakup may be the result. Put off your work, and your career and income will suffer. This is a struggle many managers face in succeeding in life.

Let’s consider a different way of thinking; Let’s look at it as your life is just 1 big area, one area with no need to balance different aspects of your life, no need to move on to the next task because you have so much to do, no nothing. How could something like this be possible? It’s possible if all of those different areas of your life are congruent, if they all follow the same rules. Then what you think and what you do are one, both pointing in the same direction. For example, improving your health improves your relationship. Increasing your income increases your products made and/or your service.

It seems obvious that all the different parts of your life are interconnected. But a common way people approach their problems are to treat problems by isolate them. If there’s a problem with your health, you need to diet and exercise. If there’s a problem in your career, it’s time to work harder. This doesn’t work well because everything is interconnected.

If you feel lonely because you haven’t been able to find the right relationship, and you keep trying harder and harder to find a relationship, you may get nowhere. The problem may be that you work at a career you simply aren’t passionate about. Once this happens, you project this discouragement and lack of passion to everyone you meet. Then you change careers to do what you love, and all of a sudden your interactions with everyone turn positive. You meet your future spouse, who is attracted to your dedication and passion about your work and the contribution you’re making. And the encouragement you experience from this relationship in turn helps you advance your career, increase your income, and free up more time to spend with your new spouse.

As a manger, congruence can deeply affect not only you, but the people you work with. Notice I didn’t say the people that work for you. Your job is like a sport. Your employees are all members of the same team. The team plays for a common goal which is to win. Under the right leadership, this team is unstoppable. And the leader must show congruence in what he says and what he does. The following 6 traits are what help with congruence. They are all important, connected, dependent and interdependent. You can’t have balance and congruence without mastering and knowing how to handle the following 6 traits.

1. Kindness
2. Proactive
3. Cheating
4. Balance
5. Flexibility
6. Passion

You might ask what I mean by cheating. Well, cheating is one of those things that deprives someone of a sense of ownership, self-efficacy and believing in oneself. No matter where you apply it, the long-term results are negative. Cheat your health, and pay the price of illness. Cheat in your relationship, and the cost is a loss of intimacy and even a marriage. Cheat in your education, and your income and efficacy suffers.

If you apply one of the 6 traits, either positively or negatively, it ripples into all other areas. If you cheat your health, then in the long run this will hurt your career, your relationships, your finances, and your emotional well being. Similarly, be kind to your body, and your increased positive energy will positively affect your relationships, your work, your finances, your emotions.

I Tip in Career Counseling: “Be proactive about building a career you enjoy, and your passion will spread to every area of your life.”