Most Millennials and Gen Z require more out of the companies they are affiliated with.
They demand a healthy relationship with their work.
They pay closely attention to their purpose within their role, to their leadership, to what their organization does and most importantly why they do it.
What is Shared Purpose?
Shared purpose is the reason why a company, leaders, teams matter and should bond together.
Shared purpose relates to a personal mission statement, to core values, to personal motivation, to a given motivation.
Shared purpose allows for deeper understanding of overall objectives, clearer expectations of performance and code of conduct, stronger resilience in the face of adversity, job satisfaction on all levels, and better team engagement and alignment.
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Following through is hard but gratifying in the long run…
Some people usually don’t follow through because they self-sabotage, misuse their time and energy by procrastinating, setting impossible goals, managing their time poorly, yielding to temptations and distractions.
Other people have internal roadblocks that impede them from taking action because they are either lazy, lack discipline and willpower, fear judgement, rejection or failure, try to be perfect, are too insecure, lack self-awareness, are unconsciously protecting themselves.
Indeed, people who have interval roadblocks and who fail to follow through tend to set unrealistic expectations for themselves and end up underachieving or underperforming.
Furthermore, they overthink everything and lean towards negative thoughts which paralyzes them. Making a decision becomes difficult because they don’t have clear rules and priorities.
They also worry too much. They ruminate on past, present, future, real, fictitious problems that are most likely out of their control.
Finally, they don’t know themselves well enough to create the best goals and environment for themselves.
The Requirements of Following Through
Following through requires four elements: focus, self-discipline, action and persistence.
With focus, you are able to keep “your head in the game and your eyes on the prize”. You concentrate all your effort and energy onto achieving your goals.
With self-discipline, you are bale to regulate your thoughts, control your focus and to work regardless of your emotions and your circumstances.
With action, you are able to get closer to the finish line, execute the plan and translate your intentions.
With persistence, you will develop resilience and be able to push through until you have achieved success.
How To Start Following Through?
To start following through, you have to take a good look at yourself, build a better relationship with yourself, develop the right mindset and equip yourself with the best tools to succeed.
To develop the mindset, you must believe that:
You are capable and hard work leads to success.
The steps that you take are purposeful and fit into a bigger picture.
Discomfort is necessary to success. Following through will require you to get out of your comfort zone and do things that you have never done before.
The information and knowledge you acquire increase with the steps that you take. You learn more about yourself on top of learning new skills and life lessons.
Taking care of your mental health will reinforce your willpower and discipline.
Is Following Through Good For You?
Sometimes, you will have to make the decision to follow through or to give up.
To make the best decisions, you have to create a set of rules that will serve as a guideline, a code of conduct, a task roadmap and a mission statement.
Methods For Following Through
To stay motivated enough to follow through, you must identify the things that motivate you.
Some people want to avoid negative consequences at all cost and will do everything in their power to succeed.
Others are pushed forward by the need and desire to improve their lives.
To stop procrastinating and to follow through:
Associate your present goals with an activity that provides instant gratification.
Break down huge goals in small manageable steps.
Evaluate the risks of inaction.
Create an environment free from distractions and temptations.
Avoid multitasking and focus on one single task at a time.
Group similar tasks together and accomplish them all in one batch.
Create lists of tasks that don’t add value or that are out of your control in order to discharge your mental load.
Acquire between 40% and 70% of information.
Allow yourself to recover mentally from time to time to avoid burnout.
Review
There are many reasons why people stay stagnant in life. In Finish What You Start: The Art of Following Through, Taking Action, Executing, & Self-Discipline, Peter Hollins breaks down the psychology and the art of following through on your goals.
Finish What You Start: The Art of Following Through, Taking Action, Executing, & Self-Discipline is recommended for people who struggle to get things done and is full of powerful tools to help you take action and achieve your goals.
Peter Hollins jumpstarts you towards your dreams, shares several tactics to execute whatever you set your mind to and makes some very good points when it comes to the mistakes people make when pursuing their goals.
Following through boils down to extracting lessons from past failures and knowing yourself well enough to create the best environments, rules and roadmaps for you to succeed.
Let me know below what you think about this book!
Favorite quote(s)
Focus guides your thoughts in figuring out how to follow through and directs your actions toward achieving your vision.
Leisure is an important part of life, but if it’s excessive and takes the place of reasonable productivity, then it becomes a vice.
Follow-through is 100% mental. It takes a cognitive effort to follow through on something, especially when you hit discouraging obstacles.
Stop judging yourself and others for being different. We are all different.
Our productivity is very fragile and requires particular care to flourish. Treat yourself to what helps you thrive if you want to follow through.
The culture that we live in encourages people to live their dreams and follow their passions.
We don’t necessarily have a guideline to live the dream, to exercise our passions and to find the career that best suits us.
It seems that to get a fulfilling job or to do great work, following your passion is definitively not the way to go.
Why not?
Because following your passions is difficult, rarely successful and dangerous.
Studies have shown that:
Passions are not determined at birth.
Most people can have several passions that have nothing to do with choosing the right job. Some people don’t necessarily have a passion to follow.
Passions for a job takes time to develop. It takes time to build relationships, to become efficient at what you do and see the impact of your work.
You become passionate when you master a skill.
You become confused and anxious when you follow passion.
What should you do then?
When going after the career you want, you must measure the importance of growing a set of skills and adopt the craftsman mindset.
Indeed, there are two ways of thinking about work. There’s the craftsmanmindset and the passionmindset.
The passion mindset focuses on what the world can offer you. It sets you constantly on high alert, seeking for what you don’t like. It leaves you perpetually in a state of confusion.
The craftsman mindset is useful in building the career that you want, irrespective of what type of work you do.
It focuses on what you produce and what you can offer the world. It leaves you with clarity and a love for what you do.
How to acquire the craftsman mindset?
Great work is a combination of creativity, impact and control. This combination is rare but valuable.
Matter of fact, great jobs are rare and valuable. To find them, you need to build up great skills and in turn offer skills that are rare and valuable.
The craftsman mindset is the best way to acquire skills Capital.
To grow a craftsman mindset, you can follow these 5 steps:
Decide what Capital Market you belong to.
Identify the type of Capital you want to pursue.
Define clear goals for yourself.
Get out of your comfort zone and stretch your abilities.
Be patient.
How to gain control using your new found Capital?
Gaining control over what you do is an important part of enjoying what you do and is the hardest part.
Gaining control turns out to be tricky: you cannot ask for more control if you don’t have enough Capital to back it up or you have acquired lots of control that you can no longer evolve in your role.
It serves to have a unifying focus or mission for your career. A mission will focus your energy toward a useful goal and increase your impact on the world. To accomplish your mission, you can take small steps that generate concrete feedback.
Review
So Good They Can’t Ignore You is an extremely practical, logical guide to get the career that you want and to be so “good they can’t ignore you”.
In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport believes that you should not pursue your passions in order to achieve career success.
Instead, you should seek to improve your skills and apply yourself in a particular field. By mastering a skill, you will gain in efficiency and gradually become passionate about the work you do.
According to Cal Newport, people who solely follow their passions end up shifting careers when they realize that their career is not what is cracked up to be.
To get a fulfilling job and the career that you want, he suggests 4 rules or principles that are extracted from many successful people lives and that are difficult to implement.
It was very interesting and somewhat refreshing to hear an unpopular opinion. His principles and opinion are not designed for dreamers.
It is however designed for people at entry-level at their jobs, for analytical people who are geared towards efficient performance and who are career focused.
Even if I’m a practical person, I admittedly don’t see anything wrong with pushing people to follow their passions that might get them out of their comfort zone and into their dream job.
I think that there isn’t one approach to success or else everybody would be doing it. Some people are motivated by having a solid plan, others by an unshakable purpose and others by an exciting passion.
According to Cal Newport, Deep Working is “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.“.
What is Deep Work?
Deep Work means that we must learn to focus intensely on a single task for long periods of time without distractions and without breaking concentration.
Deep Work requires a sense of confidence and a conviction that you will succeed.
Deep Work is at a disadvantage in a society that values social media.
Deep Work is not a trend but it can make you more efficient and transform a boring job into a satisfying one.
Furthermore, Deep Work is rare but is valuable in today’s economy.
Finally, Deep Work ethics in the workplace are rare as well. Most people have embraced distraction because it is more convenient and allows us to avoid planning and concentration.
How to train your brain and build habits for Deep Work
To create real value and to get ahead in this economy, it is imperative to develop an ability to:
Learn and master hard things quickly.
Produce at an elite level.
There are several rules to Deep Working and to replacing distraction with focus.
Rule #1: Work Deeply daily
Deep Working is about building habits and rituals that go beyond willpower and that will help you sustain focus.
Personal desires such as eating, sleeping, sex, television and music are the main cause for distractions.
Willpower is not sustainable enough to fight off distractions because your will will eventually be strained.
That is why Deep Work necessitates rearranging your schedule. You can schedule Deep Work by:
Minimizing shallow obligations from your day to day.
Dedicating a full day or more to concentrate on a task and to shut out all exterior noises.
Routinely going deep everyday at the same time and for the same amount of time.
Fit in Deep Work wherever and whenever you can.
Besides scheduling your Deep Work and to maximize your success, you must also establish how, what, where, when, for how long you want to practice Deep Work.
Rule #2: Embrace boredom
Deep Working requires that you focus on a task and reject all distractions in a world where your brain has been conditioned to research distraction.
Outside of Deep Work sessions, you have to take care of your mind, embrace boredom, learn to meditate, schedule a break from focus to give in to distractions, rewire your brain to resist distractions.
Surprisingly, embracing boredom will help you improve the limits of your concentration abilities.
Rule #3: Quit social media
There are many benefits to social media.
However, Cal Newport states that modern technology is to blame for shallow work and suggests that social media should be intrinsically used as a tool.
He also emphasizes that you must assess your priorities in life and the impact of social media on your life.
To regain control of your time and attention, you can apply the law of the vital few over your network tools then avoid using Internet to entertain yourself.
Shallow Work can be defined as “Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”
To identify and remove the shallowness from your life, you must apply the following strategies:
Schedule your entire day to avoid spending time on autopilot and to fully benefit from Deep Work.
Determine how mush time you are spending on shallow activities and eliminate them.
Become hard to reach via your network tools.
Review
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport explains all the strategies you can implement to become more productive and more focused in this economy .
Cal Newport takes most of his analogies from educators because they have to go in depth in their field of choice and provide quality work.
However, this book is written for bosses and leaders who want to go to the essential, be more productive, efficiently organize their day, improve workplace culture and who want to achieve their highest potential.
It is sad to see that meditation, Deep Working and deep thinking have disappeared from and been perverted by the corporate system.
Indeed, corporate culture promotes shallows activities. People are busy as ever but are often distracted by network tools and forced to break from their concentration.
Furthermore, people –if they are not the person in charge–who practice Deep Working are not well perceived in the workplace even though they are high achievers and improve productivity.
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport is a good reminder to stay focus and to go to the essential in life.
Let me know below what you think about this book!
Favorite quote(s)
A deep life is a good life.
Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.
The deep life, of course, is not for everybody. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. […] But if you’re willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you’ll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning.
Within their roles, leaders would have to decide the best candidates for the job, the direction of an organization or even the concept of a new product.
Some of those decisions are made thoughtfully, some instinctively, involuntarily, out of necessity and others by putting it off or by letting problems solve themselves.
In reality, decision-making relies on a leader’s ability to select the best option to achieve a desired outcome.
Furthermore, decision-making is the ability to think critically in order to reach critical goals and to demonstrate the soundness of that decision.
Quick and sound decision-making is a sought-after leadership trait.
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Furthermore, introverts can be seen as “fair, thoughtful, intelligent, competent, diligent, and trustworthy”.
How To Manage Your Introversion?
Introverts must understand their strengths and weaknesses.
Introverts must also discipline their active minds.
They tend to make assumptions and create stories in their mind that hold them back and are not always true.
Instead, they must pick stories that propel them in life.
Introverts must learn how to protect their energy and take breaks when they need to in order to rejuvenate and be more alert at work.
There are several additional strategies to manage your introversion in order to achieve success:
Focus outward.
Keep your eyes on the prize.
Practice and fake it until you make it.
Feel fear and go towards it anyways.
Be unafraid of rejection.
Embrace solitude. Protect their space and energy.
The Skills Every Introverts Need To Succeed
Introverts need to learn other extroverted skills to make them more effective in the workplace and to get out their comfort zone.
1. Networking
Networking is challenging for introverts but is necessary and inevitable.
For introverts, networking seems self-serving and distasteful.
To be able to network and connect better with people, it helps to listen to people’s needs, to ask them for advice and to understand that every interaction can pay off in the long run.
2. Communicating Consciously
Because introverts withdraw in their own world, must:
Pay attention to their own thoughts.
Be careful when and how to communicate with others so that the latter don’t make negative assumptions about them.
Stay detached from their work enough to be able to socialize.
3. Promoting Themselves
Self-promotion makes introverts very uncomfortable.
However, your work will not speak for itself.
You have to learn to promote your own work and competencies.
Review
Most books about career development and success are generally geared towards extroverts, which can get discouraging for introverts.
In The Successful Introvert, Wendy Gelberg gives hints on on how, when and where to use your introversion.
She shows that there is strength in introversion, that there are places and moments where your introversion is valuable.
The Successful Introvert by Wendy Gelberg is eye-opening. I recommend this book for shy and introverted leaders (in progress) who want to gain self-awareness, optimize their leadership and develop their career.
Some of us are not leaders yet and wish to become leaders. The thing is our introversion is often times what stops us from getting what we really want in life.
In addition, the corporate world does act like introverts are problematic and often singles them out. Introverts have to learn to accept who they truly are and make the best of their personality type.
Let me know below what you think about this book!
Favorite quote(s)
The key to success is versatility.
Introversion is not a limiting characteristic, although the accompanying traits may require some special accommodations (also true of extraversion, but that’s a subject
for another book). We make comparisons to people who are highly successful and see the ways in which we fall short. Meanwhile, we don’t get to see the struggles or challenges that they had to deal with, so their success looks falsely uncomplicated.
Some of the adjectives that frequently come up in describing introverts are quiet, serious, calm, reserved, detached, restrained, and private. All of these speak to our inner focus, and they can contribute to success when used appropriately.
When you know who you are, you immediately become confident and feel empowered.
Indeed, you stop looking for external validation.
You start experimenting and looking for validation from only yourself.
Wondering how to figure out who you are?
1. Take an assessment test
Sometimes, you just don’t know where to start.
The good news is that there are several self-assessment tools out there to help you figure out who you are, your personality type, your core values, your strengths and weaknesses.
2. Take time off
Leaders have been conditioned through their role to take care of everyone else.
Taking time off in solitude does wonder for self-care, self-awareness and leadership development.
Solitude scares most people because they lack the courage to confront themselves.
However, only in solitude will you be able to observe yourself, identify all facets of your personality, discipline your thoughts and emotions.
3. Review your life
Writing things down allows you to review your life, keep track of your habits and observe your patterns of behavior.
It also allows you clarify and analyze your thoughts.
In addition, journaling is a great way to extact the essence of who you are and the lessons from past experiences whether they’ve been positive or negative.
4. Explore
Trying new things is a great way to explore and find out what you really like and don’t like, what you’re good or bad at, what feels right or wrong, what fuels your fire or what drains you.
Besides, this will help you acknowledge your differences, set healthy boundaries, become more discerning and do the things that you really want to do.
5. Observe your relationships
They say that you are the sum of the 5 closest people to you.
If you pay attention to your relationships, you’ll notice what you share in common and what you are made of.
Furthermore, you’ll notice who you look up to, who you relate to, what you tolerate and what you imitate.
Last Words Of Advice
Remember that an original is more valuable than a copy.
Hope that I’ve helped you get it together on your way to leadership!
Don’t forget to like, share and leave a comment below.
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