Our country is in transition, out with the old and in with the new. As our club’s leadership prepares to change,me as the president has been reflecting on the legacy that I'll left during my tenure in the organization.
Last week I have saw part of my weaknesses when somebody talked about my biggest disappointments and I realized that I’ve made some mistakes over the last one year that I need to correct.
Here are four ways I’ve failed myself during that terms and how I plan to change them during the upcoming era.
1.Working Hard, Not Smart
My father’s favorite sayings was that he was never the smartest guy in the room but he’d outwork anyone else. He would stay at work all night long to get the job done, sometimes working day after day with little sleep, and many times I was there right beside him.
I’m afraid I’ve had a similar mindset for most of my adult life; what I’ve lacked in experience or intelligence, I’ve tried to make up for with hard work.I’ve put myself through a lot of unnecessary stress and missed out on some neat opportunities because I was convinced that I had to work that hard to be successful.
My solution – Starting at the end of last year made me realize that I always have alternatives to my current situation and that it’s in my best interest to identify and evaluate them. In the future I will be more dilligent with being aware of my best options.
A big part of working smart is setting goals and aligning my actions with those goals, if something I’m doing either doesn’t achieve those goals or seems a roundabout way to get there, I’ll re-evaluate those tasks.
2.Failure to Start
I shared a quote on Facebook the other day that really hit home for me:
“Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm”
– Winston Churchill
If I don’t take the risk of starting something and failing, I will be no closer to success. My problem is that sometimes I overthink things and spend far too long deciding whether to start a project and then how to implement it. This blog is a good example, I should have started blogging two years before I did but I was so busy to start and that time just slipped away.
My solution – If something fits with my strategy that I create while “working smart”, I won’t hesitate to start the project. If I don’t have time to do it myself, I will find someone else to do it for me.
3.Lack of Focus
This has probably been my biggest failure over the last several years. I tend to spread myself too thin and then spend so much time multi-tasking that nothing gets done.
I find myself having so much to do that I get frustrated and overwhelmed. I try staying up all night just to get everything done but I can’t keep that up forever, so instead I will focus in on the projects that fit my strategic goals.
My solution – The action plan I set out in my New Year’s Revolution will help me focus on only a few projects at a time. I have to be careful with my aboe policy on starting new projects. I can’t commit to them until I have the resources lined up to carry them out.
4.Thinking Small
Since I’m the long-haul, hard worker type, I’m good at taking regular small tasks and just plugging away at them day after day. Of course this is a great way to build something over time, it’s probably why I’m such a good money saver, consistent and regular.
However, without a big picture I could be working in circles for the rest of my life. It’s easy for me to keep doing the same thing over and over and optimizing it for success because that’s what I know. BUT, in order to grow I need to push myself this year.
My solution – Set some goals that scare me and seem unattainable, then figure out how to reach them.
Those are the four ways I’ve failed myself during the last one year as a president, with my new plans I will turn around my shortcomings era.I hope I'll succeed to change all this in this 4 months...INSYALLAH
