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Successful Self-Management
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The starting point of maturity is the
realization that, “No one is coming to the rescue.” Everything you are or ever
will be is entirely up to you.
This life is not a rehearsal for anything else.
This is the real thing. Time is passing quickly, and all of your decisions and
indecisions, your actions and inactions, to this point have added up to create
the life you’re living at this very moment. If you want things to be different
in the future, you’ll have to make things different in the present. You’ll have
to take complete charge of yourself and your life. You have to make things
change, because they won’t change by themselves.
Self-management is really personal management,
time management, and life management all rolled into one. It’s putting your
hands firmly on the steering wheel of your life and then taking yourself in the
direction in which you want to go. Remember the old Confucian saying, “If you
don’t change the road you’re traveling on, you’ll probably end up where you’re
going.” Every successful man or woman made, at one time or another, a firm
decision about where he or she wanted to go and then took deliberate steps to
get there.
Most people make themselves into a commodity.
They will define themselves in terms of their work or what they spend most of
their time doing. They will describe themselves as a salesperson, or a manager,
or an executive assistant, etc. Since we tend to become what we think about, we
describe ourselves as being what we do for a living or as what we do most of
the time. This is one of the main reasons why people who have been fired or
laid off go through a period of shock and emotional turmoil. It’s as though
they’ve been cut off from their identities.
You are a business. You have to view yourself as
the president of your own personal services corporation. You have a combination
of ingredients that makes you a unique and remarkable person, different from
anyone else who has ever lived or will live. You’ve undergone a wide variety of
experiences, both positive and negative. You’ve had a remarkable education;
you’ve had a formal education, and you’ve learned from the various jobs and
activities you’ve engaged in. You have a unique intelligence, much of which
isn’t yet developed to the fullest. You have the skills that you’ve acquired
through hard work, discipline, and practice. When you put all of your abilities
and skills together, you’re probably capable of excelling at hundreds of jobs,
doing different things in different organizations, businesses, and industries.
One of the great tragedies of our educational
system is that almost everyone is brought up to think of himself or herself as
an employee rather than a business owner or an entrepreneur. This attitude or
myth that most people have been brought up to accept is a major cause of
unhappiness and underachievement in life. The myth of just being a good
employee leads people to see themselves as helpless and dependent. From an
early age, they look for someone to provide them with work to do and money to
live on.
When you accept complete responsibility for your
life and take charge of your working destiny, you begin to realize that
self-management is the vehicle that will take you from where you are to
wherever you want to go. You’re in charge. You determine your own cause of
action. You decide where you want to work and what you want to do. Then you,
first, prepare yourself, and then, go out to get the job that most satisfies
you and allows you to use yourself to your best advantage.
You start the process of self-management by
looking deeply into yourself and asking questions, such as, “What do I most
enjoy doing? What have I most enjoyed in my work and activities in the past?”
Imagine, for a moment, that you have absolutely
no limitations and you cannot fail. What would you choose to do? Write out a
description of your ideal job. What would you most like to do from morning till
to night? Write out this description exactly as if someone had offered it to
you and at the pay you wanted. Most people will find this exercise very
difficult at first, but the more you think about what you want and do this
exercise, ideas will become clearer to you. And, as a result of your being absolutely
clear about what you want to do, you will find yourself moving toward you ideal
job, and your ideal job will begin moving toward you.
To manage yourself better, look at your major
interests in life. What do you most enjoy talking about, reading, or learning?
What sort of books and magazines do you read? What type of subjects or
conversations most attract and fascinate you? You should always pay attention
to what you value most and what is most important to you. When you’re able to
“lose yourself” in something, that’s a clear indicator that you should be
managing yourself to accomplish more of it.
An important key to self-management is strategic
thinking. Strategic thinkers are those who take the time to sit down and work
out where they are and where they want to go. They determine how to achieve
their goals in a step-by-step fashion. They look into the future and think
about how they could allocate their resources to move more rapidly toward the
accomplishment of their goals.
In personal strategic thinking and planning, you
look at your unique talents and abilities and ask yourself, “Where can I best
deploy myself in this marketplace to bring myself the greatest rewards?”
Another key part of self-management is
disciplining yourself to work on only those things that can make the greatest
difference in your life. If you’re not extremely well-managed personally, you
will find yourself spreading your efforts across a wide variety of things and
getting nothing really important done. Self-management means putting off doing
all the things of a low-priority so that you can work on just the one or two
things that make all the difference.
Self-management means getting things done
through yourself. It means standing back and looking at all your unique
talents, abilities, and assets, and getting the highest possible return on
everything you do. You need to organize, manage, and motivate yourself as if
you were your own employee.
Productivity improvement is an essential part of
self-management. This means you need to continually manage yourself to produce
more, faster, cheaper, and better than you have before. Your most valuable
asset is your ability to earn money. To increase your productivity, you must
think every day about the things that you can do to increase your value,
thereby increasing your ability to earn more money by producing more and better
goods and services for yourself and for your company. Remember your company is
you.
Perhaps the most important part of
self-management is personal profitability. This means that you spend less than
you earn, and that you make a profit from your work. It means that you live
within your means and save and invest part of everything you earn. You are 100
percent responsible for achieving your financial independence. And this is
possible only by saving and investing part of your income every single
paycheck.
Innovation is another important part of
self-management. You are born with enormous reserves of creativity that enable
you to improve every part of your life. Constantly look for faster, better, and
easier ways to achieve your tasks and goals. Read, research and ask questions.
Talk to others who are ahead of you on the road of life, and ask for their
advice. Look into yourself, and listen to your intuition.
You can achieve any goal; you can overcome any
difficulty, and solve any problem on the path to your goal, as long as the goal
is clear. You have the creative resources within you to be, have or do anything
that you could possibly want. The only limitations are the ones you place on
yourself and your mind.
Due to all the advances in technology and the Internet, you can achieve far more in far less time than ever before. People who practice self-management are the ones who rise to the top. Self-management techniques can make you rich, happy, healthy, and fulfilled beyond your wildest imagination. It’s up to you to learn them and apply them in every area of your life.
About the Author
Joe Love draws on his 25 years of experience helping both individuals and companies build their businesses, increase profits, and achieve total success. He is the founder and CEO of JLM & Associates, a consulting and training organization, specializing in personal and business development. Through his seminars and lectures, Joe Love addresses thousands of men and women each year, including the executives and staffs of many businesses around the world on the subjects of leadership, achievement, goals, strategic business planning, and marketing.
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