Personal development Archives - Page 6 of 6

Best Practices for Managing Priorities and Productivity

Pamela Ayuso December 7, 2020

In his book, The Executive’s Compass: Business and the Good Society (public library), James O’Toole describes the use of a compass with the ideas of liberty (North) and equality (South) on the vertical axis and efficiency (East) and community (West) on the horizontal axis. These poles, notably the liberty-equality continuum, represent tradeoffs we must make as we search for the ideal society. I read about the tension between the idea of full liberty and full equality, but I had never

Building Resilience to Navigate the Ups and Downs

Pamela Ayuso September 21, 2020

Life happens every day. Over time, we will experience a bit of everything – good, bad, great, sad, and sometimes, like the recent crisis we are living through, catastrophic. Our work life is no different. With the ups come the downs: in typical times, a great team player may leave the company, or perhaps a loan does not come through. It can be very frustrating and sometimes scary.

Growth is not linear; it is all over the place. To be able to work with the uncertainty, I’ve found that as leaders, we must develop resilience. If we are not feeling well ourselves, it will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to lead.

Build Your Schedule Block by Block

Pamela Ayuso August 31, 2020

Your schedule is what determines what you will do daily. And your daily actions are the steps that will take you to achievement. Therefore, how well you set up your schedule will define how successful you are reaching all your goals, no matter what they are. What you seek to achieve may be professionally related, but it may also be about creating more time for yourself, your community, and your loved ones.

A well-designed schedule will establish where you will spend your time and will be the foundation for your results over time. Your schedule can be supportive if you design it to be so — otherwise, it can be part of the reason you are not where you strive to be.

The Value of Personal Growth: Pushing Through the Pain

Pamela Ayuso July 20, 2020

The agony of the writer. I am not the first to write about this and certainly not the last. But alas, I will try to render my personal experiences and inspire something positive out of this profoundly uncomfortable feeling.

I’m in the middle of editing my business book, which is an exploration of what I have learned about building a business – it is, in essence, the business handbook I wish I had had when I started as an entrepreneur. I thought the writing process was going to be the hardest part, and editing the book would be a breeze. I would only have to hire a great professional, and the rest would sort itself out.

Your Career Can Be Your Greatest Teacher

Pamela Ayuso February 17, 2020

Our careers are a progression. As our careers develop, our work with all the experiences it involves as well as our colleagues and counterparts can be some of our greatest teachers. We grow through our work because it forces us to confront our fears (e.g., fear of failure or public speaking) in a way that no other activity would. There is no choice; we have to get to the other side of our fears because we might otherwise damage our careers. By letting go of our reservations, we discover new inner strengths as well as other perspectives in life. Over time, we learn and grow with our career.

Along the way, we also inevitably make mistakes. It is part of what we sometimes must experience to learn. We regret some mistakes, and often we would rather forget them because they sting, but we all make them. If you are on an upward journey and working on areas you have never worked on before, you cannot know everything there is to know about them, and you will make mistakes. They are a part of our path.

Get to Know Yourself and Understand Your Strengths

Pamela Ayuso November 11, 2019

There are many options are available today for getting to know your team and how to best work together. I think, though, that these exercises can be more useful for getting to know the person you will always have on your side: yourself. Sometimes it is hard to see ourselves as others see us and as we are, but these tests can help us see what we may have never understood before and to learn more about our preferences and how we act in different situations.

Assess How Effective You Are at Delegating

Pamela Ayuso June 10, 2019

As you advance in your career, the ability to delegate becomes more important. By delegating, you will have more time to focus on the work where you can add the most value. You will also provide the space for others to get valuable training and move up in their careers. Take a moment today and assess your effectiveness in delegating.

To start, analyze your current workload. Some of the questions you can ask yourself are:

What are you doing today that you can delegate to free up time for yourself?
Is there a specific task that only you can do which you are neglecting to do something that another person on the team can do?
Can someone do part of the work you are doing more effectively (or efficiently) than you?

Problem Solving for the Office and Your Personal Life

Pamela Ayuso April 1, 2019

We spend most of the day at work, solving problems on a daily basis. What we often forget is that many of the tools for problem solving that we use at work can be very useful for our personal lives as well.

Problem solving for life follows a similar process to that in business. Our personal and professional lives are always busy, and sometimes we don’t give our personal difficulties the same type of attentiveness we give to our business problems. It is in the personal sphere, though, where we can have the most impact in our lives overall, freeing more time and space to be more creative and feel fulfilled.

Category: Personal development