Last week, we learned that using the StrengthsFinder® assessment starts the conversation of where our greatest capacities lie. This not only gives you some ammunition to work with when building a better brand, but it also helps justify why owning your unique abilities is crucial to long-term success.
I want to take it a step farther and help you identify areas where you can begin creating more space to function in your strengths more consistently in the day-to-day tasks of your business.
Start incorporating your strengths by taking some time to answer these questions:
What tasks exhaust me?
What about my work is energizing?
What can I delegate to function more in my strengths?
Out of the answers, did anything surprise you? Do you feel you have people in your life who can alleviate some of the tasks that keep you from functioning more in areas where you naturally excel? This isn’t an excuse to be irresponsible and abandon everything about running a business that you hate. The IRS will be on your tail in no time flat if that’s what you’re getting from all this strengths talk. What I’m saying is that a MAJORITY of your time should be spent on things that energize you. There are still going to be days when you have to be a responsible adult/business owner…our apologies. There’s no free pass for that one. The goal here is to streamline your process and carve out space to hone your craft. If your business is slow right now, this is the perfect time to analyze reasons why you aren’t attr acting more clients.If your business is slow right now, this is the perfect time to analyze reasons why you aren’t attracting more clients. You may just need to identify someone you can partner with that will provide the yin to your yang. Or maybe you just need an outside perspective (we highly encourage feedback and tough love).
Here are some helpful tools to keep you on track:
Set office hours. Sticking to those hours will make it harder to compromise your values, easier to accomplish your goals and make you more intentional about how you spend the hours you have in a day. With limited hours, we tend to function with more focus and feel better about delegating tasks that aren’t the best use of our limited time.
Create a workflow. It’s likely most of you have a good workflow already. You know how much time it takes to complete each task and are fully aware of what pieces of the puzzle you aren’t super stoked about doing. The goal here is to be realistic about what steps of your workflow you dread (and consequently leave you backlogged) or completely drain you altogether. These steps either need to be farmed out to someone else OR you need to come up with a system that allows you to tackle those tasks without wanting to punch yourself in the face.
Write a job description. Here’s why writing out a job description is important: it gives you clarity in terms of what your responsibilities are, keeps you from spending a majority of your time on work that doesn’t reflect your greatest abilities and sheds light on areas of your business you need to delegate to people who are better at those functions than you. If you’re an army of one, you still need a job description. It’s unbelievable how much time we spend on tasks that really aren’t as important as we make them out to be in our heads. A job description mixed with a tight workflow and clear office hours will give you so much more freedom to do what you love.
