What challenges do you face every day at work?
Imagine a day that started with everybody smiling at you, continued with vibrant energy and collaboration, immense productivity and focus, total contagion, and ended on a high and all the while balanced with brilliant health, a clear mind, plenty of time for personal development and growth and of course family and friends.
You are not alone if you just read that paragraph and felt whimsical. Amongst the commonest challenges people face are a lack of work-life balance, a lack of motivation, a lack of recognition and appreciation, and poor communication.
Multi-tasking is actually one of the worst things we can do to be productive.
Both health and performance are impacted by these challenges, and while initially the effects may seem minimal, they soon expand, engulfing everything and everyone around them. This article takes a deeper dive and shares some tips on how you can optimise your performance by overcoming these challenges.
Lack of work-life balance
Multi-tasking is actually one of the worst things we can do to be productive. At the same time, sitting at our desks, attending endless meetings, and having no boundaries of when the work day needs to stop detrimentally impacts on performance.
Start by visioning what the ideal work-life balance actually encompasses for you. Most people tend to linger with what they don’t want and so their focus is on the awareness of what they don’t have as opposed to what they do.
Once you have the vision outlined, flesh it out a little with details such as how long you might want to spend with family and friends, what your weekends should look like, how many holidays you might have, what food you want to eat, how much exercise or self-care you want to engage in. This is the first step to making it tangible as opposed to an elusive wish that you never actually make the effort to bring to life.
The next step is the truly engage with the feeling of what having that work-life balance is actually like. I set you a challenge to practice smiling for at least a minute while you try to engage in that feeling. The more you do this, the more you will start to lift your mood and energy every time you think about it.
Guess what? With an elevated mood through smiling, you are much more likely to be able to do what needs to be done to create that perfect balance, and happy team member or leader, leads to better performance.
Lack of Motivation
Does the issue lie with your motivation or those around you? If you are hugely motivated but finding it challenging to engage those around you, step back and try to take in the bigger picture. We get so bogged down with the daily pressures, tasks and minutiae, that often we neglect bringing our team along with us and share our vision and ideas.
Team engagement comes from a sense of mutual respect, feeling appreciated and working together for a common cause, coupled with a motivating factor that provides something for them. Consider how you might incorporate the motivating message so it becomes an everybody-wins situation to get buy-in.
In my workshops and speeches, I train people on how to find and engage with their E-motion: the energetic motion for change, so they can truly start to make things happen and keep going in flow state – which mean it feels effortless but yields phenomenal results.
We are all leaders of our own lives.
Be passionate with your message – use you voice, your body language, lead by example, show respect to the boundaries your team may put in place, and in fact encourage them to have them. We are so much more dynamic and able to succeed collectively as opposed to individually, so start celebrating every win in the process, so bring accountability to the team, make every person feel important in their role, no matter how small – it still counts and means something. That leads perfectly onto the next challenge!
Lack of Recognition and Appreciation
Imagine if you saw everybody as a leader? Which in fact they are. We are all leaders of our own lives. Engaging everybody around you to understand and feel important, to feel like they too lead, creates a conscious organisation.
Feeling truly heard is one of the greatest needs we have and a powerful tool of communication to master.
This is in fact something we can measure with an assessment – and it gives us a scope to identify where the pitfalls may lie, and how they can be rectified. A conscious organisation is one where you will notice the success skyrockets, people are engaged, happy, and report fulfilment in over 14 areas including leadership, productivity, communication, financial success, physical health, relationships to name a few.
Show appreciation not just with financial gifts and rewards, but by listening and speaking. Feeling truly heard is one of the greatest needs we have and a powerful tool of communication to master.
Lack of Communication
In many respects, this can be rectified by the tips shared already. When people are unclear about what they are doing, this can push them into a state of stress. Some types of stress help us perform even better – such as working to a deadline. However, this type of stress – stepping into the unknown, often leads to inactivity.
Elevating yourself and your team to a point where you don’t drop onto inertia during stress is something I train people on. The key is to get comfortable with the uncomfortable and learn to trust, let go and maintain enthusiasm and optimism.
Understanding that people learn in different ways, and identifying what those ways are for each individual will help enormously when communicating tasks. Using needs-based communication helps to gain buy-in. Matching people’s communication styles also helps them hear and engage better.
The power of that smile can never be underestimated.
Communication is not just verbal – its listening, reflecting back, acting on what is heard and share that, being included in the celebration and the challenges that may come up, and of course body language.
Looking at someone when they are speaking, or making it clear that you are actually listening even if you are not looking at them. Holding an open posture, physical gestures such as nodding, avoiding other distractions such as phones, and of course smiling while you are conveying a message or listening to one. The power of that smile can never be underestimated.
Even if you try one tip from each category, make one tiny change, those around you will change with you. So go ahead and try something today!
Dr. Rana Al-Falaki is an optimal performance strategist, an award-winning executive and leadership coach working with CEOs, leaders, business owners and entrepreneurs to optimise performance in every aspect of life and for those around them. She is the Founder of NAIL-IT – providing bespoke motivational events, workshops, speaking, VIP days, coaching and retreats creating experiential modalities that can be translated into everyday life based around her unique performance optimisation formula. She is also an award winning best-selling author and multi-award winning specialist in Periodontics (specialist dental surgeon).
Click here to read more about Dr. Rana Al-Falaki