Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you faced one challenge after another; and you didn’t know how you could possibly accomplish everything? There might have been endless demands placed on your time and resources, where you found yourself running from one meeting to another. Then at the end of your day you get back to your desk and find 200 emails waiting for you.
A secret to performing at your best is having a goal that challenges both your skills and abilities. It is one of the reasons we need small daily goals such as deadlines, or larger goals such as increasing your team’s revenue by 25%.
Here are some suggestions that will allow you to embrace meaningful challenges as you achieve your organizational goals and objectives.
1) Keep the Meaning
Embracing a meaningful challenge is something that will help keep your motivation high and your focus positive when working towards overcoming a performance challenge. The personal meaning could be achieving your year-end performance objectives in order to receive your bonus, allowing you to take your family on vacation. Whatever it is, try not to lose sight of the personal meaning.
2) Remove the Distractions
We live in a time of great distractions, and many of those daily distractions do nothing to help us achieve challenging goals. Often continuous daily distractions drain energy and steal valuable work time throughout the day.
I help my clients avoid daily distractions by asking them to review their main goals and challenges each day. This gives them a clear perspective on where they need to spend their time and how to avoid the unnecessary daily distractions of urgent meetings and requests.
3) Recharge
Recharging is something I learned years ago when I was training with Olympic level swimmers. They would get up at 4:30 a.m. (I know, that is a hard challenge to embrace!) and swim for 2 hours. Then they would go about their daily activities. During the middle of their day, they would often take a break to have a nap in order to recharge for the afternoon and evening, which usually involved another 2 hours in the pool. These swimmers knew the importance of recharging after their morning workouts and activities in order to be fresh and fully engaged for the challenge of their next workout.
If you work for an organization that allows afternoon naps, great! However, for most of us a nap is out of the question. So try going outside for a 10-minute walk during your day. You will find that both your body and mind will feel recharged and you will be ready to face any challenge.
Why is it important to embrace performance challenges in our modern day work worlds? Because it’s within these challenges that we will find the opportunities to grow ourselves professionally and provide better products and services to our clients and business partners.
All the best in achieving your highest performance.
Paul
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net