Optimism

Are you half empty or half full? This metaphor of a glass half way filled is often used to describe a person’s mindset and their attitude towards life. A person can look upon their life’s events as being “half done” as half the drink has gone, or as space to pour in half more – as there is room for more drink! In other words, people tend to adopt a pessimistic or optimistic outlook on life.

I am, like my father, the eternal optimist. To such an extent that my friends call me Polly Anna, always looking for goodness, seeing a different picture on sometimes dire circumstances and generally waving the flag of positive thinking. We are beautifully balanced by other family members who, living more in the half empty world, bring us back down to earth with a bump!

Of course there are benefits of allowing yourself to be pessimistic. My sister describes it as living her life in more of a realistic way, not allowing herself to be disappointed when things go wrong. And us optimists of course can learn from a healthy dose of realism. My friends do tell me that I drive them round the bend always looking for the positive, particularly in people.

But I do wonder if optimists have a better life, by constantly showering ourselves in positive thoughts? In thinking about this, here are some things that optimists, most likely subconsciously, do:

• They reframe – this process is often used by coaches to help clients develop a new perspective around their issues. The thinking is that optimists live events as if they were enclosed and played out in a picture frame. Optimists are more able to expand the borders of the frame and change the content to play a different movie and outcome.
  
• They are open to new landscapes – optimists often generate new possibilities and don’t limit themselves to the familiar. They are more prepared to sneak a peek at something new.
  
• They learn – when, inevitably, things don’t go the way they want, they generally view the experience as something to put as a credit in their learning bank and approach differently next time.
  
• They find another way to tell themselves they are lucky – even in the most difficult circumstances, optimists give themselves positive affirmations. Following bereavement for instance, as well as the obvious loss, there is a feeling of luck to have had that person in their life.
  
• They visualise – optimists find a language or a way to look at a future full of possibilities. They are able to create a picture something to aim for that is different to now.

As with everything, there is a downside to each of the above. More pessimistic people would describe that better than me and of course people who describe themselves as more pessimistic also do the above. But I believe that optimists do them more naturally and automatically. And while I can learn from, be balanced by and injected with realism by my less optimistic friends, I am still happy where I am. After all, in the famous song from the famous Monty Python movie, even Brian was able to “Always look on the bright side of life”!

I would be very interested in your views via the blog.

Executive Stretch

Many executives and senior managers find themselves overstretched, often working excessively long hours with a consequence to their work-life balance. It’s a situation exacerbated by the recession, where the solution to economic difficulty is regularly touted as “achieving more with less”.

The concept is meant to translate into finding more efficient and effective ways of working, but all too often it results in doing the same things, the same way, but with less people and therefore simply an increase in everyone’s workload.

Yet for an executive, it’s not simply the volume of work that’s an issue, but the type of activities they spend their time in.

There’s a simple model that can help in understanding this. Consider that there are three levels of work.
•    Level 1: Future – strategy, direction, business development, change
•    Level 2: Overall management of current business operations
•    Level 3: Involvement in specific operational tasks, issues, problems, crisis

In a recent course, I asked a group of senior managers to consider how their time, by percentage, is typically split between these three levels. The results were interesting. Those that, by their own definition, were overstretched, were spreading their time between all three levels, often with level 1 activities suffering as a consequence of  their situation forcing them to spend more than 50% of their time in level 3 activities. In other words they were getting lost in the detail.

The model suggests that to be effective, executive time should be split between the top two levels, with most time being spent in level 1 – and only a small percentage of time, less than 10%, in level 3 activities.  Those that considered that they worked hard, but were not overstretched, had more of a tendency to this balance.

So it’s not the amount that people do, but the stretch between too many competing challenges at different levels that seems to cause a problem. The urgent things, as is so often the case, were taking precedence over the important things, and the short-term taking precedence over the long-term.

To address this the cycle has to be broken. This means making the time for activities that will lead to long-term results in readdressing the balance.  For example, taking the time to coach others in how to do things.  In the short-term this takes more time than simply doing whatever it is yourself, but in the long-term, it will enable you to delegate more.

Ultimately it’s a simple message. To become less over-stretched, to achieve better results for the business and to improve your work-life balance the most important question is not “how do I squeeze more into a day?” – but “what should I be doing, and what should I not be doing?”