Newsletters

Your Fresh Start is a monthly newsletter for conscious, self-aware people who want to gain new ideas and perspectives on their work/lives for increased self expression, satisfaction and income, essentially, bringing more 'life' into livelihood.

Welcome to Issue Two of Your Fresh Start - July 2008 … And Please Pass It On to Others

Now that summer is officially here, it's time to slow down even more than ever.  I belive all of us can relate to my client's concerns about her work life bottleneck.  Hopefully, you'll find some useful suggestions for time dilemmas you face.

In a spirit of taking more opportunities to smell the roses, enjoy,

Melanie Keveles

P.S. Be sure to read through to find an announcement about my up-coming teleclass event.

Time in a Bottleneck - Catching Up When Work Life's Out of Control

By Melanie Keveles, MA, CPCC, MCC - Master Certified Coach

Another highly talented client came to me with her issue of managing her time.  She raised the issue sheepishly, thinking she should have this under control herself.  After all, she is someone who is generally confident and knows she's got great capacity.  She has a high powered job, a great staff as well as five children well cared for by her stay-at-home husband.  Why can't she handle her time commitments?

What she needed as she saw as we progressed in our session, was a thinking partner; someone to help her take a step back and survey her situation.  She described her circumstance as what she imagines a clinic doctor feels as he races between patients, never quite feeling like he's caught up.  Her metaphor gave me a clear picture of her situation as well as a clue to how she felt.

As we talked, a strategy emerged:  Anticipate, delegate, eliminate and experiment.  What was useful about these elements is that they weren't something we had read in a book somewhere.  We weren't trying to retrofit someone else's concept, merging it with her situation.  No, these words had resonance and application to her situation because they came from my questions of what was missing for her now in her time dilemma.

As she reflected, she saw that she had not spent as much time as necessary anticipating what was coming down the pike each week.  She found this insight particularly sad for her, because as she saw it, visioning and planning is one of her strongest suits.  Yet she hadn't been able to set aside enough time to do this conceptual work.

She confided that in just this last week, she had brought home work from the office, intending to tackle it over the weekend.  But with out-of-town guests and a desire to spend time with her brood, she just couldn't tear herself away to focus on her office work.  Consequently, when she arrived at the office on Monday morning, she already felt behind.

As I probed, I found a part of her which we dubbed her internal teenager who rebelled at the necessity of spending time away from her family.  This sub-personality was at war, it seemed, with her professional self.  Before we had this conversation, she hadn't seen the internal conflict in this light.

Together, we mapped out a plan that would give her time every early morning, without robbing her of the precious quality time with her family.  She resolved for the next several weeks to experiment with a new schedule which would have her arriving at an hour earlier than she had normally arrived. 

Since she resented the fact that she often left the office too late to be able to interact with her children at night, she agreed to test out a new schedule that would have her leaving the office no later than 5:30 PM three days a week, committing herself to staying late the other nights.  Again, she was willing to take an experimental posture, knowing that as she tested this out over the course of the next several weeks she may have to make some adjustments.  This structure, however, gave her the confidence that she was attempting to approach this situation differently.

As we continued to delve more deeply into her situation at work, we turned our attention to the leadership of her staff.  Through a recent reorganization, she had acquired a new set of direct reports, as well as found herself working for a new boss.  Wanting to make sure accounts were properly attended to and that circumstances would run smoothly, she realized she had leaned over backwards to support her staff.

However, in stepping back from the situation and looking at it objectively, she realized that she had made herself too available, attending all but a few meetings with them and prompting them at every turn, to be sure that her ideas were carried forward.  Her staff appreciated her presence since she acted in such a supportive role rather than a perceived controlling role.  But now she could see that she was actually doing her staff a disservice.

At this juncture in the development of her staff it was important for her to step back a bit and let them demonstrate their skills, talents and competencies.  As we talked this through, she realized she needed to meet with her staff members to relay her confidence in them and devise a game plan for her to pull back and give them more space to strut their stuff.  She agreed to do some healthy delegating, weaning them off of such a heavy reliance of having her in their meetings.  Doing so would free up her schedule considerably.

The final part of the equation we were mapping out together came down to what she could eliminate.  As such it was tied to the delegation because she was stepping aside and letting her staff members play more of a key role with important accounts.  Foremost she was able to eliminate meeting times that had tied her calendar up considerably, even having her double booked.  She promised, however, looking out over the next several weeks to identify other aspects of what she had been doing to eliminate.

Without the overriding frustration she had been feeling which was bottlenecking her ability to think straight, she felt certain she would be able to find more unnecessary elements of her job to eliminate.  That would be part of her homework for the coming weeks.

Her willingness to experiment with all of this was an important element of the equation.  Taking an experimental posture would allow her to make adjustments along the way - and keep her eyes open for new approaches that would also help her in managing her time.

Imagine what you could accomplish to dissolve any time crunch bottlenecks you're experiencing in your work life if you were to apply the caveat of anticipate, delegate, eliminate and experiment to your situation.  Try it - and see what happens!

Happenings

Join me and my coach partner Karen Carr for a rollicking good time in our three part teleclass series to make your dreams come true:  Dream, Courage, Action!:  Who's Featured in the Movie of Your Life?  The teleclass starts on August 13th and runs three consecutive Wednesdays from 3-4 PM EDT.  You'll gain clarity on your direction, techniques to keep your fears at bay and a variety of tools to get you into motion. Contact me for more details and to register - .

Reprint Rights

Please feel free to reprint this article as long as the following bio (and link to my site) is included with the article.

Melanie Keveles helps people make long-forgotten dreams come true. A master certified coach, she's helped her clients find greater career satisfaction, launch entrepreneurial ventures, and get their books published. Do you have a dream that you keep yearning over? Call Melanie today and take the first step to realizing it. You can reach Melanie at , at 715.394.4260, or www.startingfreshcoaching.com.

You'll also want to read Melanie's upcoming book. Co-author of Fired for Success: How to Turn Losing Your Job into the Opportunity of a Lifetime! (Warner Books), Melanie is under contract with Praeger Books for a forthcoming book on entrepreneurial women, Scrappy Startups: How 15 Ordinary Women Turned their Unique Ideas into Profitable Business.