Just say no!

Work vs family…. The struggle continues.  

Work often becomes addictive.  You don’t even realize it.  You may be one of those folks who can hardly wait to get to your computer to see all those e-mails that someone stayed up all night writing and sending to you to make your day.  You may be one of those folks who complain about the excessive number of e-mails you get every day.  But you sit at your desk all day, watching with great anticipation, as they come up.  You may even get perturbed when you don’t get an e-mail for more than thirty minutes.  You even check your computer’s connections to make sure everything is intact!  “No e-mails?  Man, the server must be down.” 

If I asked you to choose what’s most important to you, work or family, there’s an extremely high probability that you’d choose family.  Yet, if I follow up with asking you where you spend most of your time, you’ll probably answer, “at work, or working.”  What’s up with that?  How can family be more important to you, yet you spend most of your time working?  Oh yes, I know your argument!  You work to support your family.  That’s partly true.   

Why do we work so hard or so much?  Because it’s easy!  “Wait a minute,” you say, “My work is tough!”  You want tough?  Try raising a family!  That’s tough!  Let me tell you why you spend most of your time at work, the real reason.  Again, it’s easy!  At work you know the rules.  You know when you’re supposed to be there.  You know what to do.  You know how to address people.  In fact, you were trained to do what you do at work.  Now, how much training did you get to be a parent or a spouse?  That’s tough!  The rules are made up as you go along, usually not by you, and they get tougher as time goes by.  Work is fun!  Come on, be honest. Yes, you have a lot of responsibilities, but you also have a lot more help than you do at home.

You’re going to have to take care of your family every once in a while, or you will lose them.  If you have kids, don’t blink because when you open your eyes they will have grown into people.  You’ll wonder what happened and the answer is that while you were busy saying yes to your work, they kept on growing and left you behind.

Work can become addictive.  Do what’s right for you and your family. That means going home when you should.  Not taking that work trip that seems like it will be so much fun.  Not going to that function when your son or daughter is graduating from karate school.  It also means taking time for yourself.  An Effective Leader ensures she grows on the inside as well as on the outside.  (I’m not talking about physical growth here.  That will come on its own.)  It’s tough, but so are you!  Your job is temporary.  You’ll always be Dad or Mom.  Effective Leadership is about doing what’s right at work and at home.  You have to strike the balance, which is almost never 50-50.  It will always be easier to say no to your family.  Take courage!  When someone asks you to do one more fun thing at work and you know your family is counting on you to be with them at the same time, just say no to the work.  You won’t regret it in the long term.

Until next time, Be GREAT! You ARE!

 

                                 ¡HEIRPOWER!

 

 

bob vásquez!

 

You don't know what you don't know

 You may have heard the kind-of-a-joke that goes like, “What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?” the answer being, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” It’s almost funny, but as my mentor, Dava Flowers, suggested in an email, maybe we should think about those two topics because the Youngsters are looking for a better answer. Dava is a Youngster. She’s twenty. A college student. She’s a leader in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP). The email was about Dava and Nicholas Tupper, also a Youngster, and CAP Cadet, had hosted a "Fight Apathy" Meeting “where young people from my school can come together and share leadership stories and humanitarian ideas with other students and the leaders in my community.” Do you see why these Youngsters have become my mentors?

 

I, way too often, hear Old Schoolers complain about our Youngsters, they may be your followers, who live in an “all about me” culture. All they care about is themselves. Maybe. But if that’s so, where did that culture come from? They didn’t create it. They inherited, or assimilated into, it. I’m convinced that our followers, including our Youngsters, care. I think that, by Nature, they have to care. The challenge is what do they care about? That’s where we Oldsters come in. 

 

How many times have you heard that (always others) “they don’t know what they don’t know?” That’s ignorance. We’re ALL ignorant of something! In my case, many things! I’m okay with that. I try to make up for that by learning as much as I can about as much as I can. Maybe you, Leader, should find out what your followers do, or don’t, know (which, by the way, would make you less ignorant) and help them to know!  Interestingly, Dava’s note referred to action as she stated that her goal was to get her peers to “ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING.” One of my most favoritest adages is, “To know but not to do is not to know.” I’m not sure who said it, but it’s a profound thought. As a leader, you’re charged with leading. Duh…! Where? YOU don’t know unless you know what your followers know! And that takes getting to know them. Start there! Once you know what they know, or don’t, you can, with them, set a direction for growth. And you know what you’ll accomplish that’s deeper than you anticipated? They’ll know that you care! WHOA! My leader cares! What a GREAT climate to live and work in!

 

 Your followers care. They do! About what? Find out! Then guide them toward assimilating what they care about with what you care about and what you BOTH care about. There’s power in that! When we all care about the same thing, we’re likely to do something about it, as Dava expects from her peers. But until you make the time to get to know them, YOU won’t know what they don’t know.

 

Notice that I introduced Dava as my mentor. I’ll soon, I hope, write a book titled PowerPact Mentoring, which will be based on a workshop I do. Traditionally, the mentoring processes is an Old Schooler guiding a Youngster toward some end. We live in a new world. Dava and I will soon launch a podcast that we’re calling Creating Leaders of Character. Her main purpose in that project is to help me to know what I don’t know. Help me reduce my ignorance of who our Youngsters are and how they think. I don’t really lead anyone anymore, but as I encourage you to be a leader, I need to know about our followers so that I can give you better advice.

 

So, (as all Youngsters start every sentence) get to know your followers and show them that you care. Life, and leading, is so simple once you understand the complexities! Know and care! That is all!              

 

            Until next time, Be GREAT! You ARE!

 

                                 ¡HEIRPOWER!

 

 

bob vásquez!