Main Idea
Have you ever seen a two year old child completely out of control? Have you seen small business owners out of control? Are decisions being made clearly based on the best information available.
Expansion of Idea
When life is out of control, it is hard to make good decisions. When a toddler is out of control, the only thing that really works is for them to be by themselves in “timeout”. They may scream and cry for a while, but they normally get themselves back under control in a fairly short period of time. Why is that? I am not going to pretend to be a child psychologist, but I think kids need time by themselves without external influences.
As adults, we are not much different. We need to have time to plan and digest information. Steven Covey calls this time Quadrant II. This is time spent on important but not urgent matters. This could be strategic planning, customer analysis, or employee coaching. The agenda for the first time should be to develop ideas to follow up on in future timeouts. We tend to avoid this type of time because we focus on urgent. In fact, in the current economic times, the urgent hijacks our time, energy and money. A lot of small business owners are not much different than a two year-old. We are trying to run our businesses, but are completely out of control emotionally because we do not have a practice of “TIMEOUT”.
Area to Start
Schedule time for you and yourself to meet. Put it on the calendar.
Set follow up meetings to insure that this becomes a habit.
Set time to meet with key management members or advisors.