Energy and Motivation: Don’t Do This

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction. So let's dive straight in to this week's episode.

Several weeks ago, whilst I was delivering a leadership development program for a group of senior leaders, I was asked a question about what can they do to manage their own energy and motivation levels? Because if it is their job as leaders to inspire and support the people they lead, they said we need to be energized and motivated ourselves. So if this is a challenge you face, if you ever find yourself wondering what can I do to get my own motivation and energy back to where I know it's been in the past, then today's episode of the Leaders Kit Bag is for you. So how can we as leaders maintain and manage our own energy levels and and our own motivation? One of the biggest revelations for me personally on this topic probably in the past 10 years has been around limiting the number of goals I set for myself. I think it is very true for senior people, for very driven, motivated people, to overestimate what we can deliver or achieve in work or in our personal life and at the very same time underestimate the amount of time and effort it takes. So one of the things I'm very conscious about doing now is setting myself a limited number of goals. Now this was really highlighted for me when I read the book the Four Disciplines of Execution. And in that book there's some research cited that was conducted by Gallup. Now the authors of the book the Four Disciplines of Execution, they liken the day to day running of a business department or even team as a whirlwind. And the whirlwind represents all of those day to day tasks, the things that has to get done just to keep the business or the team running at its normal level. It's your standard KPIs and metrics, your standard goals and objectives that have got to be hit and delivered. Then the research looked at how many goals a business could deliver with excellence in addition to the day to day or the whirlwind. And this is where it starts to get really interesting. If we have two to three additional projects, those needle moving projects, maybe the strategic initiatives that are going on, if we are working on two to three of those at any one time, in addition to the whirlwind, the research suggests that two to three will get delivered with excellence, that is to a very high standard. When that number starts to grow to 4 to 10, the number that gets delivered with excellence drops to 1 to 2. And as soon as we go to 11 or more, the number delivered with excellence drops to a big fat zero. And this has absolutely been working for me and my business. So if you really want to try and maintain and manage your own energy and motivation, then I encourage you to be very, let's say, intentional about the number of projects you are taking on. In my business, I will not take on more than two to three at any one time. And I'm very conscious and careful about what personal goals I'm setting for myself. Because I'm a solo business, my business and personal goals all get wrapped up into one. But beyond two to three, the number that delivered are delivered with excellence starts to drop exponentially. The final thing I would say here as well is that on a personal level, whatever goals you are setting for yourself, be very mindful of your starting point and just try and build in and create some incremental goals. Just be very mindful of where you're starting from. For example, if you suddenly decide that you want to change your eating habits and start eating more healthily, it's not uncommon, right? For someone who is highly driven to go, right, that's it, I'm cutting out sugar, I'm stopping eating carbs, I'm going pescatarian. And we try and do everything all at once and it's just too big a step for most of us.

Okay, so here you can take a.

Step out of James Clea's book Atomic Habits and just break your goals down into lots of smaller manageable steps. So then you start to see some progress and that progress builds motivation as opposed to setting out with an enormous goal, seeing very little progress, and that killing your motivation. That's it for today's episode of the Leader's Kit Bag. Hope it's been useful. And as always, look after yourself, look after those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.