Enhance Personal Effectiveness With These 3 Qualities

The month of January is almost coming to its end in mere couple of days - how have you gotten your 2022 off the ground, by committing to specific and realistic goals? I hope it has started strongly and in the way you have envisioned it - ever more importantly from both health and well-being standpoints. What incredible and interesting the last two years have been, historically speaking, around the globe. Today, it seems we are still in the midst of coping with the COVID19 variants spread in different parts of the world and blending into the so-called "new norm" of heightened public awareness, social distancing, strengthened regulations and protocols, remote working, limited (or rather, different) social exchange and its impact on economic inflation, felt everywhere. Let's face it, this experience is rather uncalled for in many ways, but how different it really is compared to all the ongoing changes that we know are happening everyday on earth? It is an important evolutionary phase of this lifetime.

Regardless of what happened, one thing is certain - here we are, our hearts are still beating, and we get the rare opportunity to move forward with life. Whether pandemic or not, this truth is simply unbeatable. This global pandemic is merely a medium through which this truth needs to be conveyed in the most compelling way, yet. If I have learned anything, this is it: Everyday above ground is a wonderful reason to be grateful about. So, live each moment fully as though it will be your last.

When I think about matters on living fully, oftentimes it leads me to 3 essential qualities I strive to embody with discipline - clarity, focus and commitment - that I would call personal effectiveness, when combined. This is by no means advocating more "do" than "be", but more about the art of finding the right balance in both, within which the virtuosity of life rests. In either context of form (material-based, e.g. goal-oriented tasks) or formlessness (energy-based, e.g. mindfulness or meditation) of the world, I find that these qualities simply carry equal weight for individual effectiveness. So, let's expand further on each of them.

From Confusion to Clarity

Confusion is usually triggered from not clearly knowing and understanding what it is that you really want out of life - chunking down to activities you fill every significant part of your day with, that eventually forms what you ultimately create of life itself. I bet you have had one of those days where you looked back at the end of it realizing that you have not actually done much of anything really. Think about it, when you are confused (perhaps hard to admit), you may be doing something, keeping your nose to the grindstone but you are not quite sure why you are doing it, more so when you do not even find it necessarily enjoyable. Perhaps you are just conforming - everybody does it, and thus, so must you - to fit the mould and feel belong. That is security, not clarity - unless it also makes your heart sing. Therefore, the question that must be pondered upon is "WHY am I doing what I am doing now?". Clarity is borne from a deeply connected place with yourself, where every endeavour you undertake becomes meaningful and purposeful, as it leads you in a specific direction towards where you want to be.

From Overwhelm to Focus

Wherever you are heading charted by your daily endeavours, there will be various peaks and troughs that you will likely experience on your journey. When challenges present themselves along the way, you will need to surmount them to continue on the path or you may choose to ignore or abandon them in favor for yet another "North Star" that interests you. Either way, the trigger for overwhelm is ultimately only because you might just care too much about what other people may perceive you for the outcome you experienced, especially whether you can get all the ducks in a row. Overwhelm is a state in which you may feel that you have numerous things or responsibilities to do or fulfill, but you have no idea what to attempt first. You might then want to consider prioritization yet somehow feels just as challenging where everything seems important (hint: go back to the previous question). "Does this ever get any simpler?", you may wonder. What deemed important or not for each individual is a choice in itself. Overwhelm stems from how your choice is influenced by or determined relative to the average choice out there by others - rendering the metric of a 'good' or 'bad' choice. Imagine being "shameless" about the choice of actions you believe in and redirect all your energy towards overcoming every obstacle that greets you, one at a time - that's the focus you need to make things happen. Here, the question that you can ask yourself is, "What is the one thing that I can do right now to move forward?" Depends on how your day might look like, suggest to just start with one thing, then another and so forth. Before you realize it, the energy you have spent on feeling overwhelmed would have been channeled into truly getting things done in a way that serves you.

From Indecisiveness to Commitment

There are potentially many routes that can lead you to the same destination. For example, if you want to be more assertive (or any change you want to have in your life), you can either read some books on that, attending an in-person training for it, learn from an online course at your own pace, or get help and support from a coach who has been in your shoes, got the results you desire and get there faster. Each alternative offers yet another full range of options of its own kind and their pros and cons that you may need to weigh upon. The world we live in today offers a plethora of different options to almost anything that you can think of. The more options dished up for you, the more you feel the need to "analyze" and "compare" in hope to come to the "right" decision, only to discover more options appearing out of nowhere, shortly after. The moment you feel that you are one step ahead, you are actually taking two steps back, which can be really frustrating and draining. Risks are inherent in the decision-making process. For instance in the same example above, regardless of what you opt for, you might risk forfeiting your investment (time and money) should you not get the results you expect. However, the risk is in fact much higher if this whole process gets you into an inertia state, where you are constantly evaluating but never executing (hint: go back to the previous question). You can ask yourself, "What do I need, to make peace with my decision to either succeed or grow through this experience, by giving my all in this moment?" Start by thinking about the basic few must-have criteria that must be primarily met, to simplify the process and block out the "noise". Commitment is all about being resourceful in finding a working solution to the change you want in your life. There is no such thing as failure when you can choose to recognize the lesson from the experience itself. How liberating is that!

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ANNOUNCEMENT

My new online course "BE Assertively YOU with Ease" is now launched!

It is a course designed for expat women (or women in general) where I will be sharing my own journey in this: how it came about, how did I overcome it and what have I learned and continue to learn to this day. You can find out more details about it here.