You’ve gotten to a place where you’re very successful. Your organization is thriving and you’re making plenty of money… But there’s a problem. The more you grow, the more you have to do. You keep accumulating responsibilities, and at some point, you were pulled away from the passionate, creative work that made you successful in the first place.
Success has a ceiling when everything falls on your shoulders. It cannot continue at this rate of rising unless something changes drastically – but that too has its own set of challenges. You’re likely at a point of exhaustion and the to-do list is overwhelming. In this state, the tyranny of the urgent captures your attention, and you’re so busy being busy that you can’t stop long enough to break the cycle.
You might not be running out of money, but you’re certainly running out of time.
It’s important to understand that REAL impact actually comes from a small portion of our activities. Like the 80/20 rule, or all of the unseen preparation that allows athletes and artists to wow us with their abilities in astonishing bursts of greatness, a small amount of actions create the majority of the value you bring your own life and the lives of others.
When you’re trapped in cycles of urgency and busyness, it’s hard to identify those impactful areas of effort – much less have the time and energy to take them on. Even if you think you have your priorities in order, an audit of your calendar to show how you ACTUALLY spend your time might be a shocking reality check.
So many business leaders are prisoners of their own machines. They have their hands in everything, exist in a state of reactivity, and undermine their ability to do the work that energizes them by thinking they can have it all and do it all.
But here’s the thing… You can’t.
Time is a limited resource. Life itself is a limited resource.
To break these cycles, we have to confront our perceived immortality and shake off the belief that we don’t have the time to make more time. We’re held back by cynicism about the abilities of others, an inflated sense of self-importance that leads to micromanagement, and an addiction to daily catastrophes that keep us focused on right here, right now – instead of stepping back to evaluate the bigger picture.
Whatever we practice, we get good at – whether it’s the positives of compassion and presence or the self-sabotaging habits of perpetual busyness and a stranglehold on control. We can get good at doing what lights us up, or get too good at doing the things that bring us down. As an organization grows, leaders face the dangerous possibility of falling into the second category – and letting busy work sap away their energy in the process.
Your energy drives your success, so what do you do when you’re repeating cycles of doing tasks that don’t replenish and build that energy? What do you do when day-to-day operations keep you from doing the work that matters most to you?
The key is delegation… But it’s not just dumping work on others, commanding them to do the things you don’t want to do… Instead, it’s empowering others, trusting them to take ownership of what they do best, and relinquishing control to regain time, energy, and focus for the things that made you successful in the first place.
In the audio presentation below, I go into detail about what this process looks like, how delegation empowers the people on your team, and the mental traps we fall into that prevent us from taking the leap into true delegation, effectively firing ourselves from the roles that don’t align with our higher purpose as a leader, creator, and entrepreneur.
If you’re feeling stuck, like you’ve hit a ceiling of capacity, like you’ve been pulled away from the things you love and into the day-to-day, reactive operations of your organization… You need to hear this message.
Delegation is the path back to the light!
