Knowing without knowing how you know: Intuition. Our own sixth sense is hugely valuable for helping us to make better decisions about everything we do in life and business.
Question: What’s more important? Urgent tasks or important tasks? Recently, I had a thought provoking discussion with a business leader who shared with me her thoughts on this. And it made me think.
Everyone wants things instantly and a lot of us confuse urgent with important.
But actually, ‘urgent’ is important in the short run, ‘important’ is important in the long run. A leader needs to keep the long-term vision in front of their eyes all the time when making business decisions.
If you keep focusing on urgent tasks, you’ll be constantly firefighting. Instead, why not take the lighter out of the hands of those who light those fires?
In business, delegating urgent tasks and focusing on the important ones is the responsibility of a good leader.
A fact is a statement that can be proven true or false. It’s black or white, yes or no. It’s something that either happened or did not happen. That’s a fact.
An opinion is an expression of a person’s feelings. It’s how we think about a fact. It always holds an element of belief, it’s subjective.
When we see new ideas, when we encounter new situations, new challenges, new behaviours, it’s all too easy to judge and jump to conclusions. We may focus on the trivial, and ignore information that doesn’t support our view of the world.
However, when we take our ‘glasses’ off and open our minds, we may see a lot clearer, and can change our perspective completely.
Not many people are willing to suspend their views and beliefs to fully hear the views of those with which they disagree.
Everything we do, feel or want is influenced by our own thinking. But once we’re able to challenge our very own thinking, that’s when we’ll be able to make better choices and set ourselves up for growth and improvement.
Encouraging critical thinking and radical openness is key to building a well-functioning, thriving human business.
Listening to Ray Dalio’s Principles on Audible, I feel that he gives voice to so many things I do instinctively in business and team building.
Most recently, his thoughts about conflicts touched a chord with me. I like constructive disagreement and believe that conflicts are essential for great relationships.
I’m in agreement with Dalio that spending on the time and energy to get in sync with colleagues and partners is the best investment we can make. In my experience, once people know how to express their views assertively, in a way that won’t cross boundaries, honesty becomes the norm, people start to feel aligned with themselves and are more open to ideas and criticism.
When we manage to create a culture where disagreements are encouraged, people become more willing to learn from each other, and the team is on a way to success.