As we continue our series on how to unleash your full potential, keep in mind that it’s the little things that count. Personal effectiveness is a good example. Instead of being one big thing, personal effectiveness is the sum total of little things that you do every day.
Effectiveness, by the way, is not the same thing as efficiency. Those two terms often get confused. Effectiveness is the ability to get things done. Efficiency is the ability to get things done, but it's more about getting them done quickly, whereas effectiveness has to do with quality and sustainability… and making an impact.
Effectiveness is what raises the level of your performance, your achievement, and your satisfaction. Not only that, when you're effective you’ll have a contagious effect. Others around you will also be able to perform and achieve at higher levels and will likely feel more satisfied too.
Here's some good news.
Effectiveness is not some sort of personality trait. It's not a characteristic that some people are born with, and some people just never have a chance to access. Just the opposite! Effective people have all varieties of temperaments. What they have in common are the practices or the habits that they employ.
What that means is that effectiveness is learnable and accessible . You, too, can become more effective! You can acquire the skills and habits that make people more effective.
Habits are learned. Habits take 15-30 days of sustained practice to become habits, so this will be well worth working on.
We have many, many choices in nearly everything we do. Sometimes we make hasty decisions and end up regretting them. To prevent regret, build a habit of objectively evaluating choices before you make them or before you reflexively enact a decision. This requires intellectual honesty and a willingness to step outside your comfort zone and entertain new ideas.
More often than not, evaluating options involves more that determining what’s right and what’s wrong. There can be more than one “right” choice. What you’ll be evaluating are different courses of action. Evaluating them without judging them will help you stick to the facts and maintain a more neutral perspective.
In evaluating choices and making decisions, step one is to make sure you’ve identified the real problem. Addressing superficial issues or symptoms of a problem won’t make the problem go away. Get to the root cause and focus your energy there.
Next, ask questions to better understand the situation and others’ perspectives about it. Don’t fall into the trap of only gathering information that supports your preconceived notions. Instead, actively seek diverse points of view and work to fully understand them.
Questions that will help you to evaluate your options objectively include:
Using a process like this should improve your decision quality. It will make you more confident about the choices you make. Others will be more likely to understand and respect your choices. As a result, you will be more effective – better able to get things done and to make an impact.
Being credible means that others can believe in you. People can't believe your message if they don't believe in you, the messenger.
Being credible means that you’re demonstrating clarity, consistency and alignment in your words and actions. It means you deliver on time and uphold your promises and commitments.
When you make choices based on a thorough and objective evaluation of the options, you’ll be more credible. Listening to others, inviting their input, and asking questions to genuinely understand and solve problems will make it easier for others to support your choices.
Being credible puts you in a position where others will seek out your ideas and your input. You’ll continually build on your effectiveness by being adept and predicting likely outcomes. When you take a forward-looking view, people will feel more confident because you’re not blindly proceeding without foresight.
Foresight keeps you from looking too narrowly at the present or status quo. It also keeps you from looking backwards where you have no impact. Looking forward makes you proactive, prepared, and inspiring to others.
keep yourself under control! When you lose control, it's frightening to other people. Develop the ability to limit your expression to whatever's appropriate at that moment in time, that place, and that person.
This isn’t to suggest that you shouldn't have feelings. Feelings are valid and important. But pure, spontaneous feelings can be reactive and hazardous if not tempered with reason.
This includes controlling what you express to yourself. Be sure that what you're putting out there for others is useful and not meant to emotionally manipulate them. You don't want to come across as someone who's only in it for yourself.
Self-awareness gives you insights about why you feel the way you feel and why others feel the way they feel when they're around you. If you’d like to work on developing self-awareness and emotional intelligence, this assessment tool is a great place to begin.
This one is tough. Criticism stings, and our automatic response is pain.
A single word of criticism can drum up a lifetime of similar criticism, including self-criticism. To avoid all that pain, we avoid asking for and hearing criticism.
For some people, the avoidance of criticism is to be overly defensive, to try and justify or minimize the situation that you're being criticized for. For others, the criticism is not only accepted, but it ends up being magnified with a lot of self-condemnation. Some people do both. They minimize in public, and they maximize the criticism when they're alone.
Another common and ineffective response is to shift blame or externalize all criticism by denying responsibility. If you can't accept responsibility, what you're saying is that you are not in control of the situation. That shows limitations to your effectiveness.
To invite feedback and process it without becoming overly defensive, use these tips:
If you’d like to learn about 5 more habits for personal effectiveness, enroll in our free, self-paced, eLearning course called The Essentials of Personal Effectiveness. It’s available only in the People First Leadership Academy, a resource you’ll definitely want to bookmark and visit often!