Trying To Find Some Sense Of Balance
About halfway through the first semester of a school year, students start to panic. If you are a student leader, your stress level may have already shot through the roof. Any sense of organization and planning ahead is tossed out the window as student's fight to keep up with only the most pressing of needs.
One of the main contributors to this frantic lifestyle (besides your professors or teachers thinking that their class is the only one you have and loading you up with homework) is when we lose a sense of balance in the commitments that we've made. A student leader must always monitor how effectively he or she is keeping their life in balance. There are so many things that vie for a person’s attention and energy. You must choose wisely what you will commit too, otherwise, you will find yourself overloaded and overwhelmed. Leadership expert, Fred Smith (visit Fred's site here) skillfully illustrates the importance of maintaining balance in the life of a leader:
“We are always warned by the electric company not to overload a circuit. This is right, but I noticed that I have six plugs on one outlet but there is no potential danger because I only use one thing at a time and each one doesn't come close to maxing out the circuitry. We get in trouble of overloading by using more than one or two that max out.
The same thing happens in our lives. We get overloaded by having high potential involvements or emotional experiences or commitments of time and we get too many of them turned on at the same time ---- we can easily blow a fuse. It isn't how many connections you have on a circuit, it is how much potential there is for an overload. One can take on fourteen things so long as none of them are so demanding or have to be done simultaneously that they overload your circuit.
When they compete for the current, then you are in danger. We draw different amounts of current for our emotional output.
How is your circuitry? Are you getting close to the sound of crackling wires because you have too much on one line?”
Stephen Covey, in his book, The 7 Habits Of Highly Successful People, notes that our priorities are constantly affected by two factors: importance and urgency. Looking at the chart that's pictured here (click on image for a larger view), Covey explains that our most effective and best work is done in the area of “important – not urgent” (what he calls “Quadrant 2”). The reason that this is the place where we do our best work is because we are able to tackle the important things without feeling like we have to rush through it (which is the work we do in Quadrant 1).
Covey states that we feel more productive and better "balanced" when we can move, steal, beg, borrow the time we spend in Quadrants 3 & 4 and spend it in Quadrant 2. Covey’s point is that if we discipline ourselves to do the important work when it is not urgent (Quadrant 2), we'll not only do better work, but we'll get the most important things that need to get done...done. There will always be things that hit us throughout our day that is both important and urgent. But if we can spend less time in Quadrants 3 & 4, and more time in Quadrant 2, it will shrink the work that we face in Quadrant 1 (important-urgent).
In this sense, maintaining balance in our lives is the result of planning (when we will accomplish Quadrant 2 work) and discipline (how we'll spend less time in Quadrants 3 & 4).
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