Your Employees, Exhausted to Excited?

I spent much of last year waking everyday only to be more tired than the day before. I would anticipate every weekend, hoping it would be the recharge I desperately needed. I tried being active; I tried being inactive. I tried long weekends filled with activities, and long weekends parked on the couch in my theater room. I tried healthy eating and when that didn’t boost my energy, I tried comfort eating. Next, I sat down and made a mental list of things I had done in the past that “got me back on track”. I then resorted to the extreme of repeating previous vacations that I had found refreshing (all the way down to the same resort, and same restaurants). When you’ve been a CEO for 15 years you develop a bag of tricks to get you out of the valleys. But this time was different; every trick in my bag was failing me.

I began to wonder if that was that. Maybe I just couldn’t get out of the hole. Were my best days behind me? The encouragement I kept getting was that I was doing all the right things and it was just going to take time. So, all I could do was get up every day and grind away at every problem I saw. Some days were awful, some decent, but none left me feeling fulfilled, they were no longer great.

Then one day the sun started to shine (literally…spring came). But it wasn’t just that, I found myself more rested, more excited, dealing with fewer problems, and I found myself happier. Being the analytical person I am I couldn’t just let that be, I needed to know why! What had changed? The problem with trying so many things is I didn’t have a clue what finally worked, or if it was a combination of things. I would love to blame this on analytics but, I think it’s more like self preservation; wanting to know how to get back to myself quicker next time.

Here are the top five things that allowed me to move from exhaustion back to excitement:

1. Focus
We were all designed for something, and we have to ask ourselves, “What are those few things that only I can do?” “What are the few things that I am truly one of the best in the country at?” And now for the painful question…“How much time do you actually spend on that?” For most of us the answer is probably less than 10% of our time. Once you determine the answers to these three questions, get rid of almost everything else! Seriously, delegate it, let go of it, or just stop doing it. What makes you great will never make your organization great until you are focusing the majority of your available time and energy on it.

CONTINUED... (Published originally by GMG).