personal – Page 7 – Matthew Laker

Time management a road to the life you want (Part 2)

Posted on November 4, 2015November 2, 2015 by Matthew Laker

Personal time Management will help you enter, engage, and experience what you were created for.

Today we continue on tips for time management in order to gain the life you want. You can read part one here.

To get where you want to in life, you are going to have to reflect and be a steward of the time you have. You only have so much time in your life.

How are you going to use the time you have been given?

1. Scheduling is your friend.

Either you control your life or something else well. I know right away some are saying I am just not a calendar person. Again, either you control your life or something else well.

Here are a few thoughts I find helpful around scheduling time.

a. Make sure to keep margin in your life. When booking appointments, give a little extra time. Why? Sometimes you may need it, but if not, enjoy the moment.

b. Schedule time with yourself and your family.

c. Keep 50% of your time involved in things that get the results you are wanting.

d. Schedule start and end times for your activities.

e. First 30 min. of day given to plan the day.

f. Schedule an extra 5 minutes for review of task completed or conversation at end of the hour or day.

g. Establishing a daily, month, weekly routine that will move you forward

h. ______________(What would you add?)

2. Reality Check Experiment

Spend a week recording everything you do. Put down the places you have been and the people you spoke with. Write down a summary of what you did each hour. This will help see where you are spending your time.

Here is a free spread sheet template. You can use it on your phone to help track your time.

3. It’s impossible to get everything done – live with it.

Seriously, it is impossible to get everything done. Take the time to understand how long you need and break things down into small chunks. It will lower your stress level. However at the end of the day understand there will always be something you need to do.

Celebrate what you have accomplished. What tips do you have that are useful?

Why Identifying Values is important.

Posted on November 2, 2015November 2, 2015 by Matthew Laker

Understanding our values can help us engage life.

What are values and how can understanding them help us better engage in life? Why are they important to know?

Values are the guidelines that help shape our goals and objectives in life. They are part of a source that helps bring fulfillment in our life.

Values affect all areas of our life. For example, how we use our time and to whom we spend our time with are all shaped by our values. Our values will play a major role in our decision making. They are part of our identity as individuals as well as every organization. .

Juan Carlos Jimenez shares: “When we truly believe that a set of behaviors constitute an essential cornerstone to life, we act accordingly, and don’t care what others say about it.”

For many, our values are formed in our early life as children. As we watch our guardians, we will often take on their worldview. As life moves forward we will be influenced and challenged by peers, which is not a bad thing. Experience can also shape our values. For example, if someone has a bad experience in a situation, it develops behavior in that person. Perhaps this has more to do with a natural protection of their self, but that experience creates a foundational belief and value in their life.

Values are foundational beliefs in our life that effect behavior. Values can be changed, but that is a hard road to walk. Change can occur as people honestly think about the implications of the things they stand for. Sometimes values will change because of new influences in one’s life. However changing those foundations takes work and time.

Often the greater challenge is our lived-out values compared to our stated values. They are not always the same.

It is good to spend some time reflecting on your values. As you do that ask yourself, why do you have that value? Why do you want to have, or live out , that value? We hold to values because of their benefit to us, so what benefit does it bring?

Values are the things that matter most to us.

When we understand them we begin to understand the things that drive us.

Understanding them will help us to be in a better position for ourselves to enter, engage, and experience life as we were created for.

Here is an exercise to help identify your values. Click here

Why People Get Stuck

Posted on October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 by Matthew Laker

Keith Yamashita, in his book “Unstuck” shares 7 reason why individuals and organizations feel stuck.

I first read about these reason in Gary Collins book, “Christian Coaching, Second Edition: Helping Others Turn Potential into Reality (Walking with God) .” What I like about the list is just that it is a list. It becomes a tool to help an individual or organization who already knows they are stuck to put words to it.

Let me give you the list and then provide some reflection questions at the end.

7 reasons why people get stuck:

Overwhelmed: This involves a feeling that there is too much work, too much scrutiny, or too little time, energy, or people to get everything done. When the tasks ahead feel huge, there is procrastination and uncertainty about where to begin.

Exhausted: Tired people lack energy. They tend to lose vision, purpose, and enthusiasm. Team camaraderie fades. Patience is in short supply. Conflicts and criticism are more in evidence. Everything stalls.

Directionless: Everyone may be busy and working through to-do lists, but sometimes there is no vision or big picture of the future. Team members have no common goal, so each works independently and progress is limited.

Hopeless: When there is no sense of achievement (often because there is no clear purpose), the motivation to keep working dries up, successes become fewer and the effort does not seem worthwhile.

Surrounded by conflict: It is difficult to keep moving forward in the midst of disagreements, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, and gossip. This is like a dysfunctional family trying to plan a wedding or family reunion.

Worthless: Motivation and progress stall when individuals or team members feel unappreciated, overlooked, unrewarded, or unacknowledged.

Alone: This is a feeling of isolation that may come to a whole team, company, or church. Each individual works independently with no sense of belonging, identity, team spirit, or camaraderie. Often this comes because there is no visionary leader who unites people into a common purpose.

My Observations about the list:

There is a big connection between our emotions and feeling stuck and getting unstuck.
Your mindset acts like a rudder in your life.
The need for creating a life plan can be a great asset. .
There is a need for personal/organizational systems and the understanding of who you are and where you are going to get unstuck.
Lack of community can lead to the reasons or at least feed them.
Someone who is stuck has a higher reality of not taking time for personal reflection and stillness.
The Jesus follower is not centering oneself on Jesus.

Reflection Questions:

1. Which one of those seven is where you are at?

2. What are you not believing about Jesus right now?

3. What are you not believing about yourself as Jesus see you?

4. From the position of the reason you’re stuck. What false image of your self are you trying to hold up?

5. What are two-three options to step out of the mud and walk away? Who could help you step out?

Time management a road to the life you want (part 1)

Posted on October 19, 2015October 19, 2015 by Matthew Laker

Personal time Management will help you enter, engage, and experience what you were created for.

As I journey with people, one of top tensions or challenges in people’s lives is related to how we spend our time. Many feel stressed out as they hack away at the “to do list” and responsibilities in life.

In my personal journey, and as I have walked with people, working harder is not going to help. Working smarter will help you move.

Try one of these suggestions and you just may start to see improvement. You could also work through each one step by step to steward the time you have.

1. What is important to you?

Take some time and answer this question.

2. Prioritize your work.

Let’s start right now. Break your day down into three phases. Copy the table below into a document or write it down somewhere.

What are the have-to’s in each of those slots? Fill it in.

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Sat.	Sun.
Morning
Afternoon
Night

You may need to create a work table and a home life table. When at work, what are the priorities on Monday morning? What is a reasonable expectation of the tasks you can complete?

3. To do list for the day.

Organize that list into a first priority, and second and so on. What can wait and are ongoing projects? As you approach the day this will help you know what needs to be done. Put your to-do list into your calendar. Actually schedule each hour.

Example: At 2:00, I will work on such and such a task.

4. Focus on one project and finish it.

You will increase your effectiveness if you can focus longer on one project:

“multitasking may seem efficient on the surface but may actually take more time in the end and involve more error. Meyer has said that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.” (Joshua Rubinstein, PhD, Jeffrey Evans, PhD, and David Meyer, PhD, http://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx)

So finish one project.

Personal time Management will help you enter, engage, and experience what you were created for.

My Experience with Strength Finder 2.0

Posted on October 16, 2015October 12, 2015 by Matthew Laker

What are your strengths?

This is a question I have been asked in many different circles. What if success has more to do with focusing on your strengths? Often we focus on the areas in our life that are weakest .

During the Spring of 2015, I was entering into a season of re-evaluating and reviewing life. Then during the summer, I first heard about the book “Strength finder 2.0” by Tom Rath.

The first part shares about the background and value of learning your strengths. Then in the second part, the big idea is that “Strengths are a combination of your talents, knowledge, and skills.”

Tom Rath shares that we are six times as likely to be engaged in our jobs if we work out of our strengths.

Through the research at https://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/ they have created an assessment to help people discover their talents and turn those into strengths. They have 34 common themes.

They provide a code for you to take their assessment. When you take it, you have 20 seconds to answer the question. The reason for the speed is they are looking to identify your most intense natural responses. If you take the test they will share with you your top five strengths, based on their research. In the report they send you, you will also receive 10 best action steps you can take.

For teams this can be a useful tool as you look at how the different strengths interact. There is some advice in the book on working with people who have different strengths. The biggest take away from the book and assessment is the opportunity to pause and better understand yourself. This in turn can help you enter, experience and engage the life you were created for.

My Three take always:

1. Understanding my strengths can help give direction in my life.

2. The resource has allowed me to hit the pause button to look at who am I.

3. I am now asking: “How do I leverage these strengths for success?”

This fall (2015) I am still in the process of building off of the information I have been given. I found it a useful exercise to take the test. I hope to write more about this journey, so stay tuned.

———–

Here are my top five strengths and a summary of what each one means:

Harmony – People who are especially talented in the Harmony theme look for consensus. They don’t enjoy conflict; rather they seek areas of agreement.

Learner – People who are especially talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve . In particular, the process of learning, rather than outcome, excites them.

Responsibility – People who are especially talented in the responsibility theme take psychological ownership of what they say and what they will do. They are committed to stable values such as honesty and loyalty

Belief – People who are especially talented in the Belief theme have certain core values that are unchanging. Out of these values emerges a defined purpose for their life.

Connectedness – People who are especially talented in the Connectedness theme have faith in the links between all things. They believe there are few coincidences and that almost every event has a reason.