Are you unrelentingly busy and often feeling overwhelmed with the pressures of work and life demands?
Is technology helping or adding to your feeling that it’s impossible to keep up? Are you frenetically busy or energetic and highly focused and productive?
I have been finding with e-mail, social networking, tele-classes and so many other means to stay connected and learn that it is hard to schedule things. I often “plan” some things “just in time” and “on the fly”.
How are you doing handling all of the pressures of life and work?
The Left-Versus Right-Brain Battle
Your ability to be productive and successful at home and work is closely tied to your ability to relax and think clearly. Only when you’re well organized and your mind is clear can you unleash your true creative potential.
Success depends on freeing up your mind to be more relaxed. But no one can relax when the time-oriented, linear left brain is nagging the free-flowing, creative right brain about impending tasks.
What’s needed is a trustworthy system to manage everything we must remember. The more we can download our to-do lists into a reliable system, the more brain space we free up. With a clear mind, you can think about other important items and enjoy greater productivity.
Brain Clutter
Many of us have experienced working in the “zone,” where creative processes flowed and we lost all sense of time. This happens when we use our right brain hemisphere. Right-brain thinking is essential for innovation. It functions like an artist, concerned only with the present moment.
In contrast, the left brain supplies logic and linear thinking; it’s concerned with time and numbers. It reminds us of tasks left undone, prior experiences we need to consider and future deadlines. It functions more like a banker than an artist.
Our government, schools and businesses prefer to operate in left-brain mode, with an emphasis on laws, rules, logic, accounting and calendars. But we cannot create novel solutions without our right brain’s creative powers.
Instead of allowing our minds to perform optimally, many of us fill our brains with daily life’s mundane details and rules. Worse, we spend endless hours repeating the tasks and projects we’re trying to juggle.
It’s far more effective to employ a reliable system to handle all of these routine details and clear our minds to creatively solve important challenges.
Instead of learning to do more, we must develop strategies to think more clearly and achieve greater relaxation to obviate stress. You cannot be creative if you’re constantly worrying about incomplete details and mind-numbing numbers.
You need a functional system to hold these details until the appropriate time, when you can systematically tick off as many tasks as possible to clear your mind again. Writing things down on a to-do list is a good first step, but it’s not enough.
Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a less stressed and more purposeful and productive leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.
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