Welcome to the new manager podcast.
I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome.
I'm glad you're here, and I hope you're doing well as we get
started, I wanted to invite you to work with me one-on-one.
You can go into the show notes and you'll find a link to
schedule time on my calendar on, the consult will talk more about
what's going on with you. The challenges you're facing and
how I can help we work together for six months.
We meet every week and It is the most fun thing ever, and I'm
saying that from two perspectives.
One is when I was a manager, my manager had no time to Mentor
me. She was just really busy and she
thought, you know, you'll figure it out on your own and I did but
it would have been really nice to have someone who was there.
Just for me on my side that I could meet with every week and
talk through. Okay, this is what's going on.
This is how I'm thinking about it.
This is what I'm feeling worried about and have someone to be a
thought partner for me just to help me see more clearly.
What I, what I was going through because there were times when
things just felt a little chaotic, and there wasn't really
a roadmap and having a neutral party.
Well, I say neutral in the sense that it's not a colleague.
So they're not going to have any In about me in the workplace and
neutral in the sense that it's not friends and family because
as much as friends and family love and support us and want us
to do. Well they also have opinions.
They have opinions about what's good for you or what you should
do. And that's not always helpful
and so having someone who's 100% On Your Side asking questions so
that you can think through your own thinking and get your Our
own Clarity and your own strategy.
And just have a thought, partner is really fun from the client
side. And then for me as a coach, I
love getting to work with my clients one-on-one because we
take all of these Concepts and we get to connect them with the
individual person, their personality, their story, their
preferences, we really start to customize and fine-tune the
concepts so that you can implement Them and apply them
and make use of them in the most efficient way possible.
And it's a lot of fun because hey, there's no homework.
I'm not going to make you read anything extra, it really is
like you land in the space of coaching.
We have time each week to get curious and unpack and unravel
what's going on. And as we do that and you start
to feel better, you say, oh okay, I think I know how I want
to approach this. I see this in a new light.
Oh, I hadn't thought of that before.
Oh, that's a really interesting perspective.
Okay, ha. Now that you ask me, I can think
of it this way and then you just go into the world.
It's like coming in and getting like, a new prescription on your
glasses. You just don't even realize how
fuzzy your vision is and then when you get that little
adjustment, even if it's really small, when you see things more
clearly everything becomes easier.
And what we have is, we have six months, which means as the
insights happen, you then have this nice long runway for
implementation to make it study and sustainable.
So it lasts, so that's coaching. That's why I love it from both
sides of the coaching relationship.
And if you want to work with me, what US meet and talk, that'll
be a lot of fun. So the topic for today, Is about
making good use of your time. And this topic is important in a
few different ways. If you've ever felt overwhelmed,
that often happens when we feel, I have too many things to do, I
don't know where to begin. I don't have enough time.
I don't have time to learn the things.
I don't know, I feel all this pressure.
So when we're feeling overwhelmed, there's often a
time element. And so thinking about Out how we
make good, use of our time, can help to alleviate the feeling of
overwhelm. It's also a great topic that
connects a bit with boundaries. So when we ask ourselves, what
am I saying? Yes to and why what am I saying?
No to and why, what are the agreements I have made with
myself about how I make commitments.
And what I give my time too Then that also comes into play.
So if we don't have good boundaries, we end up
overextending ourselves. We end up not doing the most
strategic useful work, but instead end up kind of blowing
out our capacity working all of the hours burning ourselves out,
not using our time in the best way.
And then, you know, we often think of, why am I not using my
time? Well, and we think of Lots of
external factors, maybe I don't have enough resources, or I
don't have enough guidance, but there's a lot of internal
factors that suck our time away to, and I'm thinking
specifically of things like stress, anxiety, rumination.
Like, if you're laying in bed, at the end of the day and your
brain can't turn off, because you keep thinking about all the
work you have to do, or you think.
Ink about the conversation. You've been avoiding avoiding
conversations. Also ends up sucking out the
time because it is exhausting number one.
All the anxiety of I need to have this conversation.
I don't want to because it will be uncomfortable.
So, you know, I'll find something else that needs doing.
And there's always something else that needs doing so when
we're in that avoidance because of the discomfort, then whatever
is on the other side. Of that conversation whether
it's a request or whether it's giving bad news or whether it's
simply confronting a problem and saying, hey, we need to pause
and address this all of that then gets delayed because we're
not having that conversation. So how do we make good?
Use of our time? And here's the perspective that
I want to share with you, I recently Was thinking about this
in a very different way, than I normally do, and I found it to
be kind of exciting and fun, so I'm glad I get to share it with
you. Now, if you are a numbers
person, you're going to love this.
And if you want to take some notes to write this down and see
it for yourself, then take a moment to get a pen and a piece
of paper and here we go. So we're going to look at the
math of time for just a moment. We have 24 hours in the day.
Let us assume that eight of those hours are sleeping hours,
you know, more or less 8 hours. That means you have 16 hours.
When you are doing a wake things, you have 16 hours of,
wake time to do all of the living things that you do in
your weakness. And some of those are work
things, some of those are personal things, it's all of the
things that happen when you are not asleep, when you are an
awake human going through your day.
Now, those 16 hours, we have seven days in the week.
So in the week, you have 112 hours of being awake.
We have four weeks in the month, which means we have Eat waking
hours a month. So on average, in any given
month, you have four hundred and Forty-Eight Hours that you are
allocating to all of your life. Things not the sleep stuff, but
the work, the family, the eating, the brushing your teeth.
The could travel commute vacation time watching a movie
All of the things that happen when you're awake, you have four
hundred and Forty-Eight Hours for that in the course of the
month. Now when you ask yourself, how
am I making decisions about how I use that time?
A lot of it is going to be from habit or routine.
This is actually a good thing. This is a very energetically
efficient thing about the brain. So when you wake up in the
morning, you don't have Spend a lot of energy thinking, oh, what
happens next? You know, you probably get out
of the bed, you have some kind of routine, maybe you go and
make coffee, maybe you put on some exercise clothes and you
work out, maybe you take some quiet time for your own personal
reflection or maybe you hop out of bed at the last minute.
No, brush your hair. Get on Zoom.
There you go. There's there are things that
you just sort of do. And you don't really have to
think about it. It's just, oh, this is what I do
at this time and then you have things that you do, because you
feel like you should And you have things that you do because
they are agreements that you made, you know, with your kids
or your partner, or your work or yourself, you know, there are
things that you choose to do. So it is important than when we
think about what is behind the way I make decisions about how I
use an allocate that time and this is where coaching comes
back into this picture. So with my Science we meet once
a week, that's just about four hours a month.
And what that means for hours a month is less than one percent
of your total waking hours, four hours out of four hundred.
And Forty-Eight Hours is less than 1%.
Of all of the waking hours. And what's fantastic is that in,
that less than 1%. That's where we have time to
slow down. Pause, reflect and figure out
how are you making decisions? What are you, avoiding?
What are you spending your time on?
How much of it is in reactive mode versus Proactive or
responsive mode? How much of it is in strategic
thinking versus task execution? And when we start to build this
in what it means is you spend less time in avoidance and
stress and anxiety and wondering, like, am I doing it
right? And, you know, just dealing with
all of the emotion of it, it actually gives you a very steady
place to come and kind of fine tune your thinking and get more
clarity. So that as you go forward, you
may Better use of your time. We interrupt some patterns we
create new ones but it's all based on.
Let's arrive in the present moment.
Take a look at what's going on. Look at where you want to be,
what are the challenges you're facing and then how can we think
through what the best approaches?
So, let me share an example with you.
I have a client and She was in the habit of responding to
emails right away as soon as an email came in, she would open up
the email read it and try to address it very quickly.
And her thinking at the time was, I don't want my inbox to
grow with all these things and responding right away is a good
thing. It is good to respond so I don't
leave anybody waiting. And her thinking was I don't
want to be the bottleneck, I don't want things to be waiting
on me. So I want to respond immediately
now the underlying idea makes a lot of sense and it comes from a
really good place but the downside was that she was
allowing every inbox, message to interrupt her.
And so she wasn't able to have uninterrupted time for deep
thinking and force TJ thinking she was context switching
frequently and so it just interrupted the quality of
attention that she was able to give two tasks that required
more focused time. The other thing that happened
was that, you know, people would realize, oh, I just need to
email this person because she responds, right away, and she
ended up creating a kind of dependency because She had
essentially trained people that her behavior was.
If you email me, I'll message you right away, and people would
email her and it wasn't necessarily like a thoughtful
email. It's hard to get a little bit, a
little bit over dependent. Right?
And so, when we talked through this, you know, part of the work
that we had to do together was understanding, what were the
emotions and the stories that were driving her choices.
And how could we honor her intention and her desire to A
great team player. While also realizing that, you
know what, maybe being immediately reactive to every
message is actually not in service of the goals, she has
for her team. So the goal she has of helping
them become less dependent on her, empowering them to make
decisions and judgment calls. Also, her intention of being a
leader who could take a more strategic View and have Time to
think through strategy so she could then come back and
communicate, clearly what that strategy is to her team.
And also it had her starting to feel resentful.
She started to feel resentful for all of the inbox messages
and she wasn't holding boundaries around them.
And even though it was coming from this good place, I want to
be really helpful. It ended up creating this
resentment because the relationship too.
Was not as functional as she wanted it to be.
And so if you've ever felt resentment, you know, it kind of
burns like a little coal and it gets heavier and heavier and it
can slip out and become snarky or passive aggressive, even if
you don't mean to, but that emotion under there starts to
kind of leak out through your behavior and it ends up creating
other kinds of problems. So, instead, Said as we started
to unpack and understand, okay, what is her behavior?
What is it creating in terms of, you know, the reality of her
workday? What are the emotions that are
coming up? What are the uncomfortable
emotions that she might have to face in terms of having a
difficult conversation or establishing work practices?
It ended up being actually a very simple solution.
We take an experimental approach.
You know, we ask are you a person who has more focused
energy in the morning, in the afternoon in the night, if you
could choose for yourself on, would that be?
She said, oh my gosh, if I could just have like two hours in the
morning, that would completely change everything.
So then we thought, okay great. So let's design for that and
let's try it out and see what happens.
It's not about being right or wrong, it's about being present,
it's about being intentional. It's about trying, Things.
And then getting the information from the reality of it rather
than the rumination and the speculation, which honestly,
your brain can do for years and it just exhaust.
You ask me how I know I have been there.
So once we started to understand you know, the situation that
felt complex and outside of her control.
She actually found a point of Leverage to make a change and it
ended up being a very elegant solution.
Ian that everyone was fine with. She just let everybody know.
Hey, I'm, you know, blocking this time on my calendar and I
will respond to emails, you know, after this time, if it's
super urgent, let me know otherwise, like let's talk about
it later and giving herself that practice and feeling discomfort
that making the choice anyway. From a place of this is going to
be better for us and how we work together.
So it took some courage, it took a little bit of, uh, You're
standing all of the emotions and facing the stories and seeing
them clearly so that she could try something new and make a
different choice that actually ended up working better for
everyone. And you know what also is great
is that been her team got to have a manager who wasn't
feeling resentful about them. If you've ever had a manager and
you thought I feel like they are maybe not really happy with me.
I feel like my manager is on edge all the time.
Even your best intentions if you're feeling that resentment
or that anxiety it's going to emerge.
One of the things about us humans.
We are so perceptive and we are very keenly tuned in to the
emotional quality of those around us on a very subconscious
level. Even if we don't understand it
we can often sense when something is a little bit tense
and it makes a huge difference. France and how we communicate,
how we work together. So that is what I wanted to
share with you. This thought of making good use
of your time of noticing, how do you make decisions about how you
use your time and realizing that, when you pause to reflect
to explore, you know what you're avoiding?
Why you're making the decisions. You are what are any unresolved?
Emotions or unprocessed emotions that you're carrying with you.
The more you can face an address that the more energy you have
four things. You care about the better
relationships and work practices.
You can begin to establish with your team and then the less
pressure you'll feel for yourself.
So it's a win-win, everybody wins.
All right, that is what I wanted to share with you today.
Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.
Hey, Or you go. If you like this podcast, please
leave a review. Tell me why you listen and what
has helped you? Thanks so much.
I'll see you next time.