Being More Effective

This week I learned about making effective decisions and making decisions that will help you be happy and successful versus making choices that will make you a lot of money.  Being a successful entrepreneur does not mean that we have to be at work all the time as we learn from Jeff Hawkins in “Effective Choices, Not Longer Days.”  We can choose to spend our time in whatever way we feel is the most effective.  We should also work “smarter not harder.”  I have found this to be true in my own work environment.  I recently moved into a position at work.  When I first learned how to do my daily tasks, they took me an hour of more each.  As I got to know each task better, I was able to find ways to simplify to task and drastically reduce the amount of time I spend on each one.  The same things that took me all day to complete I now get done in a few hours.  This has given me the opportunity to take on more roles and learn new skills at the company.  I learned how to do my job smarter, not harder.

This idea can be applied to my job when I become entrepreneur.  I should learn the intricacies of each job that needs to get done.  The more I learn about each task the better I will be able to streamline the task into its most effective execution.  I should not become complacent when I have increased the efficiency of a task but should always seek ways to improve.  This brings me back to one of my core values: education.

I also learned about my fears and acting to prevent them.  I have many fears as I am starting into a new career field.  My goal is to become a leader in the financial industry. I want to become a CFO or treasurer of a company and I find that I have many fears as I start down this path.  I completed an activity where we evaluate our fears and create action plans to avoid them, I realized many of my fears have to do with the perceptions other people have of me.  The best actions I can take to avoid these fears is to be proactive, and not become frozen by my fears.  If I am actively avoiding my fears, there is a high chance they will never manifest.  I also learned that I need to be doing more tow build my confidence in myself and my abilities, and to learn to worry less about the opinions of others.