Invest Your Time In Your Strengths

Good morning everyone. Happy Monday. Does everybody love Mondays? If you don't answer that question, yes, I'm going to ask why. Sometimes we dread things because we don't know what's ahead or we have a perception of what's to come. My name is Jean Nichols. I'm excited to be here on Cadre listening to all of my peers posts and live broadcasts, as well as sharing insights with all of you. Today we're going to talk about investing your time and your strengths. And I started the conversation with the question, good morning, John.

I started the morning with the question, do you love Mondays? And I can't say that I always have loved Mondays. Hello, DJ Kirkby. Hi, Shannon. Hi, Alec. Mondays are something that if you are someone who has a winning mindset, who loves competition, a lot of times you're going to be the person that's going to bound out of Monday, bound out of bed on a Monday and be like, let's go get this. And not everybody is that way. And that's great. This isn't about whether or not we like Mondays. It really is about understanding what our natural strengths are and how we might invite them into our days more often.

So I'm a certified strengths coach. I'm actually certified in a variety of different personality inventories that I use as part of my coaching practice. Good morning, Anya. Good morning. Speak wonder. Happy Monday. And so when we're thinking about investing time in our strengths, if I say that out loud, and if you're on the live stream and you want to chat, tell me what you think investing in your strengths might mean to you. Ooh, junk food junkie. I love that. Good first Monday of March to you.

When I think about investing my time, it sounds silly when you think about work that way or you think about your daily activities that way. But in all honesty, we get 1440 minutes in a day. So whatever we choose to invest our time in, we want to know that we may or may not get something back. But how we're investing it is maybe making an impact. Maybe it's helping us to feel stronger so that we are more engaged with our families, our dogs, our hobbies, our job. So when I say investing time, and I'll say that a few times throughout this morning, it really is about finding intention with our work, finding intention with what we practice on.

Shannon, I love that you say focus on things that we can do well for a set amount of time. We might not be able to do all things wonderfully all the time. We might not find activities that we love to do every single day. Dogs, I'm with you. I'll make sure that mine comes on a future live stream as well. So when you think about how you're spending your time, it really is just doing a quick little analysis. I do this with my clients. I do this with myself. So if you were to draw a circle on a piece of paper here, and you put 100 at the top, 25 on the side, 50 and 75.

And if I were to ask you the question, if you look back on last week, what percentage of time did you spend excited by the activities that you were doing? Now? You could say all week, or you could just say at work or at home. So you can put whatever bumpers that you want to on it. But if I, Jean, put an arrow that took me to 80% of my time last week, I spent really excited by the work that I was doing. And it's not just about my energy level, how happy, chipper, joyful I am with what the activities are.

It's also about that feeling of, did I feel productive? Did I feel successful? Did I look forward to doing the activities that I had on my list on my work week? Did I feel engaged? Did I feel like I would want to do that again? There are many activities in our days and in our weeks that could take us up or down on the spectrum, and the goal isn't to ever get to 100%. I am a Pollyanna, but I also recognize that we aren't ever going to spend 100% of our time really excited by all the activities that we're doing.

However, if we can do a gauge on where we're at in our days and identify some things that we can actively do to shift the dial, if we know when we're feeling an 80% of our week or a day, feeling productive, engaged, excited by our work, versus 80% feeling drained, depleted, disengaged, frustrated. Physiologically, that will continue to make an impact with us. I love in here, the hardest thing to learn do is allowing time in the day for yourself. I couldn't agree with you more on that. So if you're thinking about an investment in time to reengage with yourself, to get yourself back to feeling balanced, how might we include in our percentage of our activities, activities that are going to help us do things for ourselves more?

So, if I look at this again, another exercise that I might do with a team or a team member is to say, list out all the activities. Now we know what percentage of time you're at. What are all the activities that you did. Now I say the word did specifically doing versus attending. Because when you think about an activity, it really is something that you are producing or doing. So sitting in meetings for an entire week, you might feel drained. Anybody might feel drained. But maybe there is some, some weeks where you are in meetings all week and you feel energized.

The questions might then be, were you leading the meeting? Were you learning something new? Did you feel like you met somebody at the meeting or at the event that allowed you to have future success? So if we break it down into little subdivisions and subcategories and ask ourselves, why was this exercise or this activity engaging for me, exciting for me, why was this one draining for me? It can start to help give you some data around how you might structure your days, how you might structure your weeks, how you might change your perspective on an activity based on something that does energize you.

I'll give you an example. I grew up working in corporate finance and technology, so I was the girl that loved to build and design business models to help people think about their business and their day differently and just simplify things. But a lot of my job was around entering information, running reports at month end. A lot of things that are very structured and consistent that were really draining to me. I did a personality inventory called the strengths finder, and I realized that I got a set of themes back that helped me to have the words to speak about why something excited me and why something didn't, and what I learned in working with a coach and going through that exercise and actually writing down activities and doing my own little map to see where am I at on the dial.

It helped me to learn that while I understand finance really well, my strengths, the exercises, the activities that I love to do, and I still get goosebumps when I think about it, is I love building and designing models so that I can positively impact people's lives. So once I understood that that was my sweet spot, I would negotiate with my manager at work to say, if I get my regular responsibilities done by x state, can I have more time to be a loaned resource for a different project that was launching a new technology that would help other areas of our business.

And so I started to really lean into that and understand that some of the things that I didn't like to do, I couldn't just get away from. But if I could change my perspective on what they were, they became a little bit less draining. Sometimes it was, if I get this done in ten minutes, I can go get a chai tea latte at the coffee shop, because at that time, we had one at the building that I worked in. So whatever it can take to help motivate you. I also learned that I'm really good at doing certain types of tasks early in the day.

Like, I'm really good at answering a bunch of questions early in the day. I'm really good at solving some small problems early in the day. So if I know that that's where my energy is early in the day, that I am the most tactical early in the day, so that I can be the most creative later in the day, I would start to design out some of my meetings that I could schedule, or I would start to do some of my own tasks based on kind of my energy grid, of how I could work throughout the day. And even just tiny little acknowledgements about that helped me to find time.

One where I could take a break and go for a walk, because I knew that I could be more creative when I move. So if I walk my dog at around eleven or 1130, that's about when I hit my wall, where I get too much thinking, too many meetings. And if I can religiously try to take even a 15 minutes walk with my dog, it allows me a sense of freshness, allows me to move energy through my body. And nobody, last time I checked, said that they were the most creative sitting at their desk in front of a computer.

There are a lot of studies. I actually took a masters on innovation and design thinking. Talk about that on a future development day. But if you can find that time of day where you can be the most creative, the most energized, and you can break it up into ways that you can insert activities where possible to trigger your brain, almost like a dopamine mush. And it's not the kind that you get from Instagram or social media, but the kind where you feel excited by what you do, if you can structure your days so that you can pocket that out a little more, you can start to take back of your time, and you can start to invest your time in a way that will allow you to be more productive, more engaged, more fun, more joyful in your day.

Now, again, I'm a Pollyanna, so I'm using some big Pollyanna type words. But it's not about the words. It's about how do we feel in our day? And over time, it can help us start to feel less stressed. It can start to help us redesign the pathways in our brain so that we can create new habits and patterns, and then we can communicate better we're not communicating as tense. Ideal world, right? So for today, I might invite you to just find one pocket of time that maybe you do this little exercise and then write down the activities that had you in your upper percentage of energy and the activities in your lower percentage.

Or maybe if you're like me and writing things down on a list is really hard, it's actually a very draining exercise for me. I might go for a walk and do a mental think about my day so I can try to put some ideas together that way. Do what feels good junk food junkie I also want to say in here that the feeling about each day choose three things to complete on my honey do list. It's an awesome feeling to see things being checked off each day. Exactly. So for people that are energized by making lists, checking boxes, feeling that forward progress, finding even the little things that you can do to invest your time so that you can get that dopamine rush of wow, today was a great day.

And it wasn't great because I was on a device. I had a dopamine rush because I leaned into my strengths today. So for me, Jean, if I'm going to ask you to do this, then I too am going to do the same. I actually time blocked about an hour this afternoon because I have realized that I love writing and I'm going to start posting some more blogs and I am doing 1 hour on Mondays in the afternoon as my time to listen to music, go to a coffee shop and just pull out my notebook, not my computer and just write so I can start to get that habit back again because I love paper and the tactileness of that.

So once again, my name is Jean. I'll be here every Monday at 1130 to bring some professional development insights to you and some tips and tricks. m. For some self care. So I can't wait to meet all of you. Feel free to chat in the comments. Any questions? Any ideas? Maybe as a follow up to something that you did for yourself to time box today and invest into yourself. I hope you have an amazing day and I'll see you soon.