Take Responsibility

I just finished a book that may end up in my top five of all time books. The author is Henry Cloud and the name of the book is Necessary Endings. One of my goals this year is to be better at reading books and highlighting as much as possible so that I can go back and quickly look at the information that I felt was helpful. I originally bought the book in the kindle version, but before I was even done, I went on Amazon and bought the physical book. The book is obviously about things that you need to end in your life. It might be a job or a relationship. But it could also be that you need to end some part of something. Maybe I don’t need to sell my business, but I do need to get rid of a part of that business that just isn’t successful. That is the part that I keep focusing on. I don’t want to just end most of the things I have going on in my life. Overall, I think I am very happy. I do see lots of room for improvement when I choose to look though. Before I get into some examples, I must be able to look at myself and know I am responsible for how happy I am. I am responsible for looking at everything I have going on in my life and changing or ending what I feel isn’t working. It’s easy to blame someone else, but at the end of the day, I need to be the one who decides that I am not getting what I need from something, so I need to end it.

The hardest ending that needs to be discussed is relationships. I have too many people in my life that drain me. I have too many people in my life that have no problem taking from my cup on a daily or even hourly basis, but they never put anything back. Usually, I am ok with being the person who checks in on people and makes sure that everything is ok. I don’t have an issue with being the person who does things the majority of the time. But I do need something back at some point. The people in my life who are draining me, I need to reduce my time with. Sometimes you must admit that the people around you have some bad traits that are influencing you. If you want to stop having those traits, you need to reduce the time you spend with them.

Work endings are a little bit harder for me. If you own a business, it would be easier to make some of these decisions. But if you don’t own the business, how can you decide what to end? How do you know what to end?  If I am not the person who is able to make the decision on ending a certain part of the business, I have to be able to make decisions on what habits I have that I want to end. Right now, I am very inconsistent at looking at certain numbers that I feel are important. I want to be able to look at numbers and make adjustments if I need to. It’s a little embarrassing to actually type that out. I am slow on making adjustments. If this was school, I would make myself write that out on the chalkboard 250 times. I want to see numbers and make adjustments. So why am I so inconsistent at looking at numbers? One thing mentioned in the book that I really loved was that he mentioned that there becomes a point when you stop talking. What he meant was that if you have a low performer and you have talked to them multiple times about their performance, the time is now over to talk about it. Now is the time to make clear expectations and let them know that if they do not meet those expectations, consequences will happen. When I read that, it felt like those conversations with those people should last about three minutes. Instead, I let them take up more like thirty minutes or more. I need to take responsibility that those conversations are less than five minutes. Can you imagine if someone came to you and said that they had a timer going every time you talked with a certain person. Is it possible that you have wasted forty hours in a year or two just talking to the same person about behavior. I heard someone mention the other day that one week is about two percent of the year. If you calculate time off in there, I wonder if it’s more like three percent. How would it feel if you knew that you spend around five percent of your whole entire year just talking to one person about how bad their performance is?

We all have some things in our lives that we need to end. Maybe it’s a relationship or maybe it’s just a behavior of some kind, either way, it’s time to end it. Right now, we have too many things that are holding us back from being who we want to be. A long time ago all of us were game changers. We made the rules, we set the tone, now that so much time has passed, we have let more negativity in. We have let bad habits settle in. Today is the day that we decide to be responsible and end those things.