Are you Making Deposits?

At any moment of any day you are doing one of two things — either increasing your energy or draining it. There is no in between. All activities do one or the other.

One reason people lose hope and hate their jobs is because they are making more withdraws than deposits. In the financial world, that’s called “overdraft” which leads to fees, despair, and eventually bankruptcy.

Here’s the thing: you control your deposits and withdraws.

Now, this isn’t true all the time. Sometimes you find yourself in a line of work where someone else tells you what to do, when, and where. But for most of us, we have just enough flexibility in our jobs to control what we do and in what order we do it.

That's where deposits come in.

The Difference-maker
What makes the difference between a deposit and a withdraw?

Strengths.

When you utilize your strengths you release energy, satisfaction, and happiness into your world which results in a deposit. When you work in your weakness, you drain your energy, resulting in less productivity and output and low morale.

It's important here to stop and clarify that a weakness is not something you're bad it. Rather, it's something you could be good at but that does not give you energy. By the way, many of us work jobs where we're paid to do things we're good at but hate doing.

The goal is to target strengths. And, the challenge is, most people don't know what their strengths are. I'm not talking StrengthsFinder 2.0 words...I'm talking your actual, articulated strengths, rooted in natural talent and ability.

The Announcement
To this end, we're launching a workshop on Friday, December 9th from 8:30am-12pm to help people discover what they do best and do more of it. More information can be found below:

Lead with Your Strengths Workshop (click here)

This would be a great professional development opportunity to discover your talents and connect with other like-minded leaders doing the very same thing.

Still Hope
If you can't make it to the workshop, there's still hope. It starts with tracking your energy and identifying the activities that fill your bucket and those that drain your soul. Do more of the former and less of the latter and you'll be well on your way.

Lastly, be careful not to characterize a whole activity as a deposit or withdraw. Lesson planning, for example, is not inherently a withdraw. The way you go about lesson planning may be a withdraw be there are likely other ways to do it that might release more energy.

And, of course, if you need help hit me up at dustin@proofleadership.com

See you at the workshop!