Tuesday, December 29, 2009

What’s Your Formula For Success?

For many people, the reasons behind our success or failure in managing the day-to-day demands of life feel mysterious and difficult to understand. Not only are there the everyday challenges to contend with, but often we experience emergencies that require additional energy to address. When you take these demands and consider the added dimension of our goals and aspirations for the future, it can feel overwhelming to find a path forward.

When coaching a person or consulting with an organization that is having a hard time meeting the on-going demands of their circumstances, I invite them to make an honest assessment of their formula for success. Borrowing from the psychologist and researcher Howard McClusky’s theory of margin, we can identify the fundamental variables that influence their success. If they are not achieving at the level they want, the simple formula indicates what changes could be made to improve results and create greater satisfaction.

The formula looks something like this: LOAD/POWER = MARGIN. Load represents the total internal self and external social demands that must be met in the course of living (i.e. family and career obligations as well as goals and personal expectations, etc.). Power is equivalent to the resources we have at our disposal to meet those demands (i.e. financial resources, time, supportive relationships, accumulated skills, resiliency, etc.). Margin is the excess of power at our disposal that can be utilized to meet both expected and unexpected challenges that arise.

Obviously, a person with a high margin of excess power is in a better position to successfully adjust to emergencies that arise, as well as to apply their surplus power to new areas of growth and development. When a person or organization’s load is much greater than the available reserve of power, the inverse margin can create tremendous stress and limited success. The question becomes how can we increase our power or decrease our load so that our margin for success grows?

After taking an inventory of all the factors pertaining to their load and power, I then ask the client to create a start doing and stop doing list. This list becomes a guide for selectively reducing the load factors and intentionally surrounding them with power factors to get their margin into better balance. The conversation could go something like this:

- Client: I have way too much on my plate right now to be successful at the things that matter most!

- Coach: Okay, let’s take a look at everything on your plate and prioritize your commitment to these things. This will give you the chance to let go of responsibilities that are negotiable.

- Client: Okay, as much as I would like to hold on to this, I guess I need to let go of activity x.

- Coach: Good, now that you’ve looked at the LOAD factors, let’s look at ways to shore up resources and increase your POWER. What available or easily acquired resources could we add to help you in your everyday experiences?

- Client: I never ask my colleagues for advice and they are much more experienced than me. Also, I forget that I have paid time off that I never take – maybe I should give myself some down time between big projects.

- Coach: Great, what else?

As this conversation progresses, ideally the MARGIN gets into a better balance and the client is now aware of a tool they can use to identify and improve their formula for success. Imagine what’s possible when you adjust your formula for greater success.

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