How to Protect Your Time and Gain Respect at Work as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

How can you gain more time AND respect at work?

In this episode you'll discover:

• One common thing leaders do which negatively impacts self-seteem over time
• How to earn respect from your colleagues (and yourself)
• What will likely happen if you say no to someone who asks to meet with you

Tune in to this seven minute episode to learn how to reclaim your time while also gaining respect from yourself and others.

WHAT IS YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE? QUIZ

Want to know how to lead better?  It starts by understanding your leadership style.   To find out yours, take my free quiz “What Is Your Leadership Style” - you’ll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.  Just click on the link fill out your quiz and click submit.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Find out how to gain more respect from your colleagues and today's episode so you can get more done in today's episode.

Welcome to The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast, the podcast, helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout, and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace.

Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And today's quick, quote is by Confucius the Chinese philosopher. And he said: "respect yourself and others will respect you".

Now, this quote is related to the episode I did on Monday, which talked about if we want to gain more control over our time, we need to start by respecting our own time and how many times we schedule meetings with ourselves and then when someone comes to us and asks, if we are busy, we say no. And so, in other words, we schedule over our meetings with ourselves. And essentially we disrespect our own time and ourselves by default. So. If you haven't listened to that episode, I give a few tips on how to overcome that. I recommend you go back and listen to it. But this is just to reinforce the idea that the only person who's going to teach others how to respect you is yourself.

And you will do that by respecting yourself. Because when you respect yourself, you feel self-respect, then you will automatically start to project that to others and they will also give you respect back.

So I remember just an example of this really quickly when I was working in a certain country and my supervisor loved to have last minute meetings with not only me, but the entire team.

And basically this person would call us all into the room and would have spontaneous meetings that could have last one, two hours. And, you know, maybe in their eyes it was productive. But for me, I was thinking about all the other things that I was not doing because I was now in this meeting. And it happened quite frequently.

I already had something planned and it was usually a meeting with myself, a meeting where I was just doing focused work by myself. And so when they would come to me, I would be by myself. And so I would say, yes, I'm available. Even though I had already planned something or to work on something else. I was really afraid to say no, because this was my supervisor.

And I felt like, well, I am only meeting with myself. So, you know, I am kind of available. But one day I decided to set a boundary. I decided to say, I'm sorry, but I'm actually very busy right now. I can not meet. And I was so surprised that this person said, oh, okay, that's fine. We'll just have a meeting with everyone else. And what I realized in that moment was I was the one allowing this to happen. That it was my, compliance or my willingness to say yes that had created the situation where I was drawn into all these meetings.

And then I had to work long hours because I wasn't able to get everything done during the day. And so I started saying no, we're often. And an amazing thing happened. This person and others as well started respecting when I said no. And sometimes I think we think, uh, that something horrible will happen if we say no, but what would happen normally is they would just ask, well, when can you meet or when can you do this? And then I would tell them.

So I would reschedule what they wanted to schedule over my time with myself, my meeting with myself for another time. Time. So because I was respecting my own time, I was also treating others to respect my time. And they respected when I said no. So I want you to think about this.

And also because when we schedule over these meetings with ourselves, where we have focused time, we want to work on a report or something that requires, focused work and we schedule over that time when someone asks, are we available? We say, yes, we are. Even though we're not. And we basically disrespect ourselves. When we do that, we know we are disrespecting ourselves.

Even if you don't acknowledge it. Upfront over time, this will wear on you. It will wear on your own self-esteem and your own self-worth. And so. I encourage you to really start to be more intentional about respecting your own time when you have a meeting with yourself to try and keep it. And not that you're having meetings with yourself all day long, but when you have those kinds of meetings scheduled in your calendar and someone asks, if you're busy, you say, yes, I am. And guess what?

Probably they will just ask. Well, when are you not busy? And you can tell them when you're actually not busy. So try it this week. Respect your own time. And see what happens. Because it probably won't be as horrible as you think. All right, until next time, keep evolving bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do? Or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is the first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz "what is your leadership style?" You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will thank you for it!