The Only Time Being Busy Leads To GREATER Impact as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

When is "busyness" okay and how can we create more of being good busy rather than bad busy?

In this episode, we explore how your perception of busyness can either fuel your inspiration or contribute to stress and burnout. We delve into the concept of “busy-ness” as a mindset and discuss how to shift your focus from unproductive tasks to those that bring real impact.

In this 9 minute episode you'll learn:

• How to transform feelings of overwhelm into motivation by prioritizing impactful tasks.
• The difference between "empty calorie" tasks and those that contribute to meaningful progress.
• Strategies to align your daily activities with your leadership goals and personal fulfillment.

Click the play button now to learn how to make your busy schedule work for you and boost your motivation!

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WHAT IS YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE?

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. Our quote today is "busy is only good if there is progress involved". And this is by an unknown source. So I think this quote really captures how being busy like we talked about on Monday is once again, not a feeling or a state or a fact, but an opinion about our situation. And in this case being busy is not always a bad thing.

So in the last episode we discussed how being busy can lead to stress or overwhelm and actually make us a less caring leader.

And I really recommend that you go back and listen to that one if you haven't already. But as stated by this quote, we can also be busy and actually feel motivated or excited or inspired depending on our perception of what busy is and the impact that we're having. So for example, Maybe you are really busy or in other words, you have a lot of things that you're working on, but you really enjoy the work.

For example, you're volunteering at a food shelter and maybe you're doing this long hours or you are helping to organize an event and it's taking a lot of time. And you know, that these things will lead to a greater impact. And so the feeling might be, instead of I'm busy and stressed and overwhelmed, the feeling could be something like excitement or motivation or inspiration.

And you may consider yourself busy, but because you see the impact you're creating. Because you enjoy the busy-ness and maybe even feel fulfilled by it. It has a different impact than the busy-ness, which is caused by the types of tasks that we were really more referring to on Monday around meetings and emails and all these things that we do, but they don't necessarily lead us anywhere.

And I think that when we see like this quote says, when we see the progress that we are making, or we can directly link the impact or the outcome of the work that we are doing to the work itself, it can feel a lot more motivational, a lot more inspirational, a lot more fulfilling.

In my six week course "becoming the modern humanitarian and development leader" one of the things we talk about is what is being productive and what is being busy? The way I like to frame it is. It's like when you choose to eat something. And you can choose to eat something, which has very low nutritional value or what I call empty calorie. And basically means that when you eat it, it doesn't do anything for you nutritionally.

It might fill you up a little bit, but it doesn't really help make an impact in terms of the health of your body. Where as if you eat high nutrition or high nurturing types of foods that will make an impact. It's the same thing the way we use our time. We can use our time and focus on empty calorie tasks, which lead us nowhere and just fill our time such as emails, meetings. These things that we choose to do but they don't necessarily lead us to an impact. These are the types of tasks, these empty calorie tasks, which lead us to stress and overwhelm. Whereas, if we focus more on the types of tasks that motivate us, that bring us joy that are nurturing to us, that we know we can see are going to make an impact such as developing our team, coaching our team. That comes with more of a feeling of fulfillment of joy, of inspiration.

So. Part of what can help you to become more focused on the tasks that create impact for you and are tasks that maybe will leave you busy, but feeling motivated and inspired. Is really prioritizing tasks that lead you to where you want to go. This is also why in my six week course "becoming the modern humanitarian development leader" we spend time on what is the leadership impact goal?

What's the impact you want to make as a leader? Because when we know that we have a better way of prioritizing our time. But also it could be something else. For example, what is the impact you want to make on the community and maybe prioritizing the types of tasks that will lead to that. Or what is the impact you want to make on your team or on the government or whatever it is.

But actively tracking or seeking the impact we want to make, visiting the communities to see the work that we're doing, the impact that it's making or noticing how your team is progressing. We are busy, helping them can be be busy, but in a inspirational way. In a motivating way and a good way. That fuels us toward positivity and forward drive, rather than dragging us back into stress and overwhelm.

So it is when we get lost in the busy-ness for being busy, these empty calorie tasks that we feel overwhelmed and less productive. But when we focus on our nurturing tasks or the tasks that make an impact and we know make us more productive. Those are the types of tasks that make busy-ness worth it.

How can you focus more on the types of tasks or activities which will lead to the most impact and focus less or do less of the types of tasks that just make you overwhelmed and don't lead you to the impact you want to make? Until then keep evolving. Bye for now.