Welcome to the new manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here, and I hope you're doing well as we get started, I wanted to invite you to work with me one-on-one. You can go into the show notes and you'll find a link to schedule time on my calendar on, the consult will talk more about what's going on with you. The challenges you're facing and how I can help we work together for six months.
We meet every week and It is the most fun thing ever, and I'm saying that from two perspectives. One is when I was a manager, my manager had no time to Mentor me. She was just really busy and she thought, you know, you'll figure it out on your own and I did but it would have been really nice to have someone who was there. Just for me on my side that I could meet with every week and talk through. Okay, this is what's going on. This is how I'm thinking about it.
This is what I'm feeling worried about and have someone to be a thought partner for me just to help me see more clearly. What I, what I was going through because there were times when things just felt a little chaotic, and there wasn't really a roadmap and having a neutral party. Well, I say neutral in the sense that it's not a colleague.
So they're not going to have any In about me in the workplace and neutral in the sense that it's not friends and family because as much as friends and family love and support us and want us to do. Well they also have opinions. They have opinions about what's good for you or what you should do. And that's not always helpful and so having someone who's 100% On Your Side asking questions so that you can think through your own thinking and get your Our own Clarity and your own strategy.
And just have a thought, partner is really fun from the client side. And then for me as a coach, I love getting to work with my clients one-on-one because we take all of these Concepts and we get to connect them with the individual person, their personality, their story, their preferences, we really start to customize and fine-tune the concepts so that you can implement Them and apply them and make use of them in the most efficient way possible.
And it's a lot of fun because hey, there's no homework. I'm not going to make you read anything extra, it really is like you land in the space of coaching. We have time each week to get curious and unpack and unravel what's going on. And as we do that and you start to feel better, you say, oh okay, I think I know how I want to approach this. I see this in a new light. Oh, I hadn't thought of that before. Oh, that's a really interesting perspective.
Okay, ha. Now that you ask me, I can think of it this way and then you just go into the world. It's like coming in and getting like, a new prescription on your glasses. You just don't even realize how fuzzy your vision is and then when you get that little adjustment, even if it's really small, when you see things more clearly everything becomes easier.
And what we have is, we have six months, which means as the insights happen, you then have this nice long runway for implementation to make it study and sustainable. So it lasts, so that's coaching. That's why I love it from both sides of the coaching relationship. And if you want to work with me, what US meet and talk, that'll be a lot of fun. So the topic for today, Is about making good use of your time. And this topic is important in a
few different ways. If you've ever felt overwhelmed, that often happens when we feel, I have too many things to do, I don't know where to begin. I don't have enough time. I don't have time to learn the things. I don't know, I feel all this pressure. So when we're feeling overwhelmed, there's often a time element. And so thinking about Out how we make good, use of our time, can help to alleviate the feeling of overwhelm. It's also a great topic that
connects a bit with boundaries. So when we ask ourselves, what am I saying? Yes to and why what am I saying? No to and why, what are the agreements I have made with myself about how I make commitments. And what I give my time too Then that also comes into play. So if we don't have good boundaries, we end up
overextending ourselves. We end up not doing the most strategic useful work, but instead end up kind of blowing out our capacity working all of the hours burning ourselves out, not using our time in the best way. And then, you know, we often think of, why am I not using my
time? Well, and we think of Lots of external factors, maybe I don't have enough resources, or I don't have enough guidance, but there's a lot of internal factors that suck our time away to, and I'm thinking specifically of things like stress, anxiety, rumination. Like, if you're laying in bed, at the end of the day and your brain can't turn off, because you keep thinking about all the work you have to do, or you think. Ink about the conversation. You've been avoiding avoiding
conversations. Also ends up sucking out the time because it is exhausting number one. All the anxiety of I need to have this conversation. I don't want to because it will be uncomfortable. So, you know, I'll find something else that needs doing. And there's always something else that needs doing so when we're in that avoidance because of the discomfort, then whatever
is on the other side. Of that conversation whether it's a request or whether it's giving bad news or whether it's simply confronting a problem and saying, hey, we need to pause and address this all of that then gets delayed because we're not having that conversation. So how do we make good?
Use of our time? And here's the perspective that I want to share with you, I recently Was thinking about this in a very different way, than I normally do, and I found it to be kind of exciting and fun, so I'm glad I get to share it with you. Now, if you are a numbers person, you're going to love this. And if you want to take some notes to write this down and see it for yourself, then take a moment to get a pen and a piece of paper and here we go. So we're going to look at the
math of time for just a moment. We have 24 hours in the day. Let us assume that eight of those hours are sleeping hours, you know, more or less 8 hours. That means you have 16 hours. When you are doing a wake things, you have 16 hours of, wake time to do all of the living things that you do in your weakness. And some of those are work things, some of those are personal things, it's all of the things that happen when you are not asleep, when you are an awake human going through your day.
Now, those 16 hours, we have seven days in the week. So in the week, you have 112 hours of being awake. We have four weeks in the month, which means we have Eat waking hours a month. So on average, in any given month, you have four hundred and Forty-Eight Hours that you are allocating to all of your life. Things not the sleep stuff, but the work, the family, the eating, the brushing your teeth.
The could travel commute vacation time watching a movie All of the things that happen when you're awake, you have four hundred and Forty-Eight Hours for that in the course of the month. Now when you ask yourself, how am I making decisions about how I use that time? A lot of it is going to be from habit or routine. This is actually a good thing. This is a very energetically
efficient thing about the brain. So when you wake up in the morning, you don't have Spend a lot of energy thinking, oh, what happens next? You know, you probably get out of the bed, you have some kind of routine, maybe you go and make coffee, maybe you put on some exercise clothes and you work out, maybe you take some quiet time for your own personal reflection or maybe you hop out of bed at the last minute. No, brush your hair. Get on Zoom.
There you go. There's there are things that you just sort of do. And you don't really have to think about it. It's just, oh, this is what I do at this time and then you have things that you do, because you feel like you should And you have things that you do because they are agreements that you made, you know, with your kids or your partner, or your work or yourself, you know, there are things that you choose to do. So it is important than when we
think about what is behind the way I make decisions about how I use an allocate that time and this is where coaching comes back into this picture. So with my Science we meet once a week, that's just about four hours a month. And what that means for hours a month is less than one percent of your total waking hours, four hours out of four hundred. And Forty-Eight Hours is less than 1%.
Of all of the waking hours. And what's fantastic is that in, that less than 1%. That's where we have time to slow down. Pause, reflect and figure out how are you making decisions? What are you, avoiding? What are you spending your time on? How much of it is in reactive mode versus Proactive or responsive mode? How much of it is in strategic
thinking versus task execution? And when we start to build this in what it means is you spend less time in avoidance and stress and anxiety and wondering, like, am I doing it right? And, you know, just dealing with all of the emotion of it, it actually gives you a very steady place to come and kind of fine tune your thinking and get more clarity. So that as you go forward, you may Better use of your time. We interrupt some patterns we create new ones but it's all based on.
Let's arrive in the present moment. Take a look at what's going on. Look at where you want to be, what are the challenges you're facing and then how can we think through what the best approaches? So, let me share an example with you. I have a client and She was in the habit of responding to emails right away as soon as an email came in, she would open up the email read it and try to address it very quickly.
And her thinking at the time was, I don't want my inbox to grow with all these things and responding right away is a good thing. It is good to respond so I don't leave anybody waiting. And her thinking was I don't want to be the bottleneck, I don't want things to be waiting on me. So I want to respond immediately now the underlying idea makes a lot of sense and it comes from a really good place but the downside was that she was allowing every inbox, message to interrupt her.
And so she wasn't able to have uninterrupted time for deep thinking and force TJ thinking she was context switching frequently and so it just interrupted the quality of attention that she was able to give two tasks that required
more focused time. The other thing that happened was that, you know, people would realize, oh, I just need to email this person because she responds, right away, and she ended up creating a kind of dependency because She had essentially trained people that her behavior was. If you email me, I'll message you right away, and people would email her and it wasn't necessarily like a thoughtful email. It's hard to get a little bit, a little bit over dependent. Right?
And so, when we talked through this, you know, part of the work that we had to do together was understanding, what were the emotions and the stories that were driving her choices. And how could we honor her intention and her desire to A great team player. While also realizing that, you know what, maybe being immediately reactive to every message is actually not in service of the goals, she has
for her team. So the goal she has of helping them become less dependent on her, empowering them to make decisions and judgment calls. Also, her intention of being a leader who could take a more strategic View and have Time to think through strategy so she could then come back and communicate, clearly what that strategy is to her team. And also it had her starting to feel resentful. She started to feel resentful for all of the inbox messages and she wasn't holding boundaries around them.
And even though it was coming from this good place, I want to be really helpful. It ended up creating this resentment because the relationship too. Was not as functional as she wanted it to be.
And so if you've ever felt resentment, you know, it kind of burns like a little coal and it gets heavier and heavier and it can slip out and become snarky or passive aggressive, even if you don't mean to, but that emotion under there starts to kind of leak out through your behavior and it ends up creating other kinds of problems. So, instead, Said as we started to unpack and understand, okay, what is her behavior? What is it creating in terms of, you know, the reality of her
workday? What are the emotions that are coming up? What are the uncomfortable emotions that she might have to face in terms of having a difficult conversation or establishing work practices? It ended up being actually a very simple solution. We take an experimental approach. You know, we ask are you a person who has more focused energy in the morning, in the afternoon in the night, if you could choose for yourself on, would that be?
She said, oh my gosh, if I could just have like two hours in the morning, that would completely change everything. So then we thought, okay great. So let's design for that and let's try it out and see what happens. It's not about being right or wrong, it's about being present, it's about being intentional. It's about trying, Things.
And then getting the information from the reality of it rather than the rumination and the speculation, which honestly, your brain can do for years and it just exhaust. You ask me how I know I have been there. So once we started to understand you know, the situation that felt complex and outside of her control. She actually found a point of Leverage to make a change and it ended up being a very elegant solution. Ian that everyone was fine with. She just let everybody know.
Hey, I'm, you know, blocking this time on my calendar and I will respond to emails, you know, after this time, if it's super urgent, let me know otherwise, like let's talk about it later and giving herself that practice and feeling discomfort that making the choice anyway. From a place of this is going to be better for us and how we work together.
So it took some courage, it took a little bit of, uh, You're standing all of the emotions and facing the stories and seeing them clearly so that she could try something new and make a different choice that actually ended up working better for everyone. And you know what also is great is that been her team got to have a manager who wasn't feeling resentful about them. If you've ever had a manager and you thought I feel like they are maybe not really happy with me.
I feel like my manager is on edge all the time. Even your best intentions if you're feeling that resentment or that anxiety it's going to emerge. One of the things about us humans. We are so perceptive and we are very keenly tuned in to the emotional quality of those around us on a very subconscious level. Even if we don't understand it we can often sense when something is a little bit tense and it makes a huge difference. France and how we communicate,
how we work together. So that is what I wanted to share with you. This thought of making good use of your time of noticing, how do you make decisions about how you use your time and realizing that, when you pause to reflect to explore, you know what you're avoiding? Why you're making the decisions. You are what are any unresolved? Emotions or unprocessed emotions that you're carrying with you. The more you can face an address that the more energy you have
four things. You care about the better relationships and work practices. You can begin to establish with your team and then the less pressure you'll feel for yourself. So it's a win-win, everybody wins. All right, that is what I wanted to share with you today. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time. Hey, Or you go. If you like this podcast, please leave a review. Tell me why you listen and what has helped you? Thanks so much. I'll see you next time.