FOCUS For My Team
If I want to FOCUS on creating peace in my life and want to help my customers/chocolate friends find their peace too, then I need to make sure my team is FOCUSed on the right things and can find their peace as well!
As the leader of my business and a team of 7+, my job is to set them up for success and create a culture where they uphold the same values to be faithful, grateful, humble, respectful, joyful, and honest.
I’ve heard author James Clear say, “We do not rise to the level of our goals, but fall to the level of our systems.”
Like all companies, we have goals for this year, but this quote made me further reflect on our systems, aka our routines within the business. Were they leading us in the direction of the vision of where I wanted us to go? A direction towards peace and in particular - mental, emotional, and spiritual peace?
I looked at our calendar year and knowing the ups and downs that comes with the holidays and the demand in different seasons for retail (+ the totally unknown to be ready for with the ongoing pandemic and constant changes), I thought about how I can keep everyone FOCUSed and healthy.
We have been very diligent about our physical health with temperature checks, hand-washing, sanitizing, staying masked up, spaced apart, testing, etc, but what about the mental and emotional toll this pandemic was putting on us? I knew that I’d have to look at the calendar and also space out time of excitement and new opportunities, time to reflect, learn, and grow, time to stretch and push ourselves to see what we’re made of, and time to rest.
Keeping a FOCUS on my team’s overall health and care for their own inner peace, I began to map out in our company planner these times to ensure they were going on vacations, scheduling “date time,” aka one on one time, “exercise time” aka walking meetings and TikTok dance practice, mentorship, professional development training, observational field trips, and just good old fun and bonding!
If it’s so hard to do this for ourselves, all the more we need to do it for the people we are leading and who are trusting us to care for them. Not just physically and financially with a job, paychecks, and benefits, but with the other important areas of health (mental, emotional, and spiritual) that will allow them to find their peace.
Yup, this will be ongoing, but I believe that the “work life balance” we are searching for is not simply 40 hours of work life and the other hours of personal life, but somehow a meaningful rhythm between the two. That the values in both your work and your personal life are aligned. That the goals may be different, but the FOCUS on the kind of people we want to be are the same. That there is a back and forth between the two rather than a sudden shift in who you are at home and who you are at work because they are opposite environments causing you to feel unbalanced.
We’re on this ongoing process for peace. It’s a process, but we want to grow along the journey and find moments of peace and joy along the way! Let’s do this team!