Your Oxygen Mask First

1. Live an Amaz­ing Life

How good are you at enjoy­ing life in tan­dem with your achieve­ments in business?

You need to work on this if:

• You rate your cur­rent enjoy­ment of life less than nine out of ten.
• You would feel you had used your life well, if it end­ed today.
• You tend to use your pas­sion for work, and have lit­tle pas­sion left for the rest of your life.
• It’s not nor­mal for you to look for­ward to things in your life.
• You often find your­self think­ing or say­ing ​“woul­da, coul­da, shoulda.”

2. For­get Work-Life Balance

Do you ded­i­cate enough time and ener­gy for every­thing that mat­ters: your work, self and life?

You need to work on this if:

• Your life feels out of con­trol, or you feel guilty about not hav­ing ​‘work-life balance.’
• Life doesn’t feel like you thought it would at your lev­el of success.
• You don’t enjoy life out­side of work as much as you’d like.
• You rarely or nev­er take time just for your­self. Or if you do, you feel guilty about it.
• You’ve lost touch with peo­ple and caus­es out­side of work you care about.

3. Dou­ble Your Resilience

How good are you at mak­ing time for things that build and main­tain your resilience: Body, Mind and Spirit?

You need to work on this if:

• You con­tin­u­al­ly run out of ener­gy, feel tired, or get sick.
• You are not enjoy­ing the chal­lenges, or the wins, at work or in life.
• You reg­u­lar­ly allow oth­er people’s pri­or­i­ties to bump the activ­i­ties you want to do for your own wellness.
• You’ve stopped doing the activ­i­ties that bring you a feel­ing of reward and inspi­ra­tion. Maybe you don’t even know what they are anymore.
• You feel a need to escape from your work or life.

4. Invest in Your Sweet Spots

How good are you at spend­ing the vast major­i­ty of your time and ener­gy doing things you love, and are good at?

You need to work on this if:

• Most of your days feel like a strug­gle because you’re doing a slew of stuff you don’t enjoy.
• You don’t feel inspired to do the work that’s on your to-do list.
• There are impor­tant, high-val­ue tasks you intend to do every week that nev­er get done.
• There are aspects of your work that are mediocre, but you don’t have the ener­gy or desire to improve them.
• You gen­er­al­ly feel blah or drained at the end of day.

5. Lick Your Toads

How do you rate at mak­ing sure annoy­ing lit­tle things get done before they pile up?

You need to work on this if:

• Learn­ing about this top­ic makes you tense.
• It’s not unusu­al for to-dos to kick around for a month or more.
• Cer­tain lin­ger­ing to-dos cause you frus­tra­tion or anxiety.
• Peo­ple repeat­ed­ly ask you to fol­low through on cer­tain tasks.
• Peo­ple are notice­ably annoyed at your lack of fol­low through.

6. Deal with Your Emo­tion­al Junk

How good are you at not respond­ing irra­tional­ly or emo­tion­al­ly in tense situations?

You need to work on this if:

• You some­times back down from deci­sions you real­ly want to make.
• What oth­ers will think of you fac­tors too heav­i­ly into your decisions.
• You are some­times shocked or embar­rassed by your own behaviour.
• Your emo­tion­al reac­tions are some­times dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the issue at hand.

7. Man­age Your Men­tal Health

How skilled are you at man­ag­ing your men­tal health?

You need to work on this if:

• Your mind is out of con­trol. It stops you from feel­ing good or mak­ing good decisions.
• Past events stay with you and haunt you.
• You’re anx­ious or angry to the point it gets in the way of your life.
• Addic­tive behav­iour is a cop­ing mech­a­nism. The addic­tion increas­es over time.
• You’re stressed to the point of hurt­ing your performance.

8. Learn Like Your Life Depends on It

How do you rate as a life-long learner?

You need to work on this if:

• The ideas and insights you have are often based on expe­ri­ences from ten or more years ago.
• You have no for­mal learn­ing sched­uled in the next 12 months.
• You haven’t read a book since you fin­ished your for­mal edu­ca­tion, unless it was required.
• You haven’t learned about a com­plete­ly new top­ic in the last 12 months.
• Learn­ing is a sur­vival tactic.
• You acquire knowl­edge to han­dle cur­rent sit­u­a­tions, not to strate­gi­cal­ly pre­pare for the future.

9. Get Tough Feedback

How do you rate at get­ting hon­est opin­ions about your performance?

You need to work on this if:

• You won­der how effec­tive you are as a leader.
• You can’t name four peo­ple who reg­u­lar­ly give you uncom­fort­able, but valu­able, feedback.
• You haven’t sought opin­ions on your per­for­mance through a for­mal mech­a­nism (like a 360° review) in the past two years.
• You won­der what your board (or the per­son you report to) real­ly thinks of you.
• You haven’t received uncom­fort­able feed­back from your board (or the per­son you report to) in the past six months.

10. Make Your­self Useless

How good are you at build­ing a team so strong there’s not much you need to do?

You need to work on this if:

• Your team isn’t chock full of A‑players.
• You cling to one or more tox­ic A‑player’s because you think their results are worth the havoc.
• Any­one on your team is a C‑player.
• Your inter­view process con­sists of a series of 60- to 90-minute inter­views with clever or inter­est­ing questions.
• You hire peo­ple with­out test-dri­ving their talents.

11. Quadru­ple Your IQ

How effec­tive are you at lever­ag­ing opin­ions from experts, in busi­ness, and in life?

You need to work on this if:

• The full weight of every deci­sion rests sole­ly on your shoulders.
• You have doubts about major, upcom­ing strate­gic decisions.
• When you review the lists of self, work and life advi­sors, it’s clear you have impor­tant miss­ing links.
• When you get stuck on a deci­sion, you often don’t know whom to call. Or it doesn’t even occur to you to reach out to someone.
• You dis­like, don’t trust, or hes­i­tate to call your cur­rent advisors.

12. Stop Being Chief Prob­lem Solver

How skilled are you at help­ing peo­ple become strong inde­pen­dent leaders?

You need to work on this if:

• You are con­stant­ly bom­bard­ed with peo­ple ask­ing your opinion.
• Peo­ple ask you the same types of ques­tions repeatedly.
• You’re involved in many small- to medi­um-sized deci­sions because your team won’t make a move with­out you.
• You have a long list of unre­solved issues and open debates.
• You reg­u­lar­ly get stuck han­dling oth­er people’s problems.

13. Teach Peo­ple to Meet Your Standards

How skilled are you at gra­cious­ly get­ting peo­ple to meet your high standards?

You need to work on this if:

• You hes­i­tate to say what you real­ly want because you don’t want to seem demanding.
• You often accept results that are less than you expect.
• You fix things so they meet your standards.
• The same frus­tra­tions keep hap­pen­ing with the same people.
• You reg­u­lar­ly make do with less-than-ide­al situations.

14. Tack­le Tough Conversations

How skilled are you at quick­ly giv­ing tough feedback?

You need to work on this if:

• You say noth­ing when things go sideways.
• You explode when peo­ple anger or dis­ap­point you.
• You let lit­tle frus­tra­tions build up until you reach a break­ing point, then rash­ly fire someone.
• Peo­ple get defen­sive or emo­tion­al when you give feedback.

15. Love the Lessons

How good are you at see­ing the ben­e­fit in your biggest chal­lenges at work and in life?

You need to work on this if:

• You are gen­er­al­ly unaware (or in dis­be­lief) that 99% of your sto­ry about any chal­lenge is pure fabrication.
• You quite eas­i­ly get stuck in ​‘woe’ think­ing about past strug­gles, even though they prob­a­bly made you stronger.
• When a new strug­gle aris­es, your mind quick­ly starts to pro­duce thoughts of woe about how chal­leng­ing your life is, and how you wish things like this would not hap­pen to you.
• You don’t get your lessons. You keep fac­ing the same types of strug­gles repeatedly.
• When obsta­cles arise, you get stuck and don’t move for­ward for a long time.

16. Keep Going For It

How good are you at reg­u­lar­ly stretch­ing your per­son­al limits?

You need to work on this if:

• In the past six months, you haven’t once thought, ​‘How the heck am I going to make it out of this alive?!’
• In the past 12 months, you haven’t tried some­thing new and been a spec­tac­u­lar failure.
• If a chal­lenge makes you squea­mish, you’re like­ly to back down.
• You haven’t recent­ly felt like the least com­pe­tent per­son in a group.
• There is some­thing you would love to try if only some­one could teach you.

17. Plan, Plan, and Plan Again

How dis­ci­plined are you about plan­ning and reg­u­lar­ly re-plan­ning for work, self and life?

You need to work on this if:

• You cre­ate elab­o­rate, long-wind­ed plans that you infre­quent­ly reference.
• You aren’t con­sis­tent­ly achiev­ing the goals you envision.
• You get side-tracked by sud­den inspi­ra­tions and rogue projects that take you away from your true priorities.
• You con­sis­tent­ly over­achieve in one area of your life (prob­a­bly work) and feel you are sac­ri­fic­ing too much in oth­er areas.