The Mistake of Mundane

How many times have you told yourself that I love challenges? You do this to motivate yourself and to set yourself up for the long haul. And then, the game begins. You accumulate intelligence, knowledge, information, and degrees. You get faster, you become smarter, and you multitask. You believe that you have risen above the ordinary. After all these efforts and the powers bestowed upon you, how can you be doing mundane activities? Right? You would feel underutilised!

Also, the mundane is boring. Meeting the same people every day, having those boring conversations about their work, their life, their temperaments, their moods, their results, and then trying to make them see reason to remain motivated and happy. After all, how long can you continue to do this? All this starts to numb your intelligence. It leaves you dissatisfied. Right?

While you love looking at your bank statements (especially the Credit entries), looking at the Receivables and Payables report is so mundane. You wish someone else would do this and only show you the money coming in (and hide the Debit entries).

You want your customers to continue ordering from you and want them to give you referrals, but talking to them and listening to their stupid rantings is so dull and mundane! Yes, you want their money, but you do not want to waste your precious time on mediocre matters like customer relationships. Instead, you would hire people to listen to those idiots, but you are not willing to invest your time in mundane tasks like connecting with them regularly.

You certainly want high productivity and efficiency, but how can YOU - the most intelligent and precious resource in your business, be wasting time in meeting your team members, assessing process flaws, understanding why they find it difficult to follow instructions, and motivating them? After all, how long should YOU continue to do it? You instead brush it aside and hope it would just correct itself. Or you feel that it needs to be handled by someone else, since it is way below your level, and your time is much more precious.

Everyone is desperate to get out of the routine. You want your work to be on autopilot while you prance around like a busy prince (or princess), leaving the mundane people to carry out the mundane chores.

I am sorry to break your delusion. The mass lies in the mundane. That is where your intelligence needs to be put to use. That is how you create succession and leadership.

After reading mistakes number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, you must have realised that you and your ideas are the real obstacles. Your perception of particular activities as mundane and boring and some others as intelligent and strategic is the next BIG mistake you make in your journey of Scaling up Joyfully.

You will never be consistent with what you consider beneath you. You will do it for as long as you have to, but only to give it up at the first possible opportunity. This makes you inconsistent and ineffective at things that actually build your organisation.

It is tough to accept Inconsistency. In your mind, you are a consistent person. You tell yourself stories about your busy schedule and unexpected priorities keep you from doing mundane things, which you genuinely want to do.

Paul decided to meet his sales team each week. A timeslot was fixed, and weekly calendar invites were sent out. However, after a few initial successful meetings, things started to fizzle out. He slowly got busy with other more important things and started postponing the sales meetings. Whenever he would meet, he noticed that he was not getting the desired results. Consequently, most sessions were spent with him ranting and complaining about the poor results. As the outcomes annoyed him, he slowly started avoiding these meetings. He was convinced that his sales team was no good. He started discussing the matter with his HR team to look for "more committed" people.

This is a classic case of Inconsistency. What could Paul have done differently? For starters, before committing to meet his sales team weekly, he could have ensured that he would live up to his time commitment.

Making decisions in your mind never produces results. It only produces stress. One has to act upon the decisions to execute them successfully.

To resolve Inconsistency, you need to identify its nature and get to its root causes. Let us examine the most common factors that make us Inconsistent, and look at Six Hacks to Becoming Consistent:

1. Manage your Calendar

Most complicated things have simple solutions.

Treat the commitments you make to yourself as seriously as the commitments you make to your closest people. Are you the most important person in your Life?

2. Don't be a Hero! Learn to Collaborate

Another simple solution to avoid Inconsistency is to manage Crisis by collaborating. While the adrenaline rush you experience by resolving crises singlehandedly is high, it also leaves you fatigued. Deal with your inner temptation of projecting yourself as the messiah in demanding situations. Learn to work in teams and with people.

3. Space out your Day

People tend to stuff their day with too many commitments. Their plans do not leave any scope of downtime or free time. Leaving a little buffer for thinking, concluding, making notes, etc., after or before meetings is essential. I have seen people who are in a hurry to pack more and more into their day. They even forget to keep time for things like meals and washroom breaks.

4. Do not Overestimate your Capabilities

This is an aspect of our inner self where you tend to overestimate your capabilities and think that you will accomplish more in less time. You have a delusion that you are extraordinary and super-efficient – while in reality, you might be a compulsive perfectionist.

5. Expect According to the Real Capabilities of your People

The fact that people might not be able to do as much as you think or expect from them is not accounted for. As a result, poor and shoddy outcomes hit them. They become stressed, and slowly but surely, Inconsistency starts creeping in.

6. Don't be too Tough on Yourself

There are those who resolve to no longer remain Inconsistent. They start becoming strict with themselves, and through the use of Strong Will Power and Determination, they try to discipline themselves. Well, it works at first, giving them results in a few instances. But then, this becomes their success mantra.

They become tough on everything. They start living with the belief that everything can be done using this approach. This mistake usually proves fatal. No one likes to be roughed up all the time by someone. Now, if that someone is you, you want to escape yourself. You then become Inconsistent by falling out with 'yourself'.

Consistency Comes with Consciousness

Consistency is an outcome of Consciousness. Within you, your Consciousness always knows what is right and what needs to be done. The 'unconsciousness' makes you do weird things first and then gets busy covering up those acts with denial or rationale.

When you start operating out of your Consciousness, you become consistent without being tough on yourself, without having to discipline yourself, without having to wield your Will Power, without playing any tricks or offering any treats to the little devil called Unconscious.

Is this possible? If you have a doubt, look around. Everything in this creation is consistent. Where is the Inconsistency but in your own mind?