Surviving your Serengeti: An ActiveRain Challenge
My interest was immediately captured when previewing the first two chapters of the book, Surviving your Serengeti: 7 Skills to Master Business and in Life, by Stefan Swanepoel coming out on March 1, 2011! I immediately recognized there was a wealth of inspiration and knowledge I would glean from this story. http://actvra.in/5xN
This story is a metaphor for the way we uniquely approach both our business and personal lives. In business, most realtors apply many of these survival skills to the challenges that occur. We must learn to endure and not give up until it's apparent that things are not going forward. It is to our benefit to master the survival skills of many of these animals presented in the book, yet we are all naturally born with certain gifts that make us who we are and contribute to our success or failure. The more we comprehend our strengths and weaknesses, the more we can focus on what we need to learn and how to better adapt to our changing environment. Whether it be a personal challenge, an evolving market or finalizing a particular transaction, we must learn to endure and maintain our fighting spirit.
I took the quiz to determine what animal I most closely represent, http://www.whatanimalami.com/ It was no surprise that I was identified as a Cheetah. I naturally strive to be highly professional, efficient and work to get things done in a short time with the highest quality and accuracy. I am blessed with a positive flow of business and strive to prioritize and accomplish every task with ease and proficiency. I have a heart to serve others. My clients are my top priority since I realize they are the foundation of my future business. I consider their satisfaction as paramount.
MY QUIZ RESULTS:
I AM THE EFFICIENT CHEETAH
Here are comments I received by regarding the qualities of a Cheetah.....
Similar to the cheetah, efficiency is all about finishing the job in the shortest possible time with a minimum of wasted energy and resources. If you are efficient, you will notice the following habits and qualities in yourself:
- You search for the most efficient way to achieve a goal without wasting energy by adapting to varying situations, responding to them and recognizing the factors that affect efficiency.
- You try to avoid excess consumption of resources by recognizing the personal limits that waste them.
- You schedule your day, prioritize every task, and keep those priorities by refining to-do lists frequently and adopting a policy of strict time management. You chunk or break your larger projects down into small, easier-to-manage steps.
- You are an effective time manager with the ability to evaluate and deal with those things that affect achieving the goal, such as self-generated interruptions.
- You maintain an orderly start up/shut down routine at the beginning and end of each day to help you remain focused and utilize peak times more efficiently
- You recognize that time is your most precious and yet most limited resource. You can't buy more of it, and therefore, how efficiently you use it shapes and affects your life.
MAXIMIZING THIS SKILL
Know you own limits; keep physically healthy and maintain a positive mental attitude. After all, the key to efficiency is to get the job or task successfully completed on time without putting a strain on the rest of your life
To accomplish this, you must constantly be on the lookout for "inefficiency" in the project, process or yourself by:
- Controlling personal sources of "friction," such as interruptions and distractions (email, texts, phone calls, web surfing, etc.),
- Continually focus on the process; doing the right thing at the right time.
- Perhaps most importantly, you must adopt a proactive attitude by taking the following actions:
- Avoid multi-tasking, and learn to say "no."
- Delegate tasks to others where appropriate.
- Look for ways to improve systems and processes - what people do and how they do it - and improve productivity by focusing on getting things done "right" and "well" instead of just getting them done "cheaply and quickly."
- Insure that resources - such as personnel and material - are being effectively utilized.
I look forward to purchasing this book when it comes out and gaining more insight and inspiration that I will use for personal and business.
