What’s your contextual word?
One word. What is one word to describe your 2016?
Mine is attention. What’s yours?
A contextual word allows you to focus your time, attention and energy into the people and projects that matter most to you. Could you and your team create a contextual word this year?
New Year’s resolutions don’t’ last. Contextual word focus does.
This year my contextual word is attention (it is also the name of my new book and the keynote I share as the opening keynote speaker at their events). My desire is to pay more attention at home, work, in my community. Wouldn’t it be neat if we all paid more attention to each other!
Here are a few ideas to help you and the team create a contextual word for this year:
Choose Big: Think of this word as a new decision filtering system for how you will invest your time and resources this year. We all know Credit Unions are about people helping people. What if your word was Delight? How could you delight every member who came into your branch? What if your word was Connect? How could you connect with younger members to bring them into your CU network and engage them in our community? What if your word was Produce? How could your team be more productive this year? Once you and the team decide on a word, determine how you will use it.
Choose ‘No’ – choosing to focus on your word might seem selfish to others (it’s not!) and it means you might have to say no to things more often. You might need to say no to people who want time that drains your energy, projects that sound fun but aren’t profitable, initialtives that won’t help you achieve your Credit Union’s goals. Remember, ‘No’ is a complete sentence!
Choose now – make a decision. Determine your focus. Write it down. Share it with your members and your team. Share it with other branches to accelerate accountability. Now go and implement it.
You don’t have time to everything, only time to do what matters.
Today choose people, projects and passions that are going to help you stay focused on your team’s contextual word and share with your word, we’d love to hear it. Let’s do this together.
