Author Todd Henry talks a lot about the importance of what he calls a “bliss station”, a place or zone that you designate to be completely void of outside inundation and influence. In your bliss station, you take care of the true stuff of life: planning, vision casting, tapping into your core, etc. It is a place that fosters creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, and real character development. It is the place where you stop being the task-oriented, frantic doer of deeds and take time to be the visionary, character-focused leader you want to be down the road.
Failing to find a bliss station—and the time to go there—rarely results in catastrophe. We can live our whole lives without ever really taking time to focus on our inner well-being and mindfulness. We can make great money being blindly active. The price we pay for neglecting this part of our development as humans is not often the lost of something we have but rather the loss of unseen opportunity, the diminishing of legacies we might have built, the futures that don’t materialize.
When Stephen Covey talks about time management, he talks a lot about the four quadrants of activities people spend time on: urgent and important, urgent but not important, not urgent but important, and not urgent and not important. Without explaining in too much detail, the point Covey makes is that most professionals’ time is dominated by urgent tasks, first by that which is important and then by that which is not important but still urgent. Basically, outside events and circumstances dictate what we do on a day-to-day basis.
The most important use of time, though, is that which is important but not urgent. Life planning is rarely urgent. Vision casting is never urgent. The stuff in this quadrant has no timetable because it is all deeply tied to our big picture for who we want to be and what we want to leave behind. At any given moment, spending time on this can always be rationally traded for that which is urgent and important. As a result, many of us never really spend time on this vital activity.
If you take these two concepts together—the idea that we need a dedicated space where we go to disconnect from everything to focus on the big picture and the idea that we should allocate time to truly plan our lives—you get a recipe for true awareness that can allow us to live with a unique sense of purpose and direction. These are vital characteristics for presenters because we are supposed to be the ones setting the tone for everyone else in the room. If we’re so caught up in day-to-day urgency that we never take time to step back and look at the long term and how today’s activities fit into the big picture, then what are we really offering the audience?
Anyone can spend 30 years running around like a chicken with its head cut off, moving from urgent task to urgent task. It takes no priorities or principles to just spin around fighting the next-closest fire, and you can be really talented at doing so. But as a presenter, you have a responsibility to have much greater perspective and wisdom than this. You have a responsibility to spend time thinking about the future, where the world is going, what the true and timeless principles are and how both you and the audience can take methodical steps to dictate what the future needs to be.
Question: Will you find a bliss station to do the real thinking and planning necessary to be a true leader?
