Hi, I’m John Drury. I help professional business leaders achieve what’s important without losing what’s essential.
I want to focus on relationships today, especially, our close relationships with our partner, our children, our parents, our wider family and close friends.
The challenge is that the “busyness of every day” can undermine and erode away the time for these important relationships in our world. We don’t get as much time as we would like to invest in them and make sure they’re strong and they’re being nurtured.
The challenge with that is that if we take them for granted, they can be undermined and we can lose ground in our key relationships. No one ever got married planning to get divorced and no one ever
really wants a big rift in their family but it’s easy to fall out of step with one another if we don’t have the time or make the time to invest in these key relationships. I know no one on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I spent more time at the office.”
It’s amazing our work seems to rise up and fill all the time that’s available. It’s easier to switch off all the other things in our life than it is to switch off at work, so we need a strategy. We need some keys to help us understand and make sure we do invest time in these key relationships.
First thing I’ve noticed, as I look back on my life, is there’s seasons in life and it’s important to know which season you’re in. When you’ve got young children, you need to be fully invested with your partner and with your children. If you put in that time and effort and energy when the kids are young, it pays dividends later on, believe me. And then as you get older and your children get older, there’s different dynamics in the family and they have their own lives that they start to move in and you’ve got to work hard to make sure you keep a relationship with teenage children and young adult children.
Then as your parents age and need you more, that’s a different season again. Both my parents passed away in the last five years and for the last five years of their life, they needed me and needed my sisters a whole lot more and we spent a lot more time. I was seeing my mom and dad every week or more than that, several times a week sometimes as they needed me.
So it’s important to know firstly what season you’re in and prioritize according to that, not be selfish but make sure that you’re putting into the key relationships for that season. And then secondly, I’d really challenge you to work hard on learning how to focus on what’s important in your business. What are the key things you must do in your business that only you can do? And how can you absolutely maximize your efforts so that you perform those tasks in the shortest time possible?
If you don’t end up late at night doing tasks that somebody else could be doing but you really streamline your business, and get some help to make sure you’re doing things as efficiently as possible so you’re making as much money as possible but then you have as much time available to invest in your key relationships. It’s so important we keep learning and growing and don’t just meander along and end up spending hours and hours and hours wasting time effectively in our business.
In which relationships do you need to focus on in this current season of your life?
