Tag Archives: Circle of Concern

Seven Habits – Day 8 – Life’s Circles

08 Wednesday Jul 2020

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Having concluded after yesterday’s entry that we have the capacity to choose our response in any given situation by using our self-awareness, creative imagination, independent will and conscience, the first and arguably most important choice to make about effectiveness is to ask ourselves “Where do I focus my thoughts and activities?” Covey’s first suggestion is that we look at life through two circles. They are the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence.

The Circle of Concern is all-encompassing. It contains anything and everything that is part of our lives. It includes social, political, environmental, psychological and any other ‘concerns’ that you know about. Right now that includes BLM, Cancel Culture, Brexit, green issues, ISIS, Donald Trump and any thing that makes you pause, think, worry, bemoan, support, decry – anywhere you might spend emotional effort.

The Circle of Influence is within that broader Circle and contains the things you can do something about. Which means for most of us it excludes a lot of the aforementioned list. We can be concerned about Donald Trump but unless we are US citizens and have a vote we can pontificate and worry all we like – won’t change a thing. However, within this Circle of Influence is your ability and willingness to do all the effective things – have greater relationships, use your initiative to solve problems, do an excellent job, act with patience, plan your work and your life.

Here is where you can ask, “What can I do about (this)?” and decide upon an actionable response. This is where you ask yourself whether the problem you are addressing is even solvable.

There are three kinds of problems. Direct Control, where you are able to affect any outcome because it is well within your Circle of Influence; Indirect Control, where you probably need others to assist with the challenge, can delegate or in respect of which you can seek help. If you like, things on the outer edge of your Circle of Influence. And No Control, where you can’t do anything about something in your Circle of Concern, where your proactive response is to smile and get on with something else.

You can’t really affect the size of the outer circle – it just ‘is’. But by focusing on the inner circle you can actually expand your influence – get better at your job and get promoted, become an authority on your profession, lead its development. By focusing on things outside your influence you waste valuable time and the inner circle effectively shrinks while you tweet mercilessly about a President you can’t vote in or out, or get emotionally upset about a statue that no-one cared about and that you walked past daily, and in blissful ignorance, until someone you never met pointed it out as racist.

Effective people ‘live’ in the Circle of Influence. They extend emotional and physical effort only towards the things that matter to them. They don’t get upset or even engage in debate about that which is of no consequence to them, and they don’t get caught up in the ‘if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’ dichotomous thinking that surrounds our world of 2020.

I have a line of thought that says, “I may not be an environmental activist but I’m glad there are people out there to whom I can delegate responsibility for saving the planet.” The same goes for many other protests, campaigns, etc. As long as they are peaceful and well-argued, we should encourage debate and appropriate activism. But don’t expect everyone to feel as strongly as you do about things that aren’t as important to them as they are to you.

It’s synergistic. While you are arguing for your cause, they are serving you by arguing for theirs, for working in an industry that serves you. They are in their Circle of Influence so that you can be in yours.

Tomorrow we go even deeper into proactivity.

Put your focus on focusing.

03 Friday Jan 2020

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Last October I wrote about the Circle of Influence, and in doing so I made a fleeting mention of the briefly identified but ne’er seen again ‘Circle of Focus’.

Just to recap, Covey had detailed the Circles of Concern (everything affecting our lives) and Influence (things upon which we can have an effect) in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In his later First Things First he and his co-authors went further and defined a further, inner Circle of Focus.

They defined it as ‘things we are concerned about, that are within our ability to influence, that are aligned with our mission and are timely.’

He went on: ‘When we operate within our Circle of Influence we do some good, but what we do may be at the expense of something better. When we set and achieve goals that are in our Centre of Focus, we maximise the use of our time and effort.’

The question arises, therefore – how much time do we spend administering, pandering, diverting, interrupting (and being interrupted) and time-wasting at the expense of the time we should spend within that focused centre?

Life gets in the way. Professionals who once had staff to assist with all those things now find they have to do their admin (etc.) themselves and so their focus has become blurred as a result. But that doesn’t mean we can abandon the Focus at the expense of the mundane. It just means we have to manage our selves better.

Now, what tends to happen is that we do whatever arises as it arises – an e-mail pings, someone pops by, the phone rings – and we redirect our (very important) focus away in their direction.

Stop it. Stop it now – or at least as much as the Gods of customer service allow.

A thing that pings or rings or is passing(s) should be given only appropriate attention, not undivided, immediate attention if you are to maximise your productivity and effectiveness.

I suggest that you do a couple of things which might help you do that.

  1. Ignore emails, and plan to deal with them at a time which suits your responsibilities – maybe at the start of the day, immediately after lunch or last thins as part of tomorrow’s planning.
  2. Shut your office door if you can. People won’t interrupt if they can’t see you. Honest.
  3. Turn your smartphone off if you want uninterrupted time.
  4. Block time out for uninterrupted, focused thinking/doing time in your planning system Or, put another way, make an appointment with yourself and keep it inviolable.

While Covey and his associated training company never again seemed to refer to the Circle of Focus after the 1994 publication of First Things First’ I find that the concept of the Circle of Focus (like the short chapter on The Three Resolutions in ‘Principle Centred Leadership’) is one of the most profound time management concepts I’ve ever known.

Try it at work, if possible.

Set time aside for the most important stuff, the stuff which, if focused upon 100%, will provide the maximum bang for buck you can achieve.

Then try this at home……………………

All my life’s a Circle.

25 Friday Oct 2019

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I have taken to wearing a little badge. Here is a picture:

untitled

I have been asked if it is an RAF roundel, since I served in the RAF Police.

No.

The original badge is actually supposed to represent the Mod music genre, but that is not why I wear it, either.

I wear it because it represents (to me) one of Stephen Covey’s primary philosophies, that of the Circles of Concern and Influence.

(“But wait! There are three circles,” I hear you observe. Read more.)

In the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey wrote of two circles. An outer circle, called the Circle of Concern, which contains all those things we concern ourselves with, but don’t, won’t or can’t do anything about. Environment, politics, international treaties (!), gravity, and so on. They affect us, but we accept we can’t influence them. I’ll call that the Blue Circle.

There was then an inner circle (here, it is white) called the Circle of Influence, which contained all those things that matter to us about which we can do something. Our work, our families, our goals, and so on.

In the Seven Habits book Covey stopped there, but in his later book, First Things First, he and his co-authors introduced a further, inner circle called the Circle of Focus, which is where we spent as much of our time as we could if we were to succeed in getting the results in the Circle of Influence that we wished to achieve.

It was never again mentioned, oddly, and I don’t know why. But I still recognise it, and in m’badge it is the red bit in the middle. I want to spend my time there, achieving my goals and not, ultimately, wasting time on the things outside my Circle of Influence.

Cue controversial bit.

Two days ago, 39 bodies were found in a trailer in Essex. At that time they were believed to be illegal immigrants (refugees, economic migrants or others). In Parliament that same day, the Prime Minister said his ‘thoughts and prayers’ were with their families, who at that stage he didn’t and couldn’t have known, and I cringed, as I often do, at the expression ‘thoughts and prayers’, which to me now represent a meaningless cliché trotted out when, in truth, we don’t really care – but have to pretend we do if we don’t want to be criticised for a failure to be actively compassionate. (And knowing that some who trot it out are atheists makes it even worse.)

That’s not to say it isn’t a tragedy, horrific, a poor reflection of the fact that organised crime takes advantage of people. That’s a fact. But I find it hard to care about that fact.

Please – don’t consider me heartless. I shed a tear whenever I see programmes about those who died fighting in wars, and when I was recently with friends at the Mennen Gate in Ypres when the (daily) Last Post was played I had to hold it in. And having loved my father, Mike and the Mechanics song ‘In the Living Years’ is a killer (even though I never left anything unsaid). But I have an emotional, professional link to those who served, and to my family. Their loss means something to me. I have no such link to dead Chinese in Essex.

There are people out there who do hold responsibility for keeping immigrants safe, and I delegate my ‘concern’ to them. I am grateful they are there, doing what they do so selflessly, so that I can focus on ‘my’ Circle of Influence.

Unfortunately, in our world of immediate news, with graphic pictures and an endless stream of people who want us all to care about what they care about, we have started to forget that if we start to care about things too much, we get anxious and depressed about them when, and precisely because, they are outside our Circle of Influence – we can’t do anything about it except ‘raise awareness’ (ugh) or give money to charity.

So, with a sincere heart and clear conscience, I say this – put your heart and soul into everything in your Circle of Influence that serves you, your family, your workmates and the wider community. Do what you can about what you truly care about. Do it well.

But don’t get caught up in ‘circle of concern’ societal mourning, virtue-signalling, false grief and ‘thoughts and prayers’ – if you want to stay happy and focused.

 

Why are you distressing your friends?

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

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I’ve recently found that well-motivated people do like to spread the word through social media about issues that they find disturbing. This is all too frequently done through the inclusion of a video of whatever it is that causes this emotional upheaval. Societally the convention is that this is considered a ‘good thing’ because (they say) it ‘raises awareness’. The awareness it has raised in me is annoyance. Why so?

Well, consider it like this. If something makes me angry, upsets me, or even worse distresses me – why on earth do I want to visually inflict it on my friends and cause them anger, upset or distress?

The news channels, the newspapers, the charities and so on already provide this information copiously. There is rarely a day goes by without some bead news being visually communicated to me, often by a charity justifiably seeking funds. In their defence they do so with more measured video snippets because they believe that distress should not be inflicted by accident. If something IS likely to distress, they warn us.

(Have you noticed the repeated charity adverts saying the ‘situation is getting worse’? If that’s so, the money already sent isn’t working, so why send more? OK, that’s a bit tongue in cheek, but Michael Sheen is starting to get on my pip. See also an interesting article on why Ethiopia continues to breed an ever-larger population while still having no food and water.)

Anyway, social media users – if you like me enough to consider me your friend, here’s a suggestion.

If you really feel strongly about an issue, provide a link instead of a video, and let me decide if I want to see it. Provide it so that it doesn’t automatically upload the video e.g. put a gap between the . and the com. Don’t force upsetting scenes on me. Start a conversation about it with me, and see if I engage. If I am interested, let’s talk – if not, let’s move on. Or just use a poster raising the issue, one that doesn’t anger, upset or distress people, but just raises that awareness.

PLUS – and here’s just a thought – please don’t try to involve me unless you intend to do more than just spread the word. If you want to actually DO something, DO IT! Otherwise you’re just pointing and saying, “Oooh, look what they did!”

And that’s the Daily Mail’s responsibility.

In the end, it’s simply a case of your Circle of Concern v my Circle of Influence. If one or neither of us is willing and/or able to do something about the issue other than just shout, let’s waste no further time on it.