13 Personality traits...and what you can do about it

I recently read a post titled, "13 Personality Traits That Can Keep You From Success".  Here is the list of traits that if left unchecked could keep you from being as successful as you would want to be:

The procrastinator

The privileged

The pessimist

The distracted

The loafer

The dreamer

The nonbeliever

The frightened

The analytical

The lazy

The visionless

The small-minded

The nonproducer

My next 12 blog posts will tackle each of these traits and what you can do to prevent them from bringing down your leadership.

The Procrastinator:  We all procrastinate.  If you think about it long enough, you can think of 10 different activities you avoid or put off for one reason or another.  It has to do with our biological and biochemical responses our brain has to identifying our most important needs for survival.  For example, you are sitting in your office beginning to eat your lunch when your brain is telling you, "keep eating...I'm hungry".  Until you begin to choke.  Now your biological urge to eat is sidetracked because you need oxygen.  Your brain is telling you to forget eating...even after you get your breath back.

So, how does this relate to leadership?  Once we identify our default behaviors, or understand why they occur, we can then begin to work at overcoming them.  Our brains tell us to avoid things that are difficult, challenging or life threatening.  Again, this is a biological defense mechanism.  So, if you avoid writing observation reports becuase they are difficult, you must overcome that behavior to avoid being the procrastinator you don't want to be.  

Procrastination occurs sometimes as an automatic mechanism to avoid certain actions.  We sometimes do it without even knowing we are doing it.  The point here is to recognize that we are procrastinating and change the behavior.

One way to avoid the automatic behavior associated with procrastination, is to make a "To Do List" or identify priorities each and every day, week and month.  Making something that you tend to avoid a priority, will reduce your inclination to procrastinate.  Good Luck.  Now it is back to writing observation reports.

Added:  1/7/15:  I recently read this article in the New Yorker:  

Getting Over Procrastination

By Maria Konnikova

 The following is a brief excerpt:

Steel’s recommendation borrows from the approach of the NYU psychologists Gabrielle Oettingen and Peter Gollwitzer, who study self-control and goal-setting: make your targets as small, immediate, and specific as possible. For instance, Steel uses timed ten-minute sessions to get started on tasks that he doesn’t quite want to do. “The problem with a goal we’re avoiding is that we’ve already built into our minds how awful it’s going to be,” he said. “So it’s like diving into a cold pool: the first few seconds are terrible, but soon it feels great.” So, set the goal of working on a task for a short time, and then reassess. Often, you’ll be able to stay on task once you’ve overcome that initial jump. “You don’t say, ‘I am going to write.’ You say, ‘I will complete four hundred words by two o’clock,’ ” Steel says. “The more specific, the more powerful. That’s what gets us going.”