3 Ways To Treat Your Overworking Addiction

Leadership can cause addictive behaviors. These addictions seem harmless but prove to be devastating to our influence and impact, not to mention our wellbeing. As I coach many leaders spanning different continents, I see these behaviors everywhere. In this post, I want to have an intervention and help you overcome these addictive behaviors that may be infiltrating your life without you even knowing.

Let’s tackle one of the most addictive behaviors:

Overworking 

The Symptoms:

When you keep telling yourself it’s just this project; it’s just this month, it’s just this phase, it’s just this season, again and again, you’re an overworking addict. You don’t know it, and you keep telling yourself you’re not, but…you are. 

The excuse you tell yourself is, “It’s not my choosing. I don’t want this!” But you do. If you really didn’t want it, you would take drastic steps to change it. I have some hard truth for you…if you really wanted to lose weight…you would. If you really wanted to save more money…you would. If you really wanted to clean the garage…you would. We do the things we really want to do without any excuse that gets in our way. Most likely you are a high achiever, which means, if you really wanted something, you would figure out a way to make it happen…period.

Overworking actual causes you to under perform. Your focus, energy, body, and quality of work can only take so much before it starts to break down. Without moments of rest and recovery you’ll lose yourself and your sharpness as you descend into burnout. You won’t know it though…it’s like the frog in the kettle of boiling water story. You’ll grow accustomed to your low levels and forget what it was like to operate in peak performance. You won’t recognize it, admit it, or feel it, but you’ll lose your edge over time and it will be noticed by everyone but you. 

So, how do we fix this addiction and overcome overworking?

The Detox:

There are 3 leadership pills you need to take to treat your addiction:

1) Prioritizationol

2) Delegationine

3) Boundriesipan

Prioritizationol

This is a fast working treatment that will cause you to prioritize your responsibilities. You can’t do it all, let me repeat that for those in the back of the room…YOU CAN’T DO IT ALL! I hope you heard that. I work with many organizations and have worked with many over the last twenty years in leadership coaching and everyone…I repeat…everyone I have worked with typically are trying to do way too much! Did you get that again…they are trying to do too much and it is causing stress, turnover, burnout, and distraction in the team.

Remember, when everything is a priority, nothing is. You have to make the main thing the main thing and keep focused on what matters most. Every little side project, one-off, small tasks, shiny object, new shower idea only makes everything move slower in the long run. You have to eliminate all the unnecessary or push it off till a later day when you can prioritize it or it will kill your productivity.

Prioritizing your schedule, projects, meetings, tasks, etc…is insanely hard, this is why most don’t do it well. If fact, you have to make time to prioritize your stuff or your stuff will prioritize you. Ben Franklin said, “For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.” Organize your stuff painstakingly. And give yourself and your team permission to do less. You have to think progressively not momentarily. Don’t let the your drive and ambition outrun your energy and wellbeing. Be patient as you play the long game of success.

Delegationine

The next pill you need to take in order to detox your leadership is a giant dose of delegation. Most leaders I work with are not good at this…or not as good as they think they are. Most likely I can almost guarantee you are holding on to things you need to delegate right now. You are telling yourself a few excuses for not delegating. Here are the most common:

• “No one can do it as good as me.”
• “My team is too overwhelmed as it is. I can’t give them more.”
• “I won’t have anything to do if I give all my stuff away.”
• “They are not ready to take on what I need to give them.”

Never stop growing your responsibility; instead, increase your delegation ability. The higher you go as a leader, the greater the need to be an amazing delegator. You can’t do it all, and great leaders know this. They don’t pretend to be superheroes; they learn how to delegate more effectively. Your leadership capacity is a direct result of your delegation strategy. Let me say that again…YOUR LEADERSHIP CAPACITY IS A DIRECT RESULT OF YOUR DELEGATION STRATEGY. You can only go as high as your willingness to let go. As my mentor Dr. John C. Maxwell, always taught me, you have to give up in order to go up. You need to make sure you have a delegation plan, knowing what the next 10% of your workload you will unload. As a bonus, always remember to do this (blog post I wrote on delegation) before delegating.

Boundriesipan

Draw lines around your day. Without clear boundaries, your day will never end. And your day must end for you to recover and rejuvenate. If you’re always available, you’ll never be sustainable. Too many leaders blur their boundary lines, causing them to drift off into an imbalanced life. Give your day hard starts and hard stops to keep from losing yourself. Draw lines around your limits, or you’ll limit your energy and focus. If you have no boundaries to your workload, you’ll literally get lost in a sea of work. There is only so much a person can do before they start to lose productivity, focus, energy, decision-making ability, fulfillment, etc…

The longer you work without boundaries the worse you actually become. Overworking backfires on you, causing underperformance. You think you are getting more done, but you start moving slower, making mistakes, making poor decisions, and it’s causing you more work. You have to manage your energy, not just your time. The only way to be in peak performance is to make sure you are living within the boundaries of what you should handle…did you get that? I didn’t write “what you could handle…” You could work 14 hour days and all through the weekend…there is nothing stopping you from doing that…but just because you could, NEVER means you should!  

I hope this is helpful to your leadership addiction of overworking. If you suffer from this, which you probably do to some extent…GET INTENTIONAL, GET OUT OF IT…AND GET HELP!