Can You Choose the Wrong Performance Area?
Answer: Yes!
People choose the wrong performance area for a variety of reasons. One of the most common mistakes is choosing a focus that is not aligned with your values. This can affect motivation and a lack of satisfaction in performance. For example, someone may highly value creativity but chooses a job that stifles creativity. It seems all too often that I hear stories of people who are at the pinnacle of their performance area, and they realize that they were chasing the wrong value the whole time. This leaves them unhappy and unfulfilled.
How to Choose your Performance Areas?
Answer: Live according to your values
It is important that in choosing your performance areas, you understand what you value. Essentially, you are starting with the why. It is better to slow down and spend some intentional time to really explore what it is that you want and why, before jumping into a goal. The selection of your performance areas in your life is important because this selection turns into time, energy, and resources. When you make an intentional choice to focus in on a certain area, you may naturally see a drift in other areas. There are various tools to explore your values and one tool is a Value Sort. This tool can help you to identify the areas that you value most, so that you can choose performance areas that align with these values.
What if you Already Chose the Wrong Performance Area?
Answer: Change or Don’t Change
I understand that this answer is over-simplified and just changing an area that you have already spent time, energy, and resources may not be that simple. With any direction in life, we have a choice to continue in a direction or change that direction. Choosing to continue in a direction can be the decision that may seem best, just understand that with that choice, also will need to come to an acceptance of what comes with that decision. Another option is to change. This may involve an entire change in direction or a small shift in what was being done before. Just know that nothing changes without something changing.
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