What is blocking us from having a more meaningful life?!

What is blocking you from achieving the quality of life, both personally and professionally, that you desire? Did you already fail in sustaining your new year's resolutions for positive change? The majority of people who set resolutions have already given up on them by now. Many people don't even set them anymore. Change is difficult. Why give up on your dream when a way to really make it happen exists?

Do you want to learn how to more effectively achieve personal and professional growth? I share some insights in this blog, followed by more details in my upcoming one-hour webinar on February 13, 2016. Two main issues block our ability to create the life we desire.

First, each person or organization has a constraint, the factor which is most limiting the ability to achieve more of the goal. The constraint could be time, cash, management attention, market demand or not enough capacity of some resource, such as a person, machine or department. The Theory of Constraints (TOC) includes an effective process for identifying and leveraging the system's constraint, known as the five focusing steps or process of on-going improvement, to much more effectively achieve more goal units.

If the constraint is an individual's time, then we need to best utilize the current amount of time available most effectively. We should make sure to maintain a balanced life. In addition, we need to minimize bad multitasking, which is defined as switching between tasks unnecessarily. Bad multitasking wastes an incredible amount of our valuable time, while jeopardizing the quality of our work. We need to create a list of tasks with priorities based on the estimated impact of achieving our goal. We should then focus on working on a limited number of tasks in order of priority, while minimizing bad multitasking. Some tasks should be offloaded to others, while other tasks should be removed from our list temporarily or permanently. These changes will enable us to much more effectively achieve both personal and professional success.

The second main issue blocking our success is the core conflict, the one evaporating (conflict) cloud that is the root cause of all the undesirable effects that exist in our reality. Each person is struggling with one of nine generic core conflicts that exist for all individuals in this world. These nine types of core conflicts are based on the Enneagram personality types. Each organization and other types of systems, such as departments or functions, also have core conflicts. The TOC Thinking Processes (TP) provide a mechanism for identifying the core conflict and finding a way to break it in such a way that win-win is achieved for all.

The power of TOC is focus: doing what should be done (reliability) and NOT doing what should NOT be done (effectiveness). TOC was founded by Dr. Eli Goldratt (1947 - 2011) in order to achieve his life goal of teaching the world to think. The five focusing steps and thinking processes are powerful tools for enabling you to have a more meaningful life. To learn more, sign up for Dr. Lisa Anne Ferguson's webinar on February 13th titled "Achieving Personal and Professional Growth" via the link at www.illuminutopia.com/Events.aspx. I also recommend reading Eli's book, "The Choice," which is his expansion of TOC from management theory and applications into a philosophy of life.