Building the New Currency of Success In Your Life, Your Leadership and Your Work.

Are you satisficing, or optimizing?

What is satisficing? Nobel Lauriate Herbert Simon coined the word satisficing to describe doing what is adequate, rather than optimizing (doing one’s best).

Satisficing can make us feel good, it can produce short term results; but, satisficing cannot and will not create the foundation of innovation, action-ability, accountability, values alignment, communication, collaboration, effectiveness and leadership that can keep us moving forward.

Nor will a focus on over achievement, perfectionism to the detriment of the quality of our lives, our relationships, our workplaces, our society help us build, maintain and sustain the human qualities, skills, potential and values that we need to drive a better human, personal and business bottom line.
The facts speak for themselves.

While U.S. productivity statistics are at an all time high, U.S. corporations spend in excess of $10 billion a year on “executive” stress related emotional and physical illness, addictions, burn outs, brown outs, absenteeism, presenteeism, and the general workplace stress tab to industry exceeds $300 billion a year. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization forecasts that STRESS WILL BE THE MAJOR CAUSE OF DISABILITY by the year 2020. And, the human statistics, the quality of life statistics are just as jarring.

CLEARLY, optimizing human potential, demands a whole new focus. A focus that can help us maximize our strengths, while also using the changes, challenges, stressors, even failures we face in our lives and our work to build the high emotional intelligence, enhanced focus, purpose, life, leadership and communication strengths that are the new currency of success.
While material incentives while important, they are no longer enough. The speed of work and life, the velocity of the changes, challenges and competition we face every day have created a pandemic of stress that is the greatest threat to sustainable economic and social well being.

It is our ability to not just achieve success, but to sustain it in environments of increasing change, challenge, competition that is our greatest challenge. Hope lies in developing a new geography of thought that can help us optimize our strengths and use the stressors, changes and challenges we face to engage our best selves, best practices, best work and enable our best leadership.

Our greatest challenge demands a whole new focus on not satisficing human potential, but optimizing human potential. A focus that can help us not only create learning organizations, but LIVING organizations where high emotional intelligence, communication-rapport-relationship building, leadership, innovation, creative problem solving, action-ability and effectiveness build and sustain our best practices and best results.

Where and how do we start to optimize? We start right where we are, with the determination to not satisfice, but to optimize our own potential, and the potential of those we lead, serve and love.

We start with CEO’s and C-Suite executives who are ready to enhance their emotional intelligence, life, leadership, communication strengths and build a new tools and strategies that take them forward in a forum of confidentiality, a haven from personal and political agendas where the ability to not only maximize strengths, but transform stressors, changes and challenges into best practices and best results is REAL.

We start with managers in the middle of the organization who recognize the importance of being coached to develop these critical strengths, want to do more that satisfice, and will benefit from a safe haven where they can learn to maximize strengths and transform stressors into the new currency of success in their lives and their work.

We start with the most important tool of all, desire. Desire to realize our ability to create personal and business environments that help us survive and thrive. Personal and business environments where we build a tableau of skills, competencies and values that speak to our individual and collective self interest to build the emotional intelligence, enhanced life, leadership and communication strengths that can help us build a bridge between the Age of Information and the Age of Innovation that is upon us.

Author's Bio: 

Irene Becker is Chief Success Officer of Just Coach It, an Executive, Personal and (Mentor) Coaching practice with clients in Canada, USA and Europe. Irene's coaching edge is helping her clients maximize strengths while transforming stressors,changes, challenges into the high EQ/EI, enhanced communication, life and leadership strengths that are the new currency of success.