No matter how great you are in business situations, you might not be as great in your personal life. Here are some tips on how you can apply the skills you’ve learned at your office to your home life as well…
Start Communicating Productively
First of all, it’s time to bring that business communication into your personal life. Of course, you can’t be as abrupt in your personal life as you can in your work life. As much as you might want to send an email to your mother signed ‘Regards’ as a secret message that she’s annoying you and it’s time to stop, that sort of thing definitely won’t work. More so, it’s important to start thinking about the ways that you’re communicating and how effective they are. Body language makes up almost seventy percent of how you communicate, and likely if giving presentations makes up a significant portion of your work life, then you’ll understand that being open with your body language is important when it comes to explaining issues to other people. Your tone of voice and facial expressions are also even more important than the actual words you say - being as aware of them at home as you are at work will help you get along considerably better with your friends, family and partner.
Make Sure You Protect Yourself
In business, you might want to be smart about taking risks, which is something that you should apply to your personal life too. When you’re dealing with money, you’re always careful in case you end up losing - and you should probably be careful and pragmatic when it comes to taking risks in your personal life too. You might want to move into a new apartment with a roommate without a care in the world, but frankly it’s always a good idea to sign a cohabitation agreement in case of any fallings out that you might have further down the line. You need to make sure that you protect yourself in the future - make sure that you get travel insurance if you’re thinking about going on holiday and make sure that you keep looking at future possibilities. Living in the moment seems like a great idea but it might not seem so great if you end up losing money because of rash decisions that you’ve made.
Learn How To Delegate Tasks
In business, one of the most important things you learn when you’re managing people is how to delegate tasks. Taking on everything yourself is the easiest way to burn out quickly, in which case you’ll be of no use to absolutely anyone. Learning to let go is something that’s hard for many of us control freaks, but at the end of the day you have to learn to trust that other people are capable and can get things done just as well as you can. That’s something that will also apply in your personal life. If you’re going on vacation with a friend, you don’t have to supervise everything - your friend is a smart and capable adult which means that you don’t have to hover over their choice of hotel like an uptight mom hovering over her teenage son’s internet use. Trusting other people to get things done is a valuable skill both at work and at home.
Make Sure You Prioritise
In both work and at home, it’s important to learn to prioritise. At work, it becomes second nature - you figure out which emails to answer first without thinking about it, but at home it can be more of an issue as you allow your wants to take over your needs. It’s important to consider what exactly you need over what you want - it can be tempting to get an extension built on your house just because you want more space, but if your kitchen is tiny and poky and your fridge is unreliable, then that should take priority. Learning to prioritise is a skill that will save you time and money in the end.
Stay Detached
Of course, you can’t stay detached from everyone in your personal life - if that was the case then you’d never be able to form real friendships or be close to your family or fall in love, and those things are of course far more important than anything you might happen to do in the office during the day. But if you’re having disagreements with people in your personal life, then managing to stay detached is a good way to ensure that you don’t say anything that you’ll end up regretting. If you have a screaming argument with someone at work, then chances are you’ll be disciplined by your boss, and with good reason. If you lose your temper, you’re incapable of making smart decisions and thinking out all the consequences of what you’re saying. That means that in the workplace, most of us have developed the skills to take a deep breath, count to ten, and figure out a solution instead of bickering with or yelling at whoever we’re having arguments with.
In your personal life, that’s a valuable skill to have. Not every relationship is easy at all times. No matter how much you might love your partner, no two people agree on everything all the time - but that doesn’t mean that you should allow any raging fights over relatively insignificant things break to break you up. Having the skills to take a deep breath and take a step back will help you keep your relationship happy and healthy.
Figure Out What You Want And Be Clear About It
Finally, in work and at home it’s important to know what you want and to be completely upfront about it. At home, write out a list of your goals and how you can achieve them, the way that you figure things out as a team at work. It’s important to be realistic and it’s even more important to be completely clear with the people around you about what your goals are. Doing that will ensure that they all come true.