Timeout for Leadership-your one-minute leadership idea

30 second time-out #2

Can you compartmentalize?

Today I call my second quick thirty second time-out to provide some food for thought.

Do you have the ability to focus on one thing at a time?  Can you place everything else into little compartments in your brain and leave them there?  Personally, when I think of this, I think of the basketball free-throw shooter, all by him or herself at the foul line with 20,000 screaming fans, with seemingly 5000 of these fans seated directly behind the basket, waiving all sorts of objects and screaming every obscenity at you with the game on the line?  Let’s up the ante and now declare that these two shots that you will determine the national championship.

Can you do it?

I think to be a successful leader, especially a school principal, one must be able to compartmentalize.  You have to deal with the issue at hand and be able to block out all of the extraneous noise around you.  I think leaders will have trouble making decisions when they allow this extra noise to seep into his or her head.

It becomes essential that you can place all of this extra information in little locked boxes within your head.  Psychologist agree that compartmentalization is a defense mechanism that we use to avoid anxiety and mental discomfort.  One can learn how to suppress his or her emotions when dealing with the specific situation at hand.

The partitions that you build within your mind, frees your mind to deal with what is important at any given time.  That free-throw shooter that I describe earlier in this article needs to lock out any of these distractions.  He or she also has to lock out any negative past experiences in similar situations.

I think the ability to compartmentalize comes with experience.  I will argue that you get better at this with age.  Think about some of your older family members and see if you agree with me.  Some of these folks are expert at compartmentalizing. 

At the end of the day, you must be able to turn on your laser-like focus at a moment’s notice and block out any distraction.  I believe this ability separates the good ones from the great ones.  Do you want to be that person on the line?  Do you want to step to the plate with the winning run at third?  Do you want the football with one play left five yards away from the endzone? 

The great ones do.  Are you a great one?  Only you can answer that question. Good luck.