Don’t wait to turn over a new leaf

We humans are a funny lot!

Whilst we may be attached to the idea of change, we often wait for a trigger to launch us into it.  

An arbitrary date in the calendar or time of year can become our notional motivation. We set our New Year’s Resolutions or roll up our sleeves for a Spring clean.

Remember your days at school when a pristine new term’s notebook or file was treated with greater care and neatness.

There is always that extra care that you take when parking your new car compared to its predecessor.

Committing to positive changes in our behaviour or lifestyle, de-cluttering our homes and offices, taking care in our work and looking after our possessions are all great steps to take at any time and yet it takes a certain date or new addition to motivate us.

Why do we find it so much more difficult to make such improvements on a Wednesday afternoon in February? (without blaming Wednesdays or Februarys!)

There is a mental tidiness to a new year, new school book or new car. They offer us a clean slate such that we can mentally bin the weaknesses, untidiness and scratches of our past behaviours and start again. That tidiness is too often a false dawn though. It only exists because we haven’t slipped back into our old ways yet.

Change isn’t created by turning over a new leaf. It may be triggered by that but it is achieved by doing things differently for a sustained period until new habits or systems have become embedded and that is a process that can be kickstarted at any time.

If you want change to occur then it can start right now.

As accountants we live busy lives, especially as deadlines approach, and so we have ready-made excuses for not implementing changes in ourselves or our firms. Yet not all change takes up time and not all change needs to be dramatic.

Even in a busy tax season, how much time does it take for you to commit to being a better listener, a more caring employer, someone who better ‘walks the walk’ right now?

How much time would it take for you to bullet point a few thoughts around what you want your firm to achieve this year and share it with your team, adding a meeting on a Wednesday afternoon in February to discuss and act upon?

How much time would it take to book some training for later in the year, get some dates in the diary to meet your key clients, organise a decorator for the meeting room?

I’m now into my fifth decade as an accountant so I understand the time pressures that we all work under but that has always been the case. Time is the resource of an accounting firm so being more aware of how we make effective use of it goes a long way to determining our levels of success. Delaying change not only impacts on the use of our time but means that the conditions that we are unhappy with persist for longer, impacting on our performance for even longer.

You can change things for the better every day.

Money saving expert, Martin Lewis, talks about a savings method where you save 1p on day one, 2p on day two, 3p on day three and so on throughout the year. By the end of the year, £667.95 has been built up.

Imagine taking that same approach to the changes that you want to make to your own behaviour or performance and that of your firm.  Committing to one change every day builds momentum.

What if you and every member of your team took just five minutes each day this week to make your business better? Tidy a space, talk (and listen) to a colleague, read an article, catch up on a client issues.

What if that five minutes per day moved to ten minutes per day next week?

What if you kept doing that up to a maximum that you set, say one hour per day.

I know that some will say, “hang on, one hour per day per team member, that’s x hours per week of chargeable time!”

You can see it that way or you can see it as x hours per week, every week, making your business better.

Who knows where you will be in twelve months.

Your choice!