Safari for My Soul

I'm about to head out the door for Kenya, East Africa. For vacation? No, for work, although if this is work, then I'm the luckiest woman alive.

I'll be leading a Safari for the Soul, leadership retreats that help senior managers find their organizational values and mission. We use the world as a classroom, letting our travelers see a new part of the world, and perhaps change their perspective about their current work.

People always ask me why I don't lead the trips in the US. I can. But it's not the same. When people go to a developing country on a different continent, their world opens up. They see, hear, smell and discuss things that would never have been discussed while accessing emails, iPhones and the newspaper back at home. With little access to the outside world, our traveler is forced to really dig deep and see what's going well and what's not going so well in his/her life and work. We don't give them any answers; we just ask the questions. They find their own answers by watching nature, talking to the local tribe people and seeing another world.

We only take a few travelers a year and it's always a privilege to do so. It's truly a gift to see these people start the two-week trip as one person and leave as another person...someone more confident, strong and focused on who they are and what they're supposed to be doing in this life. It makes my heart sing to watch this happen.

Someone asked me recently if I'd do these trips more often. These trips fill my soul, so if I didn't have a husband and a 3 year old daughter waiting for me, I'd do these trips monthly. But I do love my husband and daughter, so being away from them for a few weeks a year is enough. The trip fills my soul until the next time. I'd have it no other way.

Outsource Your Work and Get Your Life Back

I admit it. I can be a bit of a control freak. I like things done in a certain way. The upside to this is that my work is finished to a very high standard. The downside to this is that everything takes a long time, leaving me little time to do what I really enjoy doing...going for a run, playing with my daughter, hanging out with my husband.

So what's a professional gal to do? Outsource. I was introduced to this concept by Tim Ferris, the author of "The Four Hour Work Week". This book is full of lots of tips on how to focus on what's working and leave behind what's not working. The best thing I learned from this gem of a book is to outsource my work to a company such as Get Friday. I work with Sona at Get Friday and give her all kinds of work that I consider drudgery. For example, I need a spreadsheet of all management associations, their contact person and their annual conference dates, to help me market my new book "A Manager's Guide to Coaching: Simple and Effective Ways to Get the Best out of Your Employees", being published by the American Management Association (AMA) in spring 20008. Creating that spreadsheet could take me hours and bore me to tears. Instead I tell Sona what I need and in a few days I have a working document. Is it completed the way I would have done it? No. But I'd rather have something to work with than spend my own time creating a "perfect" document.

What else can you outsource? Updating your holiday card database, researching information for an upcoming talk, updating your contacts on Plaxo or Constant Contact. The list is endless once you start to think about all the work that needs to get done that you don't enjoy. So take a minute and think of some work that is required but not particularly interesting to you. Determine how you would train someone else to do it, write it down and contact Get Friday. You'll be glad you did. You may even get your Fridays back! TGIF!