Sharpening the Saw & Synergy

My Mastermind book club read two Stephen Covey Books (7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First) last year. The book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a must-read. It’s a classic time and life management book. Two of the key points in the book – numbers 6 and 7 are Synergy and Sharpen the Saw. Synergy is all about creative cooperation. It recognizes that two heads are better than one and that magic happens when a group comes together with one mind to accomplish something momentous. Sharpen the Saw refers to the principle that preserving YOU is key to living a long, successful and balanced life. This encompasses everything from taking care of yourself through physical activity to taking time to rejuvenate yourself through quiet time.

I spent Thursday through Saturday doing both of those things with my Entrepreneur Organization. We have an annual retreat every year (this was my 8th retreat with the group) that focuses on growing ourselves as leaders and getting to know the other entrepreneurs in the group better.

We started with a fun team building exercise put on by Event Experience out of Seattle. They had us all break up into teams, generally with people we didn’t know that well, and follow a variety of instructions in a scavenger hunt/race/following directions challenge. We had to do things like golf together, shoot water balloons, put on a dramatic play, bike, run and play with a giant Jenga game. It brought out a uniquely unflattering competitive streak in me. I’m not proud.

Friday was all business, all day. We started the day at 8 a.m. and did not quit with the intensity until our brains were fried like an egg on a hot sidewalk. The morning was spent taking a ‘Life Assessment.’ With questions like ‘Rate your Spirituality’ ‘Rate the hand you were dealt in life’ and ‘Rate the quality of your relationship with your mate’, it was a wide ranging, insightful assessment. There was a lot of deep discussion around the answers and many insights to be gained. We worked through lunch, continuing down that path. We identified the values that we live our life by and then started on working on very general idealized future. And then the hard work really comes in when we put the low numbers from the life assessment and mixed it in with our values to come up with specific SMART goals. We continued with that work Saturday. And, I’m excited to keep going with the values-integrated goals over the next few quarters.