Wanneer leiders moeite hebben om zichzelf te leiden

Hier zijn drie strategieën die me helpen

Als relatief nieuwe ondernemer ben ik een beetje wanhopig om dat vertrouwen te krijgen dat ik had toen ik de leider was van een grote afdeling die verantwoordelijk was voor veel mensen. Ik wil me zo capabel voelen om een ​​duurzame en steeds groeiende onderneming op te bouwen, net als bij het opbouwen van een sterk en verenigd team.

Wat ik echter heb ontdekt, is dat ik veel minder effectief ben in het leiden en beheren van mezelf dan dat ik anderen leid en beheer.

Mijn grootste uitdaging als oprichter en CEO van een beginnende start-up zonder een groot team om op te vertrouwen, is weten welke acties mijn bedrijf vooruit helpen en welke een verspilling van energie en tijd zijn.

That combination of desperation and not knowing often results in poor discipline: manifesting in futile time- and energy-wasting activity. I find myself more frequently than I would like to admit doing the proverbial running around in circles.

This usually happens for two reasons: 1) when it seems as though I can see the long road I need to travel and it feels like it all needs to be done at once, or, 2) I have no clue what I need to be doing so I spend hours flailing about doing meaningless tasks and getting nowhere.

Since I am almost always in one of those two states, I perpetually find myself in throes of that frantic, often useless, action.

I realised that if I had seen a former team of mine in a similar state, I would have first chastised myself for dropping the ball as the leader, then I would have stepped up to stop the madness. I needed to step up and lead myself out of this mess. What I needed was a solid strategy for slowing down, determining right action, and executing that action well.

For the sake of my business as well as for my mental health!

I’ve come to realise that right action happens when energy meets intuition and mindfulness. Without the intuitive bit, what passes for action may be purposeless or misguided frenetic activity.

Right action is what happens when energy and intuition meet.

To back this up, I recently came across an article by LaRae Quy, a former FBI agent, who wrote this very helpful reminder on why intuition is a powerful tool to be utilised and not just some magical fantasy superpower. She offers some tangible ways to put intuition to good use helping you not only understand better what is going on around you, but to determine right action.

So I decided to incorporate tuning into my intuition to determine my best courses of action each day, to minimise the amount of time I spend flapping around in circles either trying to feel busy and effective, or trying to grab ahold of the next most important action which is alluding me. I needed to step up and lead myself out of the mess.

I have found three things that work best for me, to get my energy and intuition to meet to help me determine right action:

1. 1Business-focused meditation and mindfulness

I appreciate and understand the value of meditation for improving mental health and daily life. I don’t do it nearly as much as I realise would be beneficial. In thinking about it’s purpose- to let the confusion and emotions of life settle so that you can live your life in a more mindful and enlightened way without all the noise of the unimportant- I figured doing the same exercise but focused on my business could provide a similar sort of mindfulness and enlightenment about the best courses of action.

Now when I sit down to start my day I spend just a quiet two minutes with my to-do list, then a further three minutes “meditating" over what is on it and what my intuition is saying about how those actions will move me and it forward.

I am still amazed at how many times I can spot something wasteful, or premature, or clearly ludicrous! I give the list a bit of a tune-up and get on with my day.

This has also has the added benefit of often revealing right action for the long haul, not just for that day’s work. I can adjust my whole trajectory toward what I am trying to achieve.

2. Reflecting on past action for better future decisions

I once worked with a woman who taught me a great deal about being an effective leader. One of the most valuable lessons I learned from her was the power of reflection. I have a tendency to always be racing to the future, and the whole concept of reflection seemed tedious and un-fun to me before I met Ingrid. Now I see reflection as the way to check in and give intuition a tune-up. It makes you better at using your intuition the next time.

I can quite clearly list the times I ignored my gut instinct and the woe that befell me for having done so. Reflecting back on what led up to the unfortunate outcome lets me see where the signs were telling me to do one thing and I did another.

Re-experiencing the moments of what I was feeling when I made the wrong decision on a course of action has helped me choose better next time. I can now recognise much more quickly and accurately the little niggle in my gut as I’m choosing and I listen, and choose again until the niggle is gone. Should I spend all my time today chasing customers in an industry that is just not biting? Or should I redesign my Mom Test and get back out there and talk to more customers?

Reflection is good especially when you know what the right answer is but you wish it was the other answer. You can’t hide from your gut!

3. Visualising and logic-modelling

This may sound counterintuitive (no pun intended!) to pair logic-modelling with a practice to improve intuition in determining right action, but when you put the two things together you get an incredibly powerful system of checks and balances. The amount of fluff and blunder this weeds out of my daily action is incredible.

For me, it really is visual and kinetic. If I can stand in front of the whiteboard or flip chart with my markers and map out what I am thinking about my actions planned and see how one leads to another, my gut instinct kicks in like a klaxon. It starts to offer me nice warm glowy assurances, or tingly excitable cues to get on with it, or uncomfortable twinges of warning to rethink the chain of actions in my model. It will tell me “um, are you sure that is what you should be spending next week doing?" Or, “do you honestly think doing that will lead to there??" I can rethink my actions before committing the time.

I haven’t been at this long, and it is by no means foolproof. But what I can say is that dedicated quiet focus time on action planning, reflecting on actions taken, and putting action plans in front of my eyes and testing the logic with my gut tuned in, has made a noticeable impact not only on seeing better outcomes and progress toward my goals, but on my own behaviour.

I spend much less time in the frenetic flapping of either mania or rudderlessness and more on what feels like right action. I have stepped up and become my own better leader!

Mijn eerste boek, Becoming a Fearless Leader: een eenvoudige handleiding voor het nemen van controle en het bouwen van gelukkige, productieve, goed presterende teams is nu uit. U kunt toegang krijgen tot een gratis pdf-werkboek dat op mijn website wordt meegeleverd . Als u mijn boek leest, zou ik graag uw opmerkingen horen.

Ik schrijf over hoe ik de grondlegger werd van een technische startup als een niet-techneut, 40-jarige vrouw zonder ondernemerservaring, en alles wat ik onderweg leer. Je kunt hier meer zien . Als u denkt dat dit nuttig kan zijn voor anderen tijdens hun zakelijke reis, kunt u dit aanbevelen en delen.

Dit verhaal is gepubliceerd in The Startup , Medium's grootste publicatie over ondernemerschap, gevolgd door 310.538 mensen.

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