3 exercises to help leaders eliminate current challenges, avoid nightmares & prevent them from happening in the future
By Jayson Krause, Managing Director of Level 52 & Author of The Science Behind Success
The ultimate starting point to eliminating your biggest complaints, solving your biggest challenges, and preventing reoccurring nightmares. These exercises will get you started, get you clear, and help you prioritize what to tackle first.
THE OBJECT ERROR
When you are faced with stress or pain, it’s easy to become quickly consumed or overwhelmed by it. You naturally focus on what it is doing to you, and you villainize it, or them. Through a reactive misappraisal and a distorted narrative, you make yourself an object of the situation and your environment—an object that is tossed around and victimized by the situation. That’s alright, everyone makes mistakes, you’ve simply fallen prey to what I call the object error. The good news is, there’s a better way. It comes through activating your agency.
An agent takes on a deviant and masochistic mindset and meets the stress in their world head-on, engaging intentionally with the pain to achieve long-term progress and elevate fitness. This mindset and approach is what better prepares you and your team to navigate the inevitable turbulence that lies ahead. In the end, an object will see stressors and obstacles as forces that cause pain and suffering. An agent sees stressors and obstacles as opportunities for growth and invitations for action for which suffering need not be a requirement.
"Pain from problems, disappointments, etc., is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice..." - Viktor E. Frankl
We’ve all failed. Hopefully you have. Some failures are bigger than others. Some feel like the world is coming to an end at the time, but in hindsight are only tiny bumps along the path. Some are critical events that shape who you are and enable you to handle difficult challenges far more gracefully than before.
Celebrate those failures. Over time, you will see or even feel the results of growth in your leadership muscles. But it’s easy to miss professional growth if you don’t stop and look for it.
When I work with teams, I often ask the most senior leader in the room to share their biggest career failure—to talk intimately about the overwhelming emotions, the mistakes, and the specific details that were the hardest to deal with. Then I have them share the essential lessons learned from that experience and how it was critical in accelerating their growth. There is beauty hidden in the depths of despair that can transform a grimace to a grin.
Divorce, death, or bankruptcy can be nightmares that wake you up and teach you about yourself, better preparing you for what’s next by building your skills, resilience, and confidence. Consider it a past simulation that can give you greater awareness, allowing you to become more intentional moving forward. You meet it, experience it, absorb the learning, and move on when you’re ready.
The good thing is you don’t have to wait for a nightmare to wake you up. If you embrace your role as an agent and maneuver the stress and pain in your environment, you embody the ultimate growth mindset, and everything starts with your mindset.
3 STEPS TO ACTIVATING YOUR AGENCY
There are two simple paths you can take when you experience a leadership or organizational challenge. You can take Easy Street and avoid it or take the masochistic approach and engage in the pain in pursuit of a vision that inspires you. Both paths have consequences that can lead to positive or negative outcomes. There are 3 steps you can take that will help you get closer to the path you want to be on.
To start, I want you to get a full understanding of the challenges you currently face. You need to get it all out. I mean all of it. You are going to focus on three things:
Identify your complaints
Identify your stressors
Highlight your pains
Begin by creating three separate columns: Complaints, Stressors, Pains.
First, list every single little irritation you complain about to your significant other or close friends. Second, list each of the stressors that keep you up at night, and in the final column write down the tremendous leadership pains from the past that still make your heart ache. Use the table below as reference and list as many of each as you can.
1. Complaints are usually those little irritations in your environment that don’t seem quite big enough to act on, like dishes being left on the counter in the lunchroom, a team member showing up late for your weekly meeting, low quality work by a team member, or maybe simply the way the person next to you hums while they work. These statements usually start out with, “I’m frustrated that…” Think about all your irritations, write them down, and let it all out.
2. Stressors are different from complaints as they have evolved beyond irritations into something bigger. These are the unsolved problems that keep you up at night. The mental churn that happens as you seek to fill a knowledge gap or solve an unanswered problem. Stressors could be, for example, pressure to meet deadlines, a consistent underperformer, people constantly coming to you to fix their problems, a collective lack of overall performance, unpredictable revenue, or inflated costs. These are significant things that occupy your thoughts as you lay your head down at night. These statements usually start with, “How do I…”
3. Pains are last on the inventory, because generally they take the least amount of work to identify. These are the unexpected mistakes and nightmarish incidents that pull the rug out from underneath you. These heartbreaks are often met with regret, shame, and personal judgement. You got blindsided by a valued team member who chose to take another job and it leaves an enormous crater of competency. Maybe a key customer left to work with a competitor, leaving a gaping revenue rut. Perhaps you got pulled into a human resources visit because of accusations directed towards you for concerning behavior, or maybe you have to let some of your people go because of your budget mismanagement. These pains hurt to the core and challenge you deeply as a leader. These statements often start with, “I wish I would have…” It’s important to fully experience these and examine what you would do differently yesterday, so the same pains don’t show up again.
Below are some questions to consider as you take inventory of your complaints, stressors, and pains.
ESSENTIAL FOUNDATION
This exercise is a foundational element with both our executive coaching clients, as well as the individuals in our virtual group accelerated leader programs. The reason for doing this exercise is to develop awareness of all of the little and big challenges and obstacles in your environment. While not always, there is often a relationship to unaddressed complaints that compound into stressors. Ignored stressors that slip through the cracks can turn into shattering nightmares that jolt you awake into a new and present way of leading. Understanding your complaints, stressors, and pains is critical to your rapid development as a leader and a starting point for delivering meaningful leadership.
The quality of your list will determine the quality of your leadership fitness and how you can accelerate the change in your environment. Every item in your inventory is a potential opportunity for you to practice your leadership and challenge your fitness. However, sadly, you can’t exercise all of them at once and you want to ensure you have the right tools and strategies to deal with them.
Want to learn more? Go Deeper?
Then download a free sample of my latest book, The Science Behind Success – What every leader needs to know about mindset, influence, culture and performance.
The Science Behind Success shares the tips, strategies, and lessons I’ve learned working with leaders from Singapore to Silicon Valley to deliver meaningful leadership. Over a decade of research and experimentation is distilled into relatable anecdotes and actionable tools for you to change your environment and change your results.
Whether you are a senior leader responsible for billions of dollars, an emerging leader starting your career, or part of that overlooked middle band of management seeking to be better, The Science Behind Success will help you get clarity on your leadership impact, give you the compass to stay steady during chaos, and the tools to accelerate your career, impact, and legacy.
Download the intro and first chapter of The Science Behind Success,
my new book, totally free, by entering your name and email in the pop up box.
Whether you are developing yourself or developing others in your organization, the reality is that most leader development fails. The Science Behind Success makes leadership make sense and provides a clear playbook for success. Get the intro and first chapter for free by signing up using the pop up box.
By signing up, you’ll also get exclusive updates from Level 52 with more great leadership tools and insights. Unsubscribe at any time.
