After avoiding ‘the’ lurgie for 3 years, it finally found me in February 2023. I was spared any unpleasant cold/flu/respiratory symptoms, but was hit hard by fatigue and brain fog. Total shut-down, hit-a-brick-wall, have-to-go-to-bed-right-now style.
This meant a good hard look at priorities, a very quick pivot, a bunch of rescheduling, and a whole lot of sleeping and doing not much. Incredibly difficult for this motivated, passionate, challenge-loving, committed-to-delivering-quality business-woman.
The whole experience has brought into focus for me some hard truths about what it takes to be a strategic thinker in a fast-paced world, and forced me to walk that talk. Here are a few lessons that became crystal clear for me:
1. Being clear on your goal and coming back to it again and again is critical.
Health is always a high priority for me, but suddenly it became the absolute tip-top priority by necessity. That meant sleep and rest had to come before anything else. With the small amount of energy I did have, my next priority became keeping my current programme running to a standard that I was happy with, and that would honour the participants’ investment of both time and money (first and most basic rule of business success – do a great job at what you do). I’d also just started a marketing course which was happening at a pretty critical time for my business. I had known for a while that I needed to master my marketing in a way that felt natural, authentic and effortless if I was going to create an ongoing stream of work I could be confident in. But still, this third priority was a maybe, and I made it clear I was only going to do what I could do.
Being clear on what your goals are, and why, is so critical. I have a saying, that “strategic thinking in its simplest form is about linking actions to goals”. Participants on my programme start off learning it, and by the end of the programme, they KNOW it. And they realise just how easy it is to get actions and goals ‘unlinked’
So many times, especially in those first couple of weeks, I had to look at the list of things I wanted/needed to do (which were all important), and think, “but which ones advance my MOST important goals?” Doing this kept me on track and helped me make the hard decisions. I pared my actions back to the bare basics, and the only thing that made that possible was being totally clear about what the bare basics were, and what they were not, because of how they linked to my goals.
2. You can always prioritise more ruthlessly.
If there is one thing that a lack of resources does for you, is it forces you to prioritise ruthlessly. As I was having to do this, I reflected back on what I had been spending my time on prior to having Covid. I had always thought I was pretty good at prioritising, but I realised that I didn’t really have to be all that ruthless before. I realised that if I could get better at being more ruthless even when I didn’t need to be, I could probably shuffle some of those lower priority things to both do a better job at the top priority things, and maybe even fit in some different ones. Could you prioritise more ruthlessly? Or more effectively?
3. We are SO not wired to prioritise for long term goal attainment.
Our brain’s primary function is survival. That means looking out for immediate danger or threats, as well as rewards, or things that might make us safer or more comfortable. Long term goals don’t really feature in that picture, do they?! I demonstrated this to myself nicely when I sat down to do some prioritising at one point, then looked at the plan I had been making and changing on the fly for the past week or so, and realised that the tasks were in the complete opposite order!
If it is true that it is not natural for us to prioritise for long-term goal attainment, but we decide that we really do want these long-term goals, then the implication is that we have to make choices that go against our basic survival brain’s instinct. Just simply knowing this and being aware of our urges when making decisions can be incredibly powerful for developing as a strategic thinker. But it does take courage.
4. Some strategic decisions really HURT.
Decisions made for the long-term often involve painful trade-offs, huge short-term costs or losses. That’s why it’s called short-term pain, because it hurts. Especially when you have no guarantee that you’ve made the right decision and will reap the long-term gain.
Although I managed to keep the intake going that I had just started when I first came down with Covid, ultimately, with my recovery period stretching towards two months and still going, I had to re-think my schedule for the rest of the year. I made the hard decision to drop an unbooked intake to make space to shift the next booked one right by a few weeks. This allowed me more time to recover both my health, AND my marketing, which I’d by this time been severely neglecting. That decision cost me a cool $32,000. Ouch. But for the long-term health of both me and my business, it had to be done.
5. Prioritising takes more energy than you realise, but it is a worthwhile investment, if done strategically.
There is a small body of neuroscience research on the cognitive task of prioritising which highlights the mammoth effort that it represents for our brains. We do it without a thought of course, and without realising just how much of our mental energy it sucks up. To give you an idea, here’s a list of a few things you are considering when you prioritise tasks:
importance
urgency
valence (your anticipated satisfaction of completing a task)
salience (how noticeable or striking a task is, that’s how it gains your attention in the first place)
rate of change of a task
difficulty of a task
interruption cost
task discrepancy (the perceived difference between the current task status and the desired task status)
time and resources required to perform tasks
action and expectancy (anticipation that the action taken will result in the achievement of a desired goal, in other words, will your efforts be worth it).
self-efficacy (your assessment of your ability to perform a task),
error sensitivity (your tolerance for a remaining discrepancy between the current state and the desired state, ie. your comfort with the extent to which the goal is achievable)
personality (your own characteristics and experiences in terms of suitability or qualification to complete the task) (Source: Zhang and Feyen, 2005 & 2007)
Phew! And that is not a complete list! I bet you’ve only considered (consciously) the first two.
The reasons prioritising is important, however, are obvious. Our time and energy are limited. We can’t do everything. Prioritising is about choosing how to use our time and energy. Strategic prioritising is about how to best use our time and energy to achieve our most important and impactful goals. Can you see the difference? We can be prioritising, sure. We may be considering many or all of the factors in the list above as we make decisions about what to do next, but unless we are crystal clear on what our goals are and how they’re going to get us to where we want to go, our intentions can drift untethered in a sea of random things to do.
In my case, I knew that my mental resources were so limited and so precious that I couldn’t afford to use them on anything that was less than critical. In fact, I had to realise that even my ‘critical’ list was probably not all going to get done. The time and energy I spent on prioritising was a sacrifice to ensure I had no regrets if any of those critical things not getting done ended up resulting in negative consequences for my business. I know looking back, that I did all I could over that time. That’s a good feeling amid a crappy situation.
6. Quality thinking is just like home-grown fruit and veggies
On a walk the other day, I caught a glimpse inside someone’s property at their neat, tidy and weed-free veggie garden. Neat rows of spring onions, staked tomatoes, and sprawling, but tidy courgette plants. It looked just like I wish my garden would look, but instead, mine looks like this at the moment:
A garden doesn’t stay as tidy as it is when you first plant it by magic. If you want a nice-looking garden, you have to do the mahi. Weeding, staking, pruning, feeding, watering, and regularly. Your reward is healthy, luscious home-grown produce, and a garden that you feel on top of rather than defeated by – and one you are proud of when your friends visit (or when random strangers peer over the fence)! Your other option is to do the minimum and let it look like mine – functional, but not pretty.
It struck me when I saw that lovely garden, that all that daily weeding was a bit like the daily, or even hourly maintenance I now have to do on my Covid-recovering brain. I tell you, I’ve been trying EVERYTHING I can to recover as fast as possible, but it’s been a process of trial and error. On the physical side, I’m learning that:
Deep breathing helps (blood vessels expand, oxygen to the brain, and did you know that you barely breathe when working at a computer???).
Exercise helps as long as it is below the anaerobic heart rate threshold (‘aerobic’ means exercise with oxygen, ‘anaerobic’ means exercise without oxygen).
The runway to bedtime is critical for getting quality sleep (going to bed overtired = less deep, restorative sleep = poor brain recovery).
Good nutrition and drinking enough water makes a huge difference to concentration.
Sugar, caffeine and alcohol definitely do not help.
I’ve taken to doing 5-10 minutes of deep breathing after each meeting/concentration sprint, as well as while walking (slowly), before bed, and any other time I think of it. I am constantly monitoring energy levels across the day and pacing myself so I hit bedtime having been through my sleep routine and feeling ready for sleep. If I get everything right and don’t overdo it, I can feel that my body is able to recover. If I don’t, I know I’m just stretching this out longer.
So what about the veggies?? All that maintenance I’m doing for my brain – it's just like regular garden maintenance. It’s all the things that for years I’ve raved on about for the better part of my career as a psychologist. The thing is, most of us can get away with not doing a lot of that boring maintenance and still feel ok and function in our roles. But for me right now, it’s the difference between functioning enough to deliver programmes well, run a successful business, and be a mum and wife, and really not functioning well at all.
What this experience has taught me is that this stuff is real! Basic body and brain maintenance really does make a difference to not just our health, but our ability to do our best thinking. That is the definition of the strategic thinking capability I teach in my programme – Capacity. It might be hard to invest time in something when we don’t see the immediate benefits, or we can’t compare the results if we had ,or had not, fed, watered, and nurtured ourselves, but I’m here to tell you the fruits of those efforts are real and there for the picking (see what I did there??).
7. There is always something to be grateful for.
Despite the challenges, I am thankful. This has happened at a time when I had already decided to focus on and consolidate one offering, and had just brought an angel into my business in the form of Yvonne, my admin support person. Financially, our whānau does rely on my income, but if it stops or slows down, we will be ok (for a while). Being self-employed means you can never really switch off from your business needs, especially while it is only me delivering my content. But the plus side is, I don’t have limited sick days, and I don’t have to justify or explain time off to anyone. I can make decisions about balancing my work and my health free from feelings of expectation or obligation. I’ve been able to serve my clients and put everything else on the back burner.
I mention all this because I am aware that in writing all of the first 5 points, there are those who are much more constrained than I am in the options available to them. Being strategic then becomes even more important of course, but I acknowledge that strategic decisions can also become more painful and costly as well.
Covid has been a nightmare situation for me, hitting me in probably my most valued personal capacity, my brain, and my ability to think. But I will recover, and it has made me reflect on and adjust my priorities once again. It has also reaffirmed for me many of the reasons why I am doing this. I like to say “you can be strategic about what to have for breakfast”. I’ve had to be strategic about how to keep my business going while taking what will probably be 3 months to recover from an illness. Being a strategic thinker is a skill for life as much as it is a skill for business.
References available on request
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Cover photo credit by Unsplash
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