Bring on 2023!
Wow, it's amazing what a month's holiday can do! I hope you're all coming back feeling as refreshed as I do, even if you had a shorter break. If not, could there be a need for some reflection on what changes you need to make to allow yourself to ease into the year, or get to a place of feeling stronger and balanced over the next few months?
This newsletter covers:
What I'm all about
If you read my last blog of 2022 you will know that my themes for the year are Consolidation and Balance. One area of focus helping me to consolidate what I've created up to this point is getting my marketing right. I'm wanting it to be consistent, authentic, and serve my audience well, whilst also feeling easy and fun. To this end, I was watching a Brand Activation webinar by a wonderful lady - Nina Christian. A point that she made really resonated. She said "Your brand is about so much more than the small area you're focusing on now". I thought... yes! My work is really focused, deliberately so, on a narrow specialist area, but the reasons that sit behind that decision to focus on strategic thinking are so much broader. It feels freeing to start reflecting on this and articulating it - so I'm putting it out there as an experiment to see if it resonates with any of you. I identified five influences on my life and work that I think have shaped the work that I do now: 1. My psychology training and Navy career Embarking on both of these amazing journeys grew out of my fascination with understanding and maximising the performance of people, either individually, as leaders, or in teams. The incredible potential we have as humans, and yet our fragility and pervasive fallibility stands between us and realising our potential. This is something that feels to me like it presents never-ending exciting challenges and is really what is at the heart of my work. I want to help people bring their best game, and in the case of the work I'm doing right now, that means making their best decisions. Sometimes I think being a psychologist when I'm talking about strategic thinking is an elephant in the room. People may be wondering, what does a psychologist know about strategic thinking?? To me it's obvious. There's the thinking, and the thinker - and you can't separate the two. For example, in our brains, cognition and personality don't operate in isolation, they are totally intertwined. Psychology is central to thinking and decision-making because decisions are made with your head and your heart. They are incredibly complex and can't be separated from who we are as a person. I've talked about this in webinars before. I think I feel a video coming on though... 2. My interest in business, organisations, and all the challenges they present My undergraduate degree was a double major in Psychology and Management. In my final semester I discovered Organisational Psychology as a subject and realised I could combine my two interests. Joy! Again, the combination seems obvious. Organisations are just collections of people with a set of (not always well defined or understood by all) objectives, and a bunch of systems, resources and constraints. Psychology has to be relevant because as every business owner, CEO, consultant or manager will tell you, people are the most crucial and complex part of organisations. Therefore, people amplify the complexity already inherent in organisations. Cue more endless interesting challenges! Strategic thinking, decision-making, and even more so strategic leading, are topics that very much straddle the individual and organisational domain, making it a beautiful sweet spot for a curious organisational psychologist. The organisational aspects of these topics are ubiquitous throughout your typical strategic thinking/management writing and training. What I felt was missing when I started reading and thinking in this space, was the people side. It's one thing to learn WHAT to think about, but far more fruitful to also learn HOW to think. 3. Cultural factors of my ethnicity and upbringing I'm half Dutch, and I can tell you it's more than a funny stereotype that the Dutch will make a dollar go further. My dad is your typical frugal Dutchman. At 75, and very comfortable financially, he still boils the jug for the dishes because the hot water in their house has a long way to travel to get to the kitchen tap (he's an engineer so I expect some robust calculations went into this decision!). When my husband (also an engineer and handy-man) bought us a spa pool shell for $1 and set about putting together all the bits to make it go, my dad who used to own a Pool and Spa business 35 years ago, produced a working spa pool filter from his garage for us. You can imagine his delight when one year for his birthday I gave him a workshop shirt I bought from an op shop. I'll never forget the twinkle in his eye as he bragged about his gift to his friends! He wears his clothes until they fall off him (at least his workshop clothes which my mum doesn't get a say in), he drives his cars into the ground, he never throws anything away, and he'll never buy something he can't make cheaper himself. I should say though, he is also one of the most generous people I know and somehow holds what he owns with an open hand without attaching much meaning to money other than the security it provides. Can you see how values around frugality, efficiency, and minimising waste are linked to strategic thinking? I always say that the essence of strategic thinking is linking actions to goals. It's about not wasting time and effort doing things that aren't taking you where you want to go, or spending precious time, energy and resources on things aren't the most important to you. In business, people make decisions every day at all levels, and without strategic thinking they could be (and frequently are) pushing in different directions and chasing all sorts of unarticulated opposing goals.
"The essence of strategic thinking is linking actions to goals."
4. My values about what is important in life For me, family, faith and health are number one. Challenge and achievement are also important drivers of mine that I'm always having to balance with the former, but at the end of the day I know what is most important to me. How is this relevant? Well, to keep putting the most important things first, and to reap rewards in these areas, I have to continually make strategic decisions. We all do. Sometimes that means doing the thing I don't feel like doing in the moment over the thing I do feel like doing (we're complex beasts, aren't we?!). I'm acutely aware of how easy it is to focus on short-term, second or third rank importance objectives and end up with a result I never wanted. And for some reason I just feel driven to share this awareness with others. 5. I've watched someone close to me get it wrong Another example of how complex we humans are - we are driven by a need to avoid discomfort and pain that can override the powerful and unique sensibilities and ability to reason that our species are gifted with. I've seen someone I love spend years avoiding the short-term pain and discomfort of pursuing personal and relational healing, despite deep down knowing the risk of regretting the lost years of relationship when it's too late. If I'm truly honest, it is possibly this last point that is the biggest driver behind my work. Our personal goals are what make us ourselves. But we are the goals that we actually pursue, and there is a battle between what we really want to pursue and what we actually pursue. This is pretty deep, but the same is true in business. A business is its actual results. It is not what it says on the glossy brochures, posters and strategic plans. Our human potential, and in the same way, an organisation's potential, can never be reached if we can't first be totally clear, and brutally honest about what our real goals are. And that includes doing the hard, uncomfortable work of teasing out and ruthlessly prioritising competing goals. Ouch. I'd love to hear how any of these influences resonate with you, because that will be where our connection is. One of the joys of the work I'm doing is that I get to work with people who I connect with on this kind of level. It's this connection that allows me to bring my best to what I do for you, and positions you to receive what you need, whenever or whatever that may be.
What are you all about? Here's a challenge:
Even if you're not in business like I am, we all have a personal brand, and we all make our decisions with both our heads and our hearts (as much as we like to think we're rational). Have you given much thought to your own personal philosophies and how they shape your decisions? What about your leadership philosophies and how they shape your leadership behaviours? To help you think about this in a productive way, below are a few questions to reflect on. I challenge you to actually put some undistracted, relaxed time aside to consider these and write them down:
What are your top 5 values? Here's a fun Values Card Sort game you can try to help with this.
Think about recent decisions, big or small, business or personal. Pick a few and ask yourself how your values helped guide you.
How are your personal values reflected in your leadership style?
What influences have shaped your choice of career/job?
What lights you up? That topic you could talk about all day. Why?
What sparks you up? That bug-bear that really winds you up. Why?
If you can identify these things, you'll find ways of connecting with people, drawing people to you who you will 'click' with, and with whom you can achieve great things. You might work out where your strengths lie and where you should put your energies. You might work out where your strengths don't lie, and where you should draw on or lean on others.
I'd love to hear how these questions help you to make strategic choices that move you in the direction of your goals!
Ngā mihi nui, all the best for now, Nina
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