ACCESSING YOUR POTENTIAL
Hypothesis – most of us have more potential than we’re currently accessing.
Why do I say that?
We often work on autopilot. It’s efficient, it delivers. Our capability is fed by our experience, our experience gets bigger and better with time in work and in life generally. The further up the leadership pipeline we go the more we can rely on our experience because we have more of it. We get busier and our decisions increase in organisational importance so it’s just as well. We can make decisions quickly from autopilot based on the vast amount of data (or knowledge) we possess.
You have more potential than you can access in autopilot.
Whilst autopilot may be our friend in many situations it doesn’t allow us to access all of our potential. Why? Because autopilot often selects the most obvious solution in our knowledge bank, that solution isn’t always the best. It also misses new ways of tackling things that may be helpful, i.e. we utilise learned behaviours rather than the best behaviour for the situation.
So how do I switch off autopilot and access more of my potential?
1) Try it in one or both of the following scenarios:
a. Re-actively - Introduce this question into your thought processes when in flight (making decisions) – is autopilot my friend right now? – Allow yourself to answer ‘yes’, allow yourself to answer ‘no’ sometimes too.
b. Pro-actively - Create time/space to think through things differently. Do you back yourself to do something great if you just give yourself time and space to think things through? If you are still thinking ‘I don’t have time’ consider briefly what you have achieved when you have given yourself time to think before. If you connect to what you could win it becomes a little easier. Generally we humans are great at starting things, not as great at stopping things, so connect to what you could be starting.
2) Manage self-first - Now you have made the commitment to switch off autopilot it’s time to prepare for optimising your performance. We perform better when we manage ourselves before we attempt to manage a situation. We see sports people preparing themselves for a big race all the time, they don’t just ‘turn up and go’. There is good reason for that, it doesn’t optimise their mindset for performance. It’s true of people in business too. There are many ways of clearing your mind in readiness. They include pausing and taking a few quiet moments, taking a few slow breaths, body scans, meditation and mindfulness exercises. The question is what clears your mind to enable you to think at your best and prepare yourself for performance? It’s a really important step so please do experiment and find what works for you.
3) Manage situation second – Now you’re in the right frame of mind you’re in a great position to manage the situation, in this case the situation is the challenge or opportunity you wish to think through, so you’re ready to move to the next step.
4) Define the purpose of the reflective session, i.e. what is your objective? What do you want to walk out with?
5) What are your options? There are many ways of considering this, here are just a few of them:
a. What is the most obvious autopilot answer?
b. What else have you got experience of doing in this type of situation (challenging yourself to use experience beyond the autopilot answer)
c. What would you try if you had to do something completely different to anything you have done before? (accessing your potential beyond learned experience)
d. What would a colleague you know well and admire do? (accessing potential outside your own thinking)
6) Decide which option works best for you having considered them all (connecting to the potential outcome) and take the action.
7) Assess and learn from the decision made to increase your knowledge bank.
8) Learn from this process – how did it serve you?
a. What worked well for you and is worth doing next time?
b. What would you change to make it better next time?
9) Consider when and how you will test it again – it’s learning from your experiments and going again that will deliver results.
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog, I hope something in it is helpful for you.
When will you next switch off autopilot in order to access more of your potential?
Try it, you might just deliver something great!
This week we’re celebrating three years of working with exceptional people in great organisations, many of whom are working with us to switch off autopilot and access more of their potential through our coaching related programmes. You can see some of the organisations benefiting from our work by clicking the link below.
Please feel free to get in touch for a chat about how we can help you or your leaders access more of their potential.
