Why settle for a good 2024 when it could be EXTRAORDINARY?
January is the time to think BIG. If you ever want to plan your own mini revolution for your professional life the time is now. Avoid looking at where you are now and adding a few bells and whistles. Planning the odd adjustment is not enough at the start of a calendar year.
If everything is where you want it right now then great. If your view is that ‘it’s not broken then why fix it’ no need to read any further. There is always something to be said for not taking anything for granted, whether it’s income, health or your job. Maintaining what you already have may be an achievement in itself for any senior leader.
But if you genuinely want to explore real change then it is the extraordinary you must aim for. The unbelievable may be closer than you think. Clear your mind and go for broke.
So how to do this?
Dial the ambition up to 10
It is only when you set truly ambitious objectives that you start to think creatively. When you are in this mode new possibilities emerge which would have stayed locked away if you had been in ‘tweak and adjust’ mode.
The key is to think ‘future back’. What do you dare to dream about? Not what might be nice or satisfying, or equal a previous best. Only when you have a seriously compelling future, which makes your eyes bulge and pulse quicken, should you start to work backwards about what you might do about it.
Make your first attempt at forming an objective and then triple it in difficulty. Then consider that if this actually was the objective given to you and you had no choice, what would you do first, second and third?
Check those three points against what you might have done if your initial thoughts were limited by practicalities. I bet at least a couple of them are different. Now that they are different, how can these three points break down a little further and start to form the beginning of a plan?
At no point should you back away from your ambition being at 10.
In short, you are aiming to be visionary first and practical later.
2. No repercussions
Aiming for 10/10 ambition means ignoring the repercussions at the beginning.
If there were no repercussions at all what would be the 6 wildest things you would do?
And I mean WILD. Not just a variation on a theme or unchartered territory which still feels familiar. By the time you get to wild things 4, 5 and 6 your thinking should be opening up. Keep the disadvantages to one side.
Look at the list and answer these two questions
What has now emerged as a serious possibility for action which was not there before?
What have you avoided mentioning that would lead a neutral party to wonder why?
Those new possibilities are worth building upon. Some of the repercussions might be less important than you think they are. Too often senior leaders impose their own limits. The key when looking at risks is to evaluate them, not just identify and then decide any level of risk is not worth it.
If there is something you avoided mentioning because you ‘just can’t go there’ - what would help you go there? What if you had no choice other than to go there?
3. On balance it’s a yes
If you find yourself having to balance between aiming for/doing/writing something or not, then give the positive side the benefit of the doubt.
Saying yes, repeatedly, can be incredibly liberating. If you really have to say no to something, do it much later down the line. Don’t interrupt your thinking.
What are the chances of getting 10 heads in a row when you flip a coin? Less than one in a thousand. When you decide to go on a streak of saying yes possibilities will emerge which would never have come to light. Explore, explore and explore again.
4. Develop the seed
Once you have a seed of an idea or set of ideas, it is time to develop it in full and bring it to life.
One approach is to write it out in full - just start writing and don’t stop until you have exhausted it. Don’t worry if no one else could understand it, it’s a stream of consciousness not a blog article.
What would happen and (should it matter) in what order?
Does it still look like 10/10 ambition by the end?
Are the risks involved starting to look a little smarter? (If not, keep going)
What would have to be different in the organisation to facilitate the change?
Go for quantity rather than quality. No one is marking your work. Often the gems lie in the final 5-10% of what you write.
5. Keep them brief
Selling ideas to others means distilling them. The same likely applies should you need to sell it to yourself again in a week’s time.
Straplines matter, and the shorter they are the more effective they will be.
Summarise each objective in 6 words or less. Keeping it brief increases the chances of your audience remembering it and passing it on to others.
You are not writing a full sentence. Think catchphrase not thesis title. The detail of what it looks like and how it will be done can be long, but the title must be short.
You may go through various drafts of this, but if you put what you wrote in full into a word cloud generator it will give you a starting point.
A.I. tools can be very helpful too, the likes of ChatGPT and Claude are more often used to expanding on a theme rather than summarising one. Paste your entire text into one of those tools, ask for 10-20 examples and see what stands out.
Remember that
If someone had predicted last January that 2023 would see a clear route to the end of AIDS transmission, successful trials of a 4 day week and over 50,000 at a Women’s Super League football match they may not have been taken seriously. Yet all of this happened. Thinking big is the only way to start.
You do not need to do this alone. Who do you work with who can go on an exponential journey of growth with you to make it all happen?
How I can help you?
1. One to one coaching programmes for senior leaders who are swamped by their jobs so they can thrive in life. Click here to discover where you are on your journey from Frantic to Fulfilled? Just 5 minutes of your time and you will receive a full personalised report with guidance on your next steps!
2. Team coaching programmes - working IN a team is not the same as working AS a team and yet they are often treated as if they are the same. I help teams move from the former to the latter, and generate huge shifts in productivity and outcomes.
3. Talks, workshops and seminars - including topics relevant to the two areas above plus explaining Gen Z to Gen X.
