Hugh’s Words of Wisdom for Wednesday 08.26.2020: Thinking bigger during times of adversity

Video Notes:

Hello, everyone. And welcome to Hugh's Words of Wisdom Wednesday for August 26, 2020. 

This week I want to answer a question asked of me by a good friend and excellent consultant and coach, Alan Anderson. He asked, "Hugh, how do you help people think bigger during times of adversity such as a worldwide pandemic?" Alan, that's a great question. Let me see answer your question by giving you some context first. 

In 2004 19.1% of Americans experienced a level of anxiety that interrupted the quality of their life. Today, the number is between 46% and 49%. The vast majority of people who feel anxious don't necessarily become debilitated and unproductive in the workforce, but performance is degraded. It's degraded because they don't know how to harness the power of anxiety and to use it to their advantage.

In this video, I want to give you three words to pay attention to that will help you think bigger and manage your anxiety or that of your employees. 

The three words to pay attention to are: purpose, process, and person. Let me put meat on these bones.

Purpose: I believe purpose is the jumping-off point for high performance. I wrote about this extensively in my book, the 7 Principles of Transformational Leadership. It is the first chapter of the book because I believe it's the most important chapter. 

In an abbreviated form, purpose is an idea, hope, dream, or aspiration you have fallen in love with for your leadership and your organization. You need a purpose for you to perform at the highest level. So when you fall in love with an idea, you're willing to exert yourself more and for more extended periods of time, and you think more creatively because you love the idea so much. 

If you like an idea, you will have limited amounts of creativity. If you love an idea; or are passionate about an idea, nothing will get in the way of you accomplishing it.

So, to think bigger, you need a purpose. As an example, one of my clients and I developed a purpose statement for her Information Technology department of 180 people. We developed this purpose statement: "We enable customer success."

Notice this purpose didn't talk about her technology services. It spoke to customer success. AS CIO, she infused this purpose throughout her department and realized that to enable customer success, all of her leaders needed to enable employee success. There was no way to have a happy and successful customer with an unhappy and unsuccessful employee. 

That's an example of a purpose statement. To overcome anxiety, we need an idea, hope, dream or aspiration that will rally employees to fall in love with it and act on boldly every day. 

Process: I believe we should not think bigger for the sake of thinking bigger. Thinking bigger and critically should be undertaken in the service of a purpose statement. To think bigger and critically, you need a process. Here's an example of a process from my Executive Coaching work. 

At the beginning of each week, set a goal or objective for the week. At the end of the week, the team leader and team conduct an After Action Assessment, asking, how did we do, were we successful or unsuccessful, and what got in the way? 

This process is not complicated but incredibly powerful when done over time. The objective is to learn what to keep doing, stop doing, or start doing, to get better every week. The key question is, how can we become one, two, or three percent better next week? Over the course of twelve weeks, can we become twenty-five to forty-five percent better? The After Action Assessment is something you would do weekly when you genuinely love your purpose.

Person: We all need a role model. We need someone we can look up to and recognize them as the person that is an exemplar of thinking bigger and of pushing beyond the boundaries of what is possible. Our role model is someone we look to and ask, "what behaviors do they exhibit that I can adopt?"

What activities, language, or behaviors do they embody or exemplify that allows them to do what they do? How can I personalize what they do? 

And we each need a coach. We each need someone that will come alongside us and challenge our assumptions challenge us to move beyond what is safe, comfortable and known. We cannot do this on our own. If you think you can, then I need to disavow you of that notion. It's not possible. We need someone that will come alongside us and help us convert our potential into higher performance. 

So we need three things: a purpose, a process, and we need a person. If you would like two resources to serve you in this regard, go to my website and the featured resources section. There you will find two learning aids. The After Action Assessment and the Thinking Bigger Recommendations are available as my contribution to you pursuing your full potential. 

That's Hugh's Words of Wisdom for Wednesday, August 26, 2020. 

Live boldly!