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What challenges are you facing right now?

Storms can kick up at any moment, within the company and outside, and sometimes both at once. In such fierce gales, facing rogue waves, can you hold the helm?

 

A startup founder we worked with described the experience of his first funding round as “a tornado of fire and sharks.”

 

Can you keep standing through that?    

 

Great leadership has evolved: It’s flatter, faster, and more fluid than ever. 

Executives face waves of mega crises, and what worked yesterday doesn’t work today. 

 Being mindfully alert implies being precise about and flexible with where you put your attention, like an elite athlete in a fast-paced competition. 

Achieving this requires facility in two core elements: overcoming reflexive choices and understanding that leadership is always a three-dimensional challenge.

  

To begin your journey, your commitment to increasing your self-awareness and self- responsibility is paramount.

 

Do you know how to create relationships that empower others and unlock optimal well-being and performance in them?

In any interaction, a leader must have multiple ways to respond to unlock the potential of others. 

This applies not just to direct reports, but to the relationships up, down, and all around you.

Research shows that optimal performance requires not only willpower, but what has been called “waypower.” 

You may have all the will in the world, but for complex leadership demands, you need to be able to generate several different options to achieve your goals. 

Your automatic reactions and default approaches can become dangerous in new types of high-stakes situations.

When we need to make judgments, we tend to connect the dots with our wishes or fears.

 

This doesn’t help. 

Those who see reality for what it is have a strategic advantage. 

You have your default ways of seeing reality, but you’re not always correct. 

First double-check to see if you are seeing reality for what it is, not what you want or hope it to be or what you fear it can be.

 

When looking at your priorities, it is crucial to not exaggerate or discount opportunities and threats—or worse, completely miss the point.

 And when taking leadership options into account, you need to be realistic about which ones you can reliably call upon and not over- or underestimate your leadership capability.

Mindfulness is the capacity to be present, to separate yourself from distractions, to notice but not judge what is happening in your external environment, and to understand and accept how you are feeling.

Being mindfully alert is about overcoming your instincts. 

If you automatically reach for your proven playbook in every high-stakes situation, you are not being mindfully alert.

Carol Kauffman and David Noble