I want to acknowledge the unique challenges we face in a rapidly and ever-evolving business environment that sometimes feels like navigating on quicksand. Your confidence, resilience and sense of well-being are easily eroded if you shift your attention, even for a moment.
We have so much coming at us, such as:
- Adapting to remote and hybrid work challenges
- Tackling technology integration, including understanding AI
- Urban-suburban migration
- Redefined post-pandemic values
- Generational and demographic shifts
- Changing financial, geo-political and economic landscapes
- Social and cultural changes and the minefield navigating them
- Adapting to the Age of Knowledge and Information, it is becoming harder and harder to be commercial when people do not want to be sold to or marketed to.
These megatrends and many more challenges we face underscore the importance of adaptability, continuous learning and agility to be better positioned to thrive in this ever-evolving business landscape.
BUT, we must go beyond agility and information to maintain our resilient confidence in this new world order.
I want to give you some ideas to help you chart your course and have a harmonious blend of personal well-being and professional confidence amidst transformative trends and uncertainty.
Imagine you are on top of a tripod that is sitting on a solid base foundation. The three legs of the tripod are:
1 / You.
2 / Your Alignment with your business’ brand promise [that is, its mission, vision, values, attributes, tone of voice and all the other ingredients of a brand].
3 / Your Interpreting of the World Around You.
The work to do in these three legs is to:
1 / You: Have a solid personal toolkit (this is a blend of your personal brand promise where you know where you are going, regardless of the department or company you are with, your values and your destination).
2 / Alignment: Understand what elements of your toolkit align with the brand promise of your business (once you are clear about your toolkit, you can make easier decisions as they relate to your work within the organisation).
3 / Interpretation: Understand the world around you instead of reacting to the headlines. Increase your sense of calm by being informed of the megatrends affecting everyone. Clarity about the bigger picture makes the day-to-day easier. It is an exercise in sense-making to reduce some of the fear that comes with our information overload and headline news.
After you have clarity on the tripod, build a solid foundation of mental fitness:
- Create your Personal Protection System: turn off the news, and get informed [see news as a product versus getting informed by reading the source materials, Substack, podcasts and journals].
- Listen to yourself and your body.
- Build daily rituals around mindfulness and mental-emotional fitness. Focus on self-care practices: put on your oxygen mask first. Meditation and mindfulness significantly impact confidence, attitude, and reactivity.
- Mental Fitness: watch for unaddressed small t-trauma (symptoms include trouble setting boundaries, easily triggered or reactivity, attachment issues, saying yes when you mean no, and difficulty with team or social interaction)
- Live and Work with Integrity.
- Deconstruct the narratives in your head and reconstruct new ones: beliefs that no longer serve you. Self-limiting beliefs are an opaque lens through which you see your life and work. You want to remove those to have clarity.
At the end of the day, remember:
- Be gentle and kind to yourself. Life is hard enough without self-limiting belief talk.
- Evolutionary biology has not caught up with our hyper-novel progress, so know that it is perfectly fine to feel out of sorts. It is normal to feel off, but know that the new normal is not normal. Baseline stress levels are elevated more than ever before.
- Navigating these times is like no other in our history. In the past, you would set your destination, chart your course, and if you did everything right, you would succeed. Today, there isn’t autopilot anymore.
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Sense-making Resources:
- A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Bret Weinstein (evolutionary biologist)
- The End of the World is Just the Beginning, Peter Zehan (geo politics expert)
- What’s Our Problem, A Self-Help Book for Societies, Tim Urban
- The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, Ray Dalio
- The Way of Integrity, Martha Beck
- The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, Gabor Maté