Leadership and Life - Building Strong Leaders and Teams

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Clarity Breaks

An important part of leadership is to pause and take breaks (as I mentioned in THIS Pause blog post). Sometimes those breaks are mental breaks to recoup and recover. Other times, they should be clarity breaks where you take a step back and focus on your business or your life. It’s a chance to clear your mind of the thousand questions and thoughts flying around and get them down on paper. I (like many others) am notoriously bad at this unless you count showers as clarity breaks (they are one of the few times that I seem to clear my head and just let my mind go; my best ideas tend to come to me in the shower).

I recently attended a session about the Entrepreneurial Operating System. I’ve used this system at two different companies and like it overall. Towards the end of the session, we were reviewing key ideas for managing and leading and Clarity Breaks came up. The facilitator challenged us to schedule one and to ensure we communicated the date and time to our supervisor, as well as, the results afterwards. I looked at my calendar and determined the following Wednesday would work. I put it in my calendar and chose my favorite independent coffee place. It’s important to go away from work; for me that meant also not at home as I work from home a lot too. My clarity break was 6 days away.

For the next 6 days, I worried about how I would fill a whole hour. Wednesday came and I drove to my coffee place, ordered my favorite chai tea latte and sat down at a small table near the back where I wouldn’t be distracted by all the people walking in. You are encouraged to just have a legal pad and pen and to put all the technology and distractions away. I didn’t really know where to start, but I took out my legal pad and wrote the time and date and then stared at the almost blank page.

I took a couple of breaths and then started with:

Leadership – support – ongoing

How to support our leadership program on an ongoing basis is something that I think about a lot, but I hadn’t come up with any solutions as I am generally too stuck in the weeds to see the bigger picture. I continued with:

How to build leadership into everyday practice?

How to follow up and see how they are doing? Is it sinking in? Are they practicing what I taught them?

It started to flow a bit more and I kept going. I wrote questions and challenges and to my surprise and excitement, ideas and solutions poured out too. 45 minutes passed quickly and I had 3.5 pages of notes, questions and ideas. I had come up with solutions to a couple of problems which had been plaguing me and I am excited to try them and see if they help. I came up with further questions to consider and some bigger philosophical questions to discuss with my boss.

After 45 minutes, I looked up and noticed a good friend enter the coffee shop, so I did indeed get distracted, but we talked about the Clarity Break and I showed her what I had brainstormed and explained that she should try it too. She seemed interested and when I got home, I researched and found some great links (see the end of the blog post).

We often spend much of our lives living in the weeds which makes sense. We are working on the project or driving the kids to activities; keeping the house clean or just working on the tasks at work. It’s so easy to get stuck here though. As a leader, though, we need to take a step back and look through a bigger lens. For me, that will include consistent, scheduled clarity breaks.

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