The Future Is A Work In Progress
Leadership can be a lonely journey when you have to build out a Strategy, Processes and Team from scratch. I’ve done this a handful of times now. Gone into organisations and led the team in quality engineering / software testing. At times, especially in my first rodeo of doing this, I wanted to do well and created a lot of internal pressure on myself, causing stress and anxiety. This blog is reflecting on my learnings and how I have relieved some of that internal pressure.
Learning: You are never alone
What I have come to realise, is that I’m never alone in the leadership journey. Each time I have had a fantastic team around me and what I’ve learnt is to share the feelings and challenges that come with leadership. A lot of the time, you have to look at things from a different angle and explore solutions. I have found when speaking to other leaders in the organisation and trusted professionals, there is always a solution to be found.
So a key learning for me is the realisation that I’m never alone. To always share and explore solutions with other people.
Learning: There is no failure.
The last year or more I have been learning about Buddhism and in particular, enjoyed Ajahn Brahm’s talks on Youtube. Today I listened to one of his talks about How to Handle Anxiety. What I liked about this talk and ones in general, are the way he looks at things from a different perspective. It’s this type of thinking I really enjoy. Thinking about a topic from another angle, instead of getting confined into a particular way of thinking. In the talk he mentions that there is nothing called failure. We do things and learn from them. I find this angle very interesting! Perhaps instead of the word failure we can think of it as a learning and then what action we take out of the learning. So a key thing for me is to document my learnings and ask myself, what am I doing with these learnings?
Learning: Do what’s in your control
This is an important one for me. To be conscious of what’s in my control or outside of my control. For example, I can make self care a priority and limit my work in progress. Exploring less is more and do one thing really well at a time. I can’t also control other people’s thoughts and actions. What I can do is control how I communicate and the actions that I take.
Learning: A positive attitude
As a leader, I feel it’s very important to keep the positive energy going forward. The reason is psychology! There is mirror behavior in psychology. This is where in a social group, one person imitates gestures, speech patterns, or attitudes of another. So if for example, I had a bad mood one day and appeared very grumpy, this might rub on other people. However, if I share a positive attitude and growth/learning mindset to other people, then that might mirror in other people around me.
Overall I feel like the Future is a work in progress and this is exciting. To hold onto this thought and keep moving forward.
