Introduction
This morning, I have been thinking about a line from Ryan Holiday’s book, Stillness Is The Key (Portfolio/Penguin, 2019), where he states the following: “We are overfed and undernourished. Overstimulated, over scheduled, and lonely.” When I step back and look all around me, I see a lot of people who fall into this description.
In particular, I see people in leadership positions dealing with this, and struggling with how to move forward given so many things in their life and work feel unclear, uncertain, and unknown. They want to create a work plan, and then they want to execute it. They also want a plan for their personal future. The challenge is that they are overfed, undernourished, overstimulated, over scheduled, and lonely. So, they feel stuck about how to begin the whole process.
The phrase, charting a path, is how one decides upon a destination and a route. It is an old naval term where you use charts to navigate your way. When one does it correctly, it prevents them from arriving at some unintended or undesired destination.
Whether we are doing this at sea or on land, charting your path typically involves three general steps. The first is orientation where you identify and clarify your destination, i.e. your overall goal. The second is way finding, where you make a plan for how you are going to get there, i.e. think planning your itinerary. This can also include making a map or using a map to figure how to get to you destination. The third step is journeying, where you actually walk the path you defined in the previous two steps.
As we know, all three of these steps will involve stepping outside your comfort zone, and experiencing moments that feel chaotic and uncomfortable. But with the right framework and the right kind of support, we can chart a path and in the process transform the route from being chaotic to being a challenge. The key is to know where to begin.
Preparing To Plan
Having spent decades helping people and organizations plan for the future, and having spent decades teaching people how to plan for the future, I like to use the following five part framework: preparing to plan, planing the plan, preparing to execute the plan, executing the plan, and evaluating the plan. While the aforementioned three part framework, i.e orientation, way finding and journeying, may work for an experienced planner, I find that many people don’t know how to begin the process of planning. And when they do begin, they often get lost in the prep work and in the planning. This then creates a cascading of problems which results in getting lost in preparing to execute the plan and in executing the plan. As the old Irish saying goes, “a good beginning is half the journey.” Same goes for planning. A good framework for charting your path makes a world of difference when you walk the path.
From my perspective, the most critical step to charting your path is preparing to plan. And I believe most people skip this step in their rush to create the plan, i.e. the actual document, and to execute the plan. Nevertheless, just because most people skip it does not mean it is unimportant. Instead, I believe it is vital to success, because to chart your path means to find your path and this takes time and self-reflection.
When we feel overfed, undernourished, overstimulated, over scheduled, and lonely, the idea of taking time for reflection seems worthless. However, I agree with the French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, Blaise Pascal who wrote in 1654, “All of humility’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It is in the creation of unstructured states of being, i.e. creating time and space for reflection, that we discover a great deal about our self and our path, past, present, and possibly the future.
When we create time and space for reflection, we create a window into discovering what’s most meaningful and fulfilling in our work and our life. We also discover whether or not we are willing to follow it whole heartedly. We even create a window into whether or not we have the capacity to plan and the capacity to execute the plan.
John Paul Lederach in his book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005), notes that most people “want to build a tunnel [i.e. a linear pathway] through the problems/obstacles they are currently experiencing.” But Lederach ask us to consider a the following question, “How do you tunnel through an active volcano?” The choice to build a tunnel creates “tunnel vision” and the outcome is that we lose “peripheral vision.” As he explains, “the capacity to situate oneself in a changing environment with a sense of direction and purpose and at the same time develop an ability to see and move with the unexpected” is very difficult because “people with tunnel vision can only see forward.” As he continues, successful leaders can see “forward, backward, and sideways.”
And for me this ability to see holistically begins when we create time and space for reflection, i.e. unstructured states of being. Here we stop rushing forward. Instead, we pause and reflect on what got us to this point in our life, and whether or not we have the time, the energy, and the right support network to move forward. But this is deep end of the pool work and it is challenging.
To be continued on Tuesday.
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