Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #15: The Method
This week’s exercise from Leadership Step By Step was to build on the previous exercise (“The Model”) and to try to influence your own environment, beliefs, and emotions in order to elicit a rewarding feeling from something that you’d like to improve at, but haven’t been able to.
For this exercise, Josh asked us to form groups to brainstorm new emotions, environments, beliefs, and behaviors, and I’m glad he did, as it was very helpful in my exercise. Discussing my “The Model” exercise and then trying to come up with new emotions, new environments, new beliefs, and new behaviors with someone else opened the door to ideas that and suggestions that wouldn’t have occurred to me, and the behavior I changed made quite a difference in my week!
In selecting something to try to improve at, Josh recommended doing something that isn’t too difficult to accomplish in a week, so the situation I decided to use was one from my previous exercise:
- Situation I’d Like to Improve: Posting online content on a schedule and staying with it.
- Environment: Anywhere (mostly at home?)
- Belief: I am too busy with too many other priorities to get ahead on writing and scheduling content. “It is too hard or takes too much time to do right now.”
- Emotion: Stress, frustration, helplessness, disappointment
- Behavior: Avoid writing and posting, even though I know I have the time to do it.
Though this has seemed difficult in the past, implementing a new behavior regimen seemed doable in a week. After brainstorming with my group partner, we came up with the following:
- New Emotion: Rested, empowered, fun/enjoyable, accomplished, satisfied, proud
- New Environment: Different time, prioritize this over morning routine of exercise/piano (which can be done later.
- New Beliefs: I make time to focus on my podcast and blog, which are important to me. I prioritize my most focused time for them.
- New Behavior: Do workout and piano later in the day. Prioritize work on blog/podcast for my 6-7am timeslot (while everyone is sleeping).
As obvious as this seems, it wasn’t something that would’ve come to me on my own – I really enjoy my morning routine and it helps me get my day started out right so it didn’t occur to me to try to change it. Any change felt like it would be counterproductive to an efficient day, but after brainstorming some different ideas, this seemed like the best solution to achieve the results I wanted, and since it was just for a week, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try, and I’m glad I did! It turned out, that by prioritizing blog writing and podcast editing in my morning routine, it eliminated the friction that I usually have in doing it since it was already decided that I do it, and I ended up being able to get done with a so much podcast editing and blog writing that I would still have time to do my exercise and piano practice in that same hour! Granted, it’s only been a week that I’ve been doing this, but I haven’t burned out yet and it feels amazing to get so much done in such a short amount of time. What felt impossible before almost felt easy this week.
Similar to The Model, the most important thing I learned from trying The Method was to start using some kind of system that acts on my emotions/motivation to get the results I want. “Finding motivation” to do something has always felt like it’s just something you are born with; you either have it or you don’t. Having a method to use side steps that mode of thinking and got me immediate results. It’s possible that I was just lucky and The Method works for me only in this scenario, but it seems like it is a pretty effective system for changing behavior. I plan on trying to do it for more things I want to improve at in the future.
Another thing I learned is the importance of getting input from others. Too often we do some internet searches to try to find ideas or additional input because we want someone who is “qualified” to give us answers, but sometimes just chatting with people close to you can give you just-as-good or better results than random people or articles on the internet.
Unlike The Model, where I felt like there’s some tweaks I can make to make the exercise “fit” me better (though I still haven’t discovered what they are), The Method felt really comfortable to use. I really thought the four lenses of environment, belief, emotions, and behaviors were a great way to break down and analyze how you feel and how you want to feel about something you’re improving at. Whereas I would normally stop at my feelings about something, the specific and yet simple, but narrow focus of those four lenses really felt like it made it easy to think about the current situation and discover a seemingly obvious path forward. A “cheat code” if you will, for finding a path through the fog.
Josh had some great examples of other famous leaders who didn’t necessarily make use of this methodology, but all had their own way of doing something similar: learning to in-part accept their situation, but adapt their mindset in order to find love/joy/reward/passion in some of the most difficult situations imaginable: Mandela, Mark Zupan, and Viktor Frankl were a few of the examples he used that really stuck with me. They were people that suffered incredibly difficult situations, but somehow were able to find meaning, indestructible spirit, and love that allowed them to accomplish great things. Their experiences really gave me a sense of how far a carefully tuned mindset can take you.
Again, I’ve only been doing this for a few days so far, so I can’t say yet whether this will be something I can sustain for the long term, but at this point, it has certainly felt rewarding so I feel compelled to continue to try. I think both The Model and The Method are systems that I can use in future to find more paths through the fog and I hope someday to gain resolve, determination, and tenacity to achieve whatever goals I set myself.
