Exercise: Enablers for Self

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For each pillar there are enablers to achieving your strategic priorities, and things that will act as detractors, blockages, or anchors to your progress.

What enablers do you need to have in place to make your strategic priorities happen?

• Capacity — Do you have the physical capacity to do everything above? What will it mean in terms of investment of time and energy? How will you create that capacity? How might it affect your choices?
• Financially — consider what you have chosen will mean in terms of financial investment. Will you need to do some financial planning, investment or financial management to enable your choices? Do you need to create a budget to manage, do you need to make some savings or reduce costs by changing your cost model, or change your income streams?
• Emotionally — consider how your mental state will impact the success you will have in making the change that you seek. Are you ready to take the actions associated with the conscious choices you want to make, and the changes that it will entail? If you know that something is going to trigger you emotionally, you may want to seek help to support you through the journey. For example, if your strategic priority is to invest more time in yourself, in your learning and development, or in your wellbeing, how will you set clear boundaries and deal with a sense of failure of duty if you need to say ‘no’ to some competing expectations of others that may generate a less than constructive response from them? What mental resilience and preparation will you need to put in place to enable you to overcome these feelings and deal with these challenges?
• Physically — you may have physical barriers to reaching your goals, such as a back injury, fitness level, health, or sheer exhaustion. Consider whether you are addressing these issues positively so that you are in a position to be successful.
• Environment — Don’t let the environment ‘punch you in the face’ and stop you in your tracks. Change, manage or avoid destructive environments. Consider what changes may need to be made within your environment to enable your success and not undermine it.
• Boundaries — What boundaries might you need to put in place to protect and prioritise your commitments? What might you need to say ‘no’ to, or say ‘yes’ to?
• Supporters — Who could act as a support, critical friend, mentor or guide on your journey?

What detractors might undermine your success? For every conscious choice that you make about a strategic priority, there are detractors that can undermine and block your progress. These can take the form of:

• Short term gains over longer term more strategic priorities. The urgent always drowns out the important. Focus on the rocks in your life and not the sand.
• Limiting beliefs or assumptions such as that you don’t deserve success, you are not good enough, you don’t have enough time or energy, there are too many competing priorities.
• Criticism and lack of belief or support from critical relations, partners, friends.
• Self-defeating defensive thinking and behaviours – has your brain become wired in a certain way as a protection from something that happened in the past, an unconscious commitment that might stop you from achieving your conscious commitments? In their book ‘Immunity to Change’ Robert Kegan and Laskow Lahey give great insights on how to uncover those mental models that hold us prisoner and resist change.

Capture some notes on what you will put in place to enable you to achieve your Self pillar strategic priorities.

Draft your enabler statement and what it means (inc what you will need to overcome)