Exercise: Enablers for Work and Contribution

Listen here (or read below)

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—What capacity do you need to build your professional development or contribution? If you are going to put more emphasis on this pillar, what implications might it have on the rest of your strategy?
• Environment—What changes might you need to consider to be conducive to achieving these priorities – from a better physical working environment or creating a more constructive mental environment?
• 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?
• Connections—What network or community do you need to be a part of? How will you build connections to enable your development and growth, to support your new venture or promotion, to open doors to new opportunities, to mentor or coach you, to educate you?
• What alignment do you need to do to ensure that your role and others’ roles are clear and well supported?
• 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? (See exercise)
• 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? What mental resilience and preparation will you need to put in place to enable you to overcome old narratives and any sense of not being good enough to deal with the challenges you may face?
• Physically—do you have any physical barriers to reaching your goals? Consider whether you are addressing these issues positively so that you are in a position to be successful.
• Supporters—Who could act as a support, critical friend, partner, 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; 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 business colleagues, partners, family, 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 Work and Contribution strategic priorities.

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