Growing your momentum will involve intense, prolonged activity. The danger is that a resolute focus on delivering particular objectives can lead to you being blinkered and bored. Running the eighteenth mile of the marathon is hard work and drudgery with the destination far out of sight. What keeps runners going is having their eyes fixed on the goal. But where does the freshness come from to lift their spirits and maintain their resolve? Freshness is about staying open-minded, knowing when to forget, coping with disappointment and keeping up vitality.
As you raise your game, guarding against staleness and boredom is vital. If your heart sinks your mood can spiral down into your boots. When your motivation wanes, every step becomes even harder work. Knowing what keeps you fresh means that you are alert and able to accept change and knocks in a positive way.
Hazel Mackenzie is a well-respected facilitator who helps leaders reflect on how to keep up their motivation. Her advice is practical:
Beware of putting a label on yourself. You are in danger of boxing yourself in. If you describe yourself as being disorganised you will be disorganised. You never look as bad or as good as you think; reality is in the middle. Recognise that your mood swings might be flights of fancy rather than reality. Watch the spiral. When you are fluid and confident you will become ever more effective.
Observe yourself. Be mindful of what is happening but don't believe you have to be perfect. Watch the avoidance tactic and beware when it distorts your approach. Be conscious of the difference between want and need. I want something is much more motivating than I need to achieve something. Always be conscious about what is giving you energy.
Hazel's constant theme is about keeping up freshness and allowing there to be a spiral upwards, leading to hope and a positive approach, rather than a spiral downwards, leading to dejection and the likelihood of failure.
Being fresh is partly about being confident in your own ideas. It is a step on from merely relying on picking up ideas from others. Freshness is about being open to new ideas and approaches, recognising that there is often more than one way of solving a problem. It involves recognising what gives you energy and how you can nurture those sources of energy, and acknowledging what thought processes enable you to view problems in different ways. Accept that you will feel a different level of freshness depending on the time of day and your location.
The authors of ?What If! How to Start a Creative Revolution at Work(Capstone, 1999) set out some practical examples to help you develop fresh ideas:
Take a new form of transport to work next week. You will be amazed who you can meet and what you will see.
Deliberately read a magazine or newspaper, listen to a radio station or watch a TV programme that you wouldn't normally see. Children's TV is good for this.
Plan a monthly lunch with people from other parts of the business whom you don't usually consult. Chat to them about an issue they are working on and get their perspectives on issues you are working on.
Get out of your normal environment for at least half a day a week. At least 70% of what we think is the result of what is around us.
Ask your family (especially kids) to help solve a problem you are working on.
Allocate twice as much time as you normally would to solving a problem. Make sure that you have three solutions before choosing one.
Block out 'freshness time' for you and your team once a month. Go somewhere you wouldn't normally go together or do an activity you wouldn't normally do.
Take a walk in the park during office hours. Change the pace of your thinking. Take time to ponder.
Listen to pop charts. Do you know what is No. 1 at the moment?
Reinvent your role at least twice a year.
Some of these ideas will not appeal to you. You may be more interested in classical music rather than listening to the pop charts, but the question of what stimulates you to fresh thinking is a good one.
How good are you at forgetting? Forgetfulness can be dangerous when you have made commitments to others and you have obligations to meet, but it can be a strength when it allows you freedom to invade your mind.
The ability to forget is crucial to moving on. If you remembered every number plate you had ever read, your mind would be completely cluttered. You have to forget facts to allow room for new facts to be remembered! But you also have to forget some of your emotional reactions. So often your mind can be cluttered with emotions like anger, resentment or frustration about past events. You might feel that you have been unfairly treated by your organisation (resentment), that you have not been able to achieve what you wanted (frustration), that you have been bullied by a particular leader (anger) or that you might fail on a particular project (fear) or you may not be able to get a past failure out of your mind (pain).
Emotional clutter in your mind can be a very damaging inhibitor. You can get stuck and be unable to move on. Your emotions can become so fixed or frazzled that your scope for freshness has completely gone.
Progress comes through recognising what your emotional reactions are and reflecting on how you can best leave them behind. It happens when you are honest about what anger, resentment or frustration is gnawing away at you. You can then box that emotion, talk it through with a good friend or coach and decide on the best way for you to move on. You need to recognise that the past is the past, decluttering your mind from irrelevant facts or destructive emotions and then giving yourself space to have a genuine openness to new experiences.
As your responsibilities grow you will experience a mixture of successes and failures. You will strive towards certain outcomes and feel dejected and disappointed if they are not delivered. Part of moving on from disappointment is recognising that the process of being disappointed allows you to be honest about your emotional reaction when something does go wrong.
Key steps in coping with disappointment can be:
Be conscious of your normal pattern of how long disappointment lasts.
Try to define the sources of disappointment as tightly as possible.
Be conscious about what in the past has helped you move on from disappointment.
Always think about the silver lining to this cloud.
Be explicit about the practical steps you need to take to move on from the disappointment.
Hold fast to the original reasons for taking a particular course of action and decide whether you want to give it another go.
Nurturing will involve strong messages but will also include care, compassion and positive support.
It is not only renewing your own freshness that matters, it is developing freshness in others. A nurturing parent is clear on the boundaries, but always caring in their approach. Nurturing is about growing other people so that they are strong and decisive, with attitudes and decisions rooted in a transparent set of clear values.
How can you increase your capacity to nurture others and keep them fresh?
Be willing to share your experience of what works and what doesn't work.
Be open about revealing how you handle your own vulnerabilities, fears or priorities.
Set aside time to mentor others in focused conversations.
Bring together groups of people who can learn from each other.
Become an even better listener and be prepared to ask different kinds of questions that enable people to develop their own confidence and competence.
Reframe what you regard as success so that it includes the outcomes achieved by those you have nurtured.
The leader who nurtures others will build up a genuine and substantial bank of support and goodwill.
Enabling others to keep fresh will in its turn have a valuable impact on you. The more you legitimise others keeping open to new ideas, the more they will want to share them with you and stimulate you to develop your own clarity of expression.
