Manage Your Mindset

FountainBlue's March 17 When She Speaks program was on the topic of 'Manage Your Mindset'. Please join me in thanking our esteemed panelists and our hosts at Coupa.

Our seasoned and inspiring panelists provide practical advice and insights on how to better manage your mindset. Below is a compilation of their advice and wisdom.

Be Leader-ly

• Know your personal WHY and make sure that you're thinking, speaking and acting on that WHY.

• Act with strength, confidence and fortitude and enable, empower, and enlist others to contribute and participate, making incremental progress towards defined goals.

• Ensure that others feel empowered and enjoy what they do and who they work with and for.

• Fix the bottlenecks and broken systems, for the little frustrations will slowly drain positive energy and intentions.

Accept what you cannot change.

• Overwhelming as the current macro and micro conditions are, accepting what's out there and impacting us is the first step to making progress despite the challenges, and even improving and getting stronger because of these challenges.

• Labeling and understanding these external conditions might support our acceptance of these conditions, and how they will forever change what's next.

  • The acronym 'PESTLE' was mentioned to represent the political, environmental, social, technological, legal and economic challenges brought on by the pandemic and its aftermath. See the resources section below.

• Manage 'your own side of the net', rather than expecting that the other party(ies) change to better suit your own wishes and requirements. 

Be centered and control what you can change.

• Find the silver lining from every cloud, and leverage it to persevere and withstand current challenges. 

• Don't give another party the power to bring you down. 

• Use data and information to help hold yourself and others accountable and manage course-corrections proactively where necessary.

• Create and draw upon an 'internal GPS' to ensure that you're navigating true to your course, your values, your intentions, while accepting that you can't change external factors like the road, the conditions, the signage, and the other drivers.

• Don't get beaten down, settling for unappealing leadership, circumstances, and disasters. Decide to manage your mindset and reach out for the support and resources you need to ride through the wave and make incremental changes. 

• To increase the likelihood of success, be specific and clear on why you want to change something, what you want to change, how you want to change it, who will help change it, what the results of change will be.

Be open to input from trusted others around you.

• Create a network of trusted others and invite them to help you see your world through another lens. 

• Welcome feedback from others so that you can grow and learn, explore and expand.

• With that said, create a filter so that you trust the input, feedback and communications of others. Beware of those who would yell, demean or embarrass you or put you down, especially publicly. 

Choose to always raise the bar for yourself and those you touch.

• Bring an open, whole self to the challenges and opportunities ahead.

• Proactively share what you know, and contribute generously to a cause worth supporting.

• Look not just at the bottom line and big picture, but also at the drivers for the shifts in strategies and results. 

• Help humans better understand business, but also make the business more human.

• Make the business case for the value add you and your team provide, and provide the data and results which benefit your internal and external customers.

• Life will continue to bring you challenges as it's a journey not a destination. Tell yourself on occasion, 'I've arrived', even if you're arriving only at the next milestone, not the destination. 

Connect with your team and be better together.

• Create and nurture a trusted community and collective mindset which benefits all individuals, the full team, the product line, and the organization as a whole.

• Work with a team to solve problems better, map solutions better, make decisions better, and in general be bigger than individual members can be alone. 

• Adopt an all-in, all-one mindset so everyone feels trusted, safe and empowered enough to fail forward, to work hard, to be proud of what they do. With that said, ensure that everyone is positive all-in, and all-one, willing to support a positive and constructive culture.  

The bottom line is that what's next will not be the 'normal' we've always learned. But managing your mindset and that of others will help us all navigate what's next, even if nobody can predict what's coming.

Resources:

• Navigating the Headwinds and the Tailwinds, FountainBlue's March 2023 blog

• Christopher Titmuss: A Mind of Dark Projections. Twelve Reflections to end Prejudice.