As a leader, how is your clarity and focus these days?
I was thinking about this while watching the U.S. Open. It’s impressive to see these leaders excel in their field; they are really amazing! It reminds me of the great leaders and managers I work with who overcome obstacles, deal with set-backs and persevere to the end.
After watching a game or two it’s easy to take their impressive skills for granted. After all, they make it look so easy. And then they make a clear mistake.
Such was the case for one such player: with a single swat, he unintentionally hit a ball at a line judge, and was disqualified.
How can such a well-trained, highly-skilled and disciplined leader make such a mistake?
I think he got caught in a momentary lapse of un-mindfulness, distracted and fueled by frustration. And it happens to the best of us. We lose our clarity and focus.
Leadership Clarity and Focus
Leadership clarity is knowing exactly what you want to achieve as a leader: your vision. Leadership focus is knowing and doing the actions required to get you there. Great leaders do the right thing, right now. How?
First, they develop a clear mental picture of their intention. Then, they make a conscious choice to commit to and pursue that intention. And last, but certainly not least, they develop strategies for protecting their intention against distracting feelings or emotions, like boredom and frustration.
Leadership Brain Fitness
Just like great athletes, great business leaders take purposeful action to preserve and strengthen their mental abilities. After all, leaders who work on their brain fitness are less prone to errors. They understand that clarity and focus require three key areas of brain function:
Cognition: Education and experience contribute to your cognitive abilities, so wise leaders engage in learning new skills which they practice to improve their processing speed (how quickly they can recall information, names and memories). This allows them to make wise and timely decisions and responses, and, it also inhibits actions that could sabotage their best efforts, like hitting a ball at a line judge.
Emotion Management: Learning how to self-regulate emotions, including stress and anger, is crucial for personal and professional success. You see, when we store an event or action in our memory, we also store the associated emotion. This unconscious emotional tagging process can influence our clarity, focus and future decision making process.
Executive Judgment: This operational part of the brain enables us to receive information, assess our feelings, identify and analyze pros and cons, formulate plans and discern outcomes.
I’ll dive in to this in greater detail in my next post. In the meantime, what do you think? How do you maintain clarity and focus? I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me here, on LinkedIn, or give me a call: 561-582-6060.
