JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Leaders lead by example. Before you ask other people to be active citizens at home, or at work, you need to ensure that you are committed to action. That you are pursuing personal change and improvement, and that you are motivated in your life and work. But, if that’s a struggle how do you do that?
The first step, according to coach and best-selling author Michael Bungay Stanier is to set yourself a worthy goal.
MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER: A worthy goal can be about your team, or it can be about your family, or it could be about your neighborhood, or it could be about running Microsoft. You know, it depends on where you want to play. And for me, a worthy goal has three parts to it. The first part is it thrilling? Like does it actually light you up? Do you actually care about it? It also needs to be important. It needs to serve a bigger game. Does it give more to the world than it takes? And then the third element is daunting. Like does this stretch you and grow you and keep you learning? Take you out to the edge of your own sense of competence and confidence and sense of what you know and sense of who you are?
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Goals help us take control of a life and to set priorities, to give us direction and a sense of destination. But at the time, it's easy to get distracted and to lose momentum.
DR TARA SWART: Because we're very busy. We have tasks that absolutely have to be done in the real world, which mean that the places I'd love to travel to, or the dream client that I'd love to guess might not be my top priority every single day. If I'm trying to just, you know, get my life under control.
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Making an action board changed the life of Neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart and it can change yours too.
DR TARA SWART: I would advise people to do a new one every year. I tend to group things together, so I would have the home things in one section and then business things in a different section.
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: You can use anything from an action board, from a poster sized board to a piece of paper clips from magazines and newspapers. For images, pick the actions you feel a priority at the top and work down, or you may have a separate board for short and long term goals.
DR TARA SWART: As with any kind of behavior change or goal setting, there are always some things that are quicker wins and some things that take longer.
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Action boards work because when you're a process called value tagging.
DR TARA SWART: Your brain naturally will filter out the things that it doesn't consider to be important, and it will direct your attention to the things that it does consider crucial to your survival, and it will tag them in order of importance. Your brain does that without you even realizing all the time. This is the reason that you're not feeling your clothes on your body all day, because you don't need to.
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So, the more you look at these images, the higher up the move in your brain's importance ranking.
DR TARA SWART: The reason for doing the board and having it somewhere visible is that you are continually priming your brain to remember that these are the things that you want.
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Personal and professional growth does not happen in your control zones. To achieve your goals, we need to overcome a fear of failure.
RESHMA SAUJANI: I had a lot of anxiety and a lot of panic attacks and a lot of like moments of like, what am I doing?
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: When Reshma Saujani decided to quit her comfortable job to pursue a lifelong ambition to serve in government. It was terrifying.
RESHMA SAUJANI: That was the most defining moment of my life.
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: She was the first south Asian woman ever to run for Congress in the States, and she did not get elected.
RESHMA SAUJANI: I got crushed. I remember waking up the next morning thinking about how many people were laughing at me right now, and the newspaper headlines, the jokes that they made about how much money I spent for, like, you know, a handful of votes. But even that public humiliation didn't break me. I cried, day two got a dog a week later and that was it. I was done. I drank a lot of margaritas and moved on.
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: When you find your purpose, you have an incredible amount of energy and it's in that state that big decisions get made. My sense of purpose is tied up in seeing the injustice of parents that suffered, which sparked a passion, you know, to give back.
RESHMA SAUJANI: My parents coming here as refugees and as immigrants was, like, very profound for me. You know, here were two people in their early 20s coming to a foreign country. They didn't have any family. They didn't have any friends, they didn't speak the language, and they were just getting by. But they were so grateful to be alive and to have a shot. You know, I mean, at creating a better opportunity for their children that they had such deep love and affection for their new home. And so for me, I think for my youngest of possible ages, I wanted to give back to the country that had literally saved my parents life. And I think that desire to give back and to serve and I think, connected to this idea. That one can be expelled from their home because the color of their skin. Here. I mean, I think those are the things that really pushed me towards wanting to be an activist and wanting to make the world a better place.
JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Find and fuel your purpose through impactful action, and make meaningful progress in your life. I'm Jean-Philippe Courtois. If you'd like more practical tips on how to grow as an individual, a leader and ultimately as a global citizen head to my LinkedIn page and sign up for my monthly news-letter Positive Leadership and You.
