When you’re feeling stuck or frustrated in your life, work or relationships, one of the most difficult things to do is regain vision and perspective and see the new opportunities before you.
The challenge is that we’re too close to the issue, to emotionally invested to make decisions rationally.
One option when you’re in this situation is to try to take another person’s outside perspective by asking yourself “If I was totally new, and had not invested the last XX years in this, what would I do?”
The reality is that question does two things:
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It removes the sunk cost. People are notorious for being loss adverse. That means when things are going badly, and will most likely continue to get worse, we don’t know when to quit because we’ve invested so much of ourselves into the project, we can’t imagine to lose the work we’ve already put in.
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It simplifies things. We have a tendency to see all the trees but miss the forest. We can’t see the big picture. If the problem was simple, how would you solve it? If it were easy, what would you do?
We need to get outside of ourselves, outside of our heads, and try to view the issue from an outside point of view.
Leaders often are ineffective because they have lost their vision and energy. Ironically, they often lose that vision not because of disengagement, but because of over-engagement. They are too close, to wrapped up in details and lose the 10,000 foot perspective. They manage things via +1 or -1 tweaks rather that looking at the big picture and knowing what the organization as a whole needs not now but in the future. Over-involvement in the minutia means that they end up burned-out as staff grow more and more reliant on their involvement. It becomes a vicious cycle. The no longer have the freedom to step away from their organization to consider what are the most important, non-urgent tasks to face. They don’t have the time to delegate or train because they’re constantly reacting to problems and don’t build the capacity into the organization, and consequently they are always dealing with urgent fires. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s a pretty common occurrence.
This is a large part of what a life- or business-coach is so attractive to people, especially for CEOs and leaders. They need someone who will be a sounding board, but also someone who will ask them an outsider’s questions:
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What is most important for your to focus?
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What if you shed the baggage of old structures or old decisions, what would you do then?
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If you were fired, what would be the first thing your successor would do? (This question was asked by the CEO of Intel of himself when the company had a disastrous downturn in revenue, and he decided that he should focus on making CPUs rather than waiting for his successor to do it! It saved both his career and likely Intel as a company.)
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What will you regret not trying in the future?
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How are you contributing to the systemic problem, and how will you break the cycle?
A good coach creates an environment to think clearly more so than providing answers.
The reality of the matter is that you don’t truly need someone to ask you those questions, you can ask them yourself. What you DO need is someone who can talk through this stuff, and serves as a reality checker for you. Since we struggle with knowing our weaknesses, strengths, blind spots we really need someone else who knows those things about us, will shoot straight with us, but also isn’t overly impressed by us (commonly known as a friend, but as anyone who has a true friend knows, a true friend is anything but common).
It’s a rough batch of questions to ask yourself:
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If someone were observing my life as a whole, what suggestions would they make?
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What would they point out that concerns them?
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What would they encourage more of?
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How would they guess my priorities based on how I use my time?
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Where would they point out character issues that are hurting myself or those around me?
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What opportunities would they see that I’m missing right now due to busyness or stress?
All of these are good questions to wrestle with yourself, but even better questions to talk through with that friend.
This becomes especially important for the expat as they tend to carry additional stresses, and have additional layers of complexity due to dealing with multi-cultural and communication challenges. The result is that having a coach, mentor or a friend becomes all the more important.