Make Your World Bigger

Leadership is the force that drives all ideas, breakthroughs, and inventions. Leadership comes from experienced senior management, young interns at entry levels, and everyone in between.

Leaders get better by creating challenges, supporting new input, and continually stepping out of their comfort zones. Every leader, whether 18 or 80, can grow exponentially and move forward with focus, facts, resilience, and imagination.

At the start of this new Leap Year and this new decade, let’s look at where we can go to make our world bigger. Thirty years ago, we knew there were billions and billions of stars. Now we know, because of the Hubble Telescope, there are billions and billions of galaxies! Facts are provisional and dependent on ongoing science, thoughtful insight, and human exploration. We each need to fashion our own version of the Hubble Telescope to view new ideas for better solutions. Here are three areas to consider. 

• Develop mentors from every decade. Play with young children and listen to elders share their stories. Your perspective is bound to change. One of my clients holds a responsible senior management position in a global firm. With no children at home, she chooses to offer babysitting on the weekends. She colors Frozen coloring books, builds structures with Legos and Playdoh, jumps in bounce houses, and watches Disney movies with the children. Her new passion for children expands her world. She returns to her demanding schedule on Monday morning with a fresh, unjaded, and renewed perspective on her job.

• Plan 4 field trips this year to companies or organizations outside your field. Find someone to take you to Google, Chick-fil-A, NASA, or an Ostrich Farm . Or consider a film studio, a science or art museum, a recycling facility, the back of a Goodwill Store, or an Amazon warehouse. Good ideas are always transferable.

• Educate yourself with a variety of Podcasts every time you are in your car, in an Uber, on a plane, or doing mundane work around the house. I walk my dog to “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.” It’s exactly 54 minutes and 3 miles and I’m constantly laughing and entertained. Currently there are over 500,000 podcasts and the platform is growing daily. The range of topics and authors can intimately inform you on a subject or topic that will open up your world to travel, food, finances, technology, and new ways of looking at every issue imaginable. Consider TED Talk Radio Hour, Hidden Brain, Gravity Assist, Revisionist History, SingularityFM, and So Money by Farnoosh Torabi…to name a few.

What will you do this year? How will you venture into 2020 to make your world bigger and more interesting? How will you grow?

I wish you your best year yet!

Susan