Good News: No One Knows What They’re Doing

As LinkedIn reminded me this week, it’s been a year since I launched Thrive Street Advisors. It was a good prompt to ask myself: What have you learned? Luckily, I had the notes from my Monthly Strategy Reviews to help with that. 

The two lessons that most stood out:

Lesson #1: Everyone has their own challenge.

As a coach, I’m privileged to work with and learn from a lot of very accomplished and skilled leaders. At the same time, I get to talk with them about their most important challenges. And the main lesson from them is: Everyone’s got their own struggle. No one is immune from imperfection. 

If you’re anything like me, that’s very comforting to know. 

It’s worth mentioning because of how easy it is to see only the successful parts of those around us. It can look so easy from afar. And that can make us feel like we don’t measure up, or that we are imposters. 

But as Amy Cuddy talks about in Presence: 

“If we all only knew how many people feel like impostors, we’d have to conclude that either (1) we all are impostors and we don’t know what we’re doing or (2) our self-assessments are way off.” 

Lesson #2: Strategy routines need teeth.

A common need among the leaders I’ve worked with is to implement routines for personal and team reflection. There’s lot of reasons why these routines don’t already exist, but the main one is basically: I (or we) have too many things going on to step back and figure out what I need to do.

But as someone who has a series of overlapping reflection routines, I can attest that it’s still difficult to turn strategy insights into action. 

For example, it took three months of strategy reviews to convert the insight that “the business should survive, so I should shift my mindset to thriving” into actual decisions consistent with that insight. And even though my October strategy reflection included the headline “Sleep has been s***”—obviously important enough that I should do something about it—my March reflection showed only progress to: “Sleep is not ideal.”

And of course, the reason that happened is because I relied too much on emotional energy to fight the status quo bias. The strategy routine was suboptimal because it had no teeth or formal requirements for action.

Ironically, that’s exactly what I’ve observed and advised other leaders to implement. So I guess that brings me back to Lesson #1. The fact that I both knew the solution and couldn’t implement it for myself reinforces the notion that we’re all in the struggle!