I have some VERY BIG and VERY BOLD goals this year!
What this means for me is that I have surrounded myself with support – more than I ever have in my entire career. I have several coaches and participate in multiple high-touch, high-level groups, providing me with unprecedented levels of guidance and encouragement. I have access to on-demand assistance like never before, and it’s not uncommon for me to reach out to my coaches multiple times within a single day.
While this might appear excessive to some, I hold a strong belief: the bigger change you want to make in the world, the more you need a robust support network. Surrounding yourself with mentors, coaches, advocates, and specialized assistance, is essential for navigating significant transformation and achieving ambitious goals.
Big change is hard and often discouraging and lonely. It’s really hard to see progress since it’s often global, complex, interconnected, and slow. You need someone in your corner, someone who keeps you focused on your bigger vision, someone who helps you prioritize your strategic goals, someone who helps you sift through busy and distracting work, someone who reminds you of your purpose and why you wanted to do this work in the first place. You need someone who believes in you more than you do.
I think it’s also true that the busier you are, the more you need coaching. For instance, sometimes my clients want to change or cancel their coaching sessions when they’re busy and I always say NOOOOOOOO. That’s when you need your coaching session the most! When I was an executive at Delphi, I was lucky to have leadership coaching and I know what it’s like to have an extremely busy day and think “I just don’t have time for my coaching session today” but because my coach had a cancellation policy, I couldn’t cancel the session. And even though I showed up to the session preoccupied and maybe a bit reluctantly, I ALWAYS came out of the session, focused, calm and ready to take a strategic and intentional approach to my to-do list rather than frantically trying to get through the work.
I once shared a panel where we were invited to speak about the successes and challenges we had when we started our businesses. It became clear during the discussion that I had grown my business at about 3 times the speed of one of my fellow panelists. Afterwards he told me the biggest difference in our approaches was he did everything himself for about 5 years until he felt he was successful enough to hire support; whereas I paid for coaching and other support even when I didn’t have money coming in. For the last 17 years I have always had at least one coach – often more than one. And for the majority of my career, I’ve had at least one mentor. You might not have your own business, but the same kind of efficacy is seen in leaders in organizations.
If you want to do big things, if you want to make big impact, if you want to stay focused on your bigger vision and not your emails, surround yourself with support.
What are some goals you have for the year?
