LL #44 | Making Mountains out of Molehills
On intuition, or unchaining your inner nitpicker.
🔍 Making Mountains out of Molehills
Or why to listen to you inner nitpicker.
As a leader, one of your best friends is your intuition. That inner voice that says, “something’s not quite right with this project, this person. Something can be better here.”
Many leaders suppress this voice for fear of being overbearing. They fear becoming the nitpicker, the critic, the micromanager. They fear being the one who points out all of the ways that things are wrong, burdening their team with unrealistic expectations.
Does that sound like you? If so, I’ll invite you stop and question if that fear is accurate.
More specifically, I’ll invite you to consider how the opposite might be true:
How might that voice be the gateway to greatly enhancing performance?
How might it be the way to liberate your team rather than burden them?
What would it look like to play around with making mountains out of those molehills?
When leaders first experiment with this, they often realize that what they thought was a molehill was actually a mountain. That their intuition wasn’t and doesn’t point to small things, but rather clues into something big that something small is lighting the way to.
This is the case for unchaining your inner nitpicker.
After unchaining your inner nitpicker, there remains the question of how to bring this to your people in a way that empowers rather than burdens.
The key question here is: where are you coming from? Is it criticism, blame, and micromanagement? Or creativity, joy, and opportunity?
One beautiful trick to shift from communicating from criticism, blame, and micromanagement to creativity, joy, and opportunity is to ask yourself: if I were to zoom in on this, what’s the 10x opportunity here? What opportunity is my intuition pointing to about how things can be 10x better than they are right now?
Bring the energy of 10x opportunity to your team, people, and projects, and see what happens.
Questions❓
What is one thing you’ve been suppressing your inner intuitive voice around?
How can you bring that into the spotlight?
What’s the 10x opportunity there?
Reminder: Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership + a FREE Virtual Annual Review
In the new year, I’m running an exciting project with two of my favorite executive coaches called Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership.
Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership is a three-week intensive and transformational group coaching program. In it, you will master the fundamentals of inner leadership and unlock your leadership potential.
Early bird pricing through the end of the year. Check it out.
We’ll be running a a FREE virtual annual review session on Tuesday, December 13th. In it, we’ll guide you through:
Evaluating your 2022 performance
Extracting essential learnings from the year
Clarifying your most important growth edges and goals for 2023
Getting complete on 2022 so you start the new year with a clean slate.
Would love to see you there :)