While these terms are often use interchangeably, they can mean very different things. They also are supported by different actions and behaviours.

In your own career you may have observed this too. You may have also thought about taking on one of these roles yourself, so that you could share your skills and expertise with others.

A Short Summary Of The Difference Between a Mentor, Advisor and Coach

In thinking about these roles, I thought carefully about how I interpreted the differences between these roles.

Often a mentor or advisor is assumed to have personally succeeded in a discipline related to the area they are mentoring or advising on.

For example, a successful entrepreneur could mentor or advise other aspiring entrepreneurs.

A mentor provides a psychological commitment over an enduring period to help an individual on a chosen path.

An advisor provides value by giving targeted and potentially infrequent advice. Often, there is an expectation that an advisor will be more directive than the other roles. Mentors and coaches may lead by asking questions and giving open space for the person they’re guiding to discover their own answers.

A coach is there to assist an individual, team or business to reach their full potential.

While mentors and advisors are often expected to have expertise and personal experience in the area they provide guidance on, the same is not always true for a coach. For example, a coach may have a successful career coaching professional soccer teams, but not have been a player themselves.

A More Detailed Summary Of These Differences

In thinking about these differences, I also thought about some of the approaches each role could take.

If you are looking for a more detailed explanation of the differences, this table gives a more detailed breakdown of the outcomes of a mentor, advisor and a coach.

If you are planning to take on one of these roles, I would encourage you to consider if you agree with the distinctions in the table above.

What would you change? What do you agree with? Just doing this will give you further clarity on how you will take on any of these roles.

While definitions vary, I would caution against the way ‘mentors’ are used in many business settings. Often I will hear people say “maybe you should get a mentor for an hour a month to help you with your development plan?”

This is a useful action but also a somewhat narrow view of mentorship.

True mentorship is gained through meaningful connection, shared time, and both philosophical and practical teaching. Often a mentorship used in business settings is actually more like an advisor relationship. It may also be worthwhile considering the qualities of a great mentor.

Any of these three roles can provide an incredible opportunity for you to connect with others. In doing this, you may discover a broader appreciation for both the skills you possess and how your skills can help others.

If you have views on this article or would like to share your experiences of being or working with a mentor, advisor or coach, consider leaving a comment below.

The post What’s the Difference Between a Mentor, Advisor, and a Coach? appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Whether this is a project at work, an initiative for a team, or a crusade in our personal lives….sometimes we nail it and sometimes we don’t. So what makes the difference between these outcomes?

Every initiative has a start and an end point. Between these two points are lots of smaller steps. We call these milestones, deliverables or tasks. They  are waypoints along our journey.

Sometimes these waypoints are needed. They take us closer to our destination. Other times they are miscalculations which lead us in the wrong direction, and we’re forced to go back to get on track again.

For many people, the way to get work done is a process of trial and error. We wait until we hit a waypoint, see what we can learn from it, and then either continue or trace-back to find our correct path. In doing so, we may learn along the way, but we lose time and expend effort. In the end this costs us.

Poorly executed pathways look like this.

Well executed pathways look like this.

The key question, is what makes the difference between these pathways?

3 Principles That Will Improve Any Initiative

Recently I met with a number of colleagues and asked them to describe what makes their work most effective.

One of these people manages very substantial, complex projects in a multinational company. Another is involved in a successful technology venture. The third leads an incredibly balanced personal life and has contributed greatly in their community.

From the conversation, we defined three overarching principles that make a world of difference.

These principles are:

1. Take advantage of knowledge of the past,
2. Use best practice in the present, and
3. Learn from the future before it happens.

The more we spoke about the various activities we do to support great work, the more we realised each activity fell under one of these principles.

Apply These Principles To Activities

For example, one of the members of the group had just completed advanced agile training. We defined training as a way to build knowledge from the past, because most training is based on some discipline that has gone before it. The training would help him to run his projects more effectively.

The friend who works in the scaling technology venture said she spends time focusing on what’s essential. This involves thinking about what’s a priority and what can wait until later. This is an example of sharpening practice in the present.

The third colleague asks a simple question of any initiative; ‘what will this work mean and for who?’. This is a way of learning from the future, because it forces them to cast their mind forward and define how the work will result in good in the community when the work is complete.

The conversation was so meaningful I summarized it in this drawing (which you can download here as a high resolution PDF. Feel free to use it in your work and with teams).

So, For Your Next Initiative, Ask These Questions

You can use these principles also. For your next endeavour, ask:

• How can I…..

a) use knowledge from the past…or

b) refine my practice in the present…or

c) learn from the future, before it happens…

• …to make the pathway for this work more successful, more efficient and more meaningful for myself, the people I’m working with, and those who finally benefit from the initiative.

You might also plan how much time you will spend considering these principles before, during and after the work.

These principles are dynamic. They can be accessed at any stage of an initiative, based upon your need at the time.

The goal is to do the work in an optimal way, avoiding headaches and misspent time.

I hope this article is useful. If so, please let me know your feedback directly or share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

—

Note: I also had many comments on this framework from a post on Linked In. Thanks to all those who gave their view.

The post The 2 Minute Cheat Sheet To Make Any Initiative More Effective appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

The mindset is ‘belief’. The fact is, if we believe we can do something, we have a far better chance of achieving our goal.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple Computers in 1997, with almost ten years in what was essentially exile, he must have believed in the potential of his leadership to change the face of computing.  When Thomas Edison made a thousand unsuccessful attempts to invent the light bulb, belief that he would eventually succeed must have carried him through. Elon Musk, who has reshaped car travel through Tesla and the way space is explored through Space X, says “when something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.”¹⁾

This is all well and good for titans of industry and history, but what can belief do for you and I? Let me share a very practical study that shows how a subtle change in what we believe, can shift our personal measures of performance and what is possible.

Belief & Physical Performance

In 1979, Gary Ness of the University of New Mexico and Robert Patton of the North Texas State University tested the influence of “belief” in students. In this study they took 48 college males without a significant history in weight training and assigned them to three random groups.²⁾

Each group had only one task – lift a maximum weight on an incline bench-press once per week.  For the first three weeks the researchers observed as the students assessed their baseline abilities. After this period, the researchers tested their theories about beliefs by modifying the conditions for each of the three study groups.

• In the first group, the researchers told the weight-lifters that they were lifting the same weight as the first three weeks, but they actually placed less weight on the bench press.
• In the second group, the actual weight being lifted was concealed from the weight-lifters.
• In the third group, the researchers falsely told the weight-lifters that they were lifting the same weight as in earlier weeks, but increased the weight. While deceptive, the intent was to provide the weight-lifters with an alternate belief around their weight-lifting capabilities.

What do you think the researchers discovered?

With all other factors held equal, the group that consistently outperformed the other two groups was the third group. This third group of students was able to lift heavier weights, in large part because they believed they had lifted this weight before.

Past Patterns Shape Belief

Now it would be tempting to say belief was the only factor at play. But there was another variable, which was the three weeks of prior weightlifting.

By the time the researchers intervened in this study, and changed the conditions of all three groups, the students had already been lifting consistently for three weeks. This created a pattern of behaviour that shaped the students beliefs about their capabilities and proved important in the study.

When the researchers added a heavier weight to the third group, and told the students it was the same weight they had lifted before, the students believed lifting this weight was actually consistent with their past efforts.

This created a dilemma for the students. If they didn’t lift the weight, they would believe they had failed at lifting a weight they had consistently lifted for the previous three weeks. If they lifted the weight, they would remain consistent with their prior efforts.

The researchers discovered that these environmental and external cues (what the students had achieved before and what they were told about the weight they were lifting), influenced their beliefs about what was possible, and ultimately affected their performance in the weight lifting task.

This focused study reminds us that our belief in whether we can do something is often influenced by whether we’ve done the activity (or something similar) before. We can see this in many walks of life.

When people are training for a first marathon, they do well when gradually increasing their running distance, not just to increase their physical training, but to build their confidence that they can run the distance. When graduates enter the workforce, sound training programs give them continuous increases in responsibility, so that can build capability upon previous experience. And when we establish a new project, we pool people together who have completed prior projects similar in nature to what the new project sets out to achieve.

Belief plays an even more important role as we approach more advanced levels of performance. This is where increased training has a reduced effect, competition becomes tougher, and we begin to edge closer to the limits of what is possible. This is why self-belief becomes a more important factor for competitive and professional athletes, compared with many factors already in their training regime.

We cannot also forget the role of the leader and coach on this dynamic. The greatest purpose of a leader is to provide a context for their people that is both similar to what they have done before, different enough that they are challenged to grow, and the encouragement to galvanise their belief to do what they previously thought not possible. This is true in business, just as it is true in sporting or personal endeavours.

A Final Word

Although Ness and Patton’s study is now forty years old, many of its findings still hold true. Countless other studies have been influenced by this research, in subjects as far ranging from how panic attacks can be controlled through mindset through to how beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed or flexible, affects our ability to adapt and grow.

While our prior experiences can create a foundation of previous behaviour, we cannot underestimate the role that belief plays in whether we achieve a new task. In this way, both experience and belief reinforce one another.

This is true for the weight-lifters who pushed up each rep on the bench-press. Likely it was true also for Steve Jobs when we he returned to Apple 1997 and  took what he knew about the company from earlier years to then setup a range of sweeping changes that would put Apple on a new trajectory. Perhaps it is also true for the latest endeavour you or I are about to take on.

Best of luck for your next challenge.

The post The Mindset That Can Make Or Break Performance appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Before looking at habits, goals, or how you motivate yourself to get the most out of every day, there is one simple question to ask yourself. This question (and your response) is a precursor to high productivity.

What Neuroscience Tells Us

Matthew Walker is a neuroscientist who wrote the international best-seller, “Why We Sleep”.

According to Walker, “morning types” make up about 40% of the population. Morning people like to wake up at dawn, enjoy doing so, and are productive in the early hours.  On the other hand, “evening types” account for 30% of people. They revel in going to bed late, burning the midnight oil and rising late in the morning (maybe even afternoon).

The balance of people lie somewhere in between and often can switch between the two. All of these patterns come under the category of chronotypes.

These types matter because, based on Walker’s research, insufficient sleep (which is less than  six or seven hours) can result in a whole lot of bad outcomes, including a diminished immune system, reduced blood sugar levels, and even anxiety.

Adequate sleep is influenced by whether you’re a morning or evening person, because your chronotype type affects when waking and sleeping time is most effective for you.

What If You’re Not A Morning Person?

Many of society’s routines and rhythms (getting up earlier, working breakfasts, being at work by 9am) are geared toward morning types.

In the last few years many articles have lauded the superhuman routines of business leaders who favour rising early in the morning. In many of these articles, there is a hidden assumption – to work hard equals getting up early. It’s simply not the case.

It would be easy for “evening types” to feel like they’re doing something wrong. Evening types may even try to follow the same routines,  even if it defies what comes naturally. If they do this, they run the risk of feeling average, fatigued during the day, and ultimately unsettling their productivity.

So, if you are an evening person, don’t fret just yet… a good portion of the world is saying:

“Hey, it’s okay to take your time. Do what works best for you. When morning people are winding up for the day, you’ll be hitting your stride!”

Take comfort in the stories that run counter to the morning trends.

Jeff Bezos, for example, takes his time in the morning. He prefers to get a good sleep rather than wake when the rooster crows. And he often wakes naturally, without an alarm clock. His mornings are spent getting ready for the day. In his words, he likes to ‘putter’ about.¹⁾

But there are limits for everyone. For example, if evening people stay up too late, they’ll still risk fatigue during their work day.

The key is not to overlook what our body tells us (regardless of whether you are a morning, evening or in-between type), so we start the day on the right foot.  No habit exists that will change our outcomes if we start the day in the wrong state of mind and body.

I’m an in-between type, with a gentle bias toward evenings. When a friend of mine had a goal to hit the gym at 5:30am, I wanted to support them enough to change my routine for a while.  I did this with extra planning, so I could prepare myself for the change and respecting the fact I’d likely find it difficult.

I went to bed earlier. I drank two glasses of water when I woke up. I was patient with my body whilst it woke (whereas my friend went hard in the gym straight away, and I allowed myself time to slowly get into the workout).

When I was trialling this new routine, someone recommended I go for a walk or do some light reading in the afternoons to re-energise. I was amazed what a difference this subtle technique made. Doing it this way, I worked within my “type” for 2 months so I could support my friend, without becoming fatigued at all.

So which type feels most natural to you? Morning, evening or in-between?

Much Is Still To Be Learnt In This Area

We are really just starting to understand the impact of morning and evening cycles on productivity.

In 2016, researcher Nolan Pope from MIT conducted a curious study. Pope reviewed a data set of 2 million students from seventh through to eleventh grade.²⁾

Matching school start times with student GPA and state test scores, Pope found having a morning class of either math or English increased students GPA by a significant amount. The results suggest that moving certain activities to the morning, from the afternoon, is enough to deliver big gains in productivity and performance over the longer term.

If we extended this to company settings, we might choose to do important planning exercises or our own individual thinking in the morning.  Again, Jeff Bezos is an example.  He plans his  most intellectually demanding meetings at 10am.³⁾

Pope’s research gives insights into whether mornings or afternoons may be best suited to complex cognitive tasks. It would be tempting to generalize these learnings to say we are all more productive in the morning. But taking into account the distinction of morning and evening types, there may be such a thing as too early in the morning.

How Leaders & Companies Can Put These Lessons Into Practice

These lessons have important implications for companies, teams and individuals. Recently I’ve met with a dozen different companies to understand how they structure their work days.  All of them had embraced flexible working hours for their people. But only a handful had also equipped their people with the tools to make flexible hours even more effective.

The most progressive companies established a culture of no meetings before 9:30am and no meetings after 4:30pm, to better cater for both morning and evening types.  Some early or late meetings are unavoidable, but the best companies treated these as the exception, instead of the norm.

What are your experiences? I’d be keen to hear. Please consider sharing your thoughts by adding a comment below.

The post Why Your Sleep Cycle Can Be The Key To Productivity appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Here are 21 of my favorites for morning, afternoon and anytime.

Morning Habits

1. Drink Two Glasses Of Water Upon Waking
When we wake, our body has not had water for 6 to 8 hours and is already in a state of dehydration. Drinking two glasses of water restores your hydration and gives you energy for the day.

2. Make Your Bed Every Day
When you make your bed in the morning, you start the day with a task completed. And if you have a rubbish day, you’ll return to a bed that is made. Take it from a SEAL commander.

3. Stretch To Keep Your Back Healthy
We spend so much time hunched over laptops and craning our neck to view our mobile phones. The long term consequences of this can affect our overall spine health. Daily stretches increase blood circulation, increase fine motor skills and increase mobility. And a simple morning stretch routine boosts energy for the rest of the day.

4. Either: i) Avoid Social Media Until A Certain Time; or ii) Limit It To Several Times 
A founder of one of the dominant social media platforms said:

“[Social media] literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Numerous studies have looked at the negative effects of overusing social media.

I love social media but lately I’ve been more focused on using it in moderation and putting other activities first.

5. Avoid Processed Or Packaged Foods
The vast majority of nicely packaged snacks contain lots of processed food or are high in sugar. They give our brains an injection of glucose which, once burned, dumps us into fatigue. Eat whole foods for sustained energy and mental clarity.

6. Sugary Drinks In Moderation
It takes a fraction of a second to decide on a non-sugary drink instead of a sugary one. With anywhere from 30 to 50 grams of sugar for some sugary drinks, too many can be tough on our brains.

7. Strengthen Your Core
Strengthening your abdominal area builds core strength, which keeps your body agile and dynamic. In as little as two minutes a day, there are a range of exercises to build core strength, that don’t have to be sit-ups (eg. a plank exercise). What’s more you can do these in the house  without needing to go to a gym. Beyond this, every day activities like walking, gardening, and carrying moderate loads all help to build core strength.

8. Say ‘Yes’ Spontaneously
Saying ‘yes’ to something you might not normally do, takes you out of your comfort zone. And this is important for ongoing growth and expansion. I’m not suggesting you ‘yes’ to something dangerous, but a little ‘crazy’ is good for all of us now and then.

Afternoon Habits

9. Avoid Coffee After 4pm
According to ‘Why We Sleep’ by Matthew Walker, caffeine has a half-life of five to seven hours in the body. That means it takes this amount of time for your body to remove at least half the effects of caffeine. So if you drink coffee at 4pm, by 11pm there’s a good chance 50% of the caffeine will still be in your system, which could disturb sleep. Limiting coffee to the mornings or early afternoon means less chance of it causing trouble with our night-time recovery.

10. Write A Short Journal Entry
In as little as two minutes you can write what you’ve done in the day. This makes us more reflective and gives us a thread to track our memories through life. Lately I’ve been using the Day One app to track my entries.

11. Read Three Pages Of A Book
Struggle to read a book? Many people can read more by changing their benchmark. Instead of focusing on getting through the book, change the goal to reading three pages every day. In those three pages, we often get absorbed in the book and read more, without it seeming like a chore.  Success stories of today – Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and many more – attribute a large part of their success to reading.¹⁾

12. Reflect On Your Goals Or Resolutions
Many people write resolutions every year and don’t look at them until the following year. Set yourself the practice of re-visiting your goals every day and you’ll be amazed how this keeps them in focus.

13. Write Or Say One Goal x10 
I guarantee you if you take one goal and either write it or say it out loud x10, your conscious mind will focus attention on how to make it happen. Connecting a physical action (writing or saying something), helps your brain with these processes of external storage and encoding.

External storage provides a cue that brings your goal into focus. Encoding helps your brain determine what is retained and what is discarded in memory.

By focusing on a goal on a regular basis, you are literally teaching your brain to maintain your goal in conscious attention, so that you filter the external environment for signals that are relevant to that goal.

The research supports this. People who write, say or describe goals vividly are up to 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to realise their goals. ²⁾

14. Focus On One Thing You’ve Done Or Are Grateful For 
You’ve done great things today. Within each and every day, think of one thing where you surprised yourself. This gives us joy. It makes us feel fulfilled. It costs nothing and is quick to do.

15. Do One Thing You’ve Been Avoiding
If you’re like me, you might have a list of things you know you need to do, but have been avoiding. Sometimes I feel like this list owns me, not me owning it. So I started doing one thing on this list every day. Very quickly this list became smaller and I feel all the better for it.

16. Book A Catch Up With Someone You Enjoy Spending Time With
Some of the most meaningful insights you’ll have in life, come from talking with people you enjoy spending time with. Take two minutes to book a coffee with one of these people. You’ll never regret it.

Anytime Habits

17. Tell Your Partner/Family You Appreciate Them
A few years ago The New York Times said married couples only talk to each other, on average, less than 4 minutes a day. In another psychology study, researchers found that unless husbands and wives told each other five positive things for every one negative thing, the marriage would likely fail. If you’re in a relationship, tell the person you appreciate or love them every day. And if not in a relationship, tell someone in your family or a close friend how much they mean to you.

18. Acknowledge One Person Each Day Who Made A Difference To You
Just recently a person in my professional network had lunch with me and shared some incredible stories. I told them how much of a difference it had made to me; that they had taken time and shared their wealth of experience. When you acknowledge the kindness that someone else has done for you, you strengthen your relationship with them. This is important because a 75 year study by Harvard researchers found that the ongoing strength of relationships is vital to ongoing happiness.

19. Stop & Focus On Your Breathing 
Once a day…stop. Spend two minutes focusing on your breathing. Even in the midst of chaos, it will give you calm. It will clear your mind. And it will put your body and thoughts back in sync for what you need to do next.

20. Belief & Discipline
Belief and discipline are incredibly underrated. Above talent and IQ, if you believe in yourself and pursue your priorities with continued practice, you’ll achieve remarkable results.

In 2005 Martin Seligman and Angela Ducksworth from the University of Pennsylvania conducted two seperate studies on eighth grade students. They wanted to put to the test whether those students with higher propensity to focus would outperform those students who had higher IQs.

The research found that “highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable, including report-card grades, standardized achievement-test scores, admission to a competitive high school.” ³⁾

You might say anyone can work hard to get slightly ahead. This may be true, but in this study those with discipline weren’t a bit ahead. For many of the indications, the correlation between self-discipline and achievement was often twice the size of the correlation when compared with the cohort of high IQ students.

So if you have two minutes, push one doubt that you have aside or do one action that helps with you one of your goals.

21. Update Your Habit List
I’ve spent months researching and understanding habits. The simple lesson I learned is to practice simple habits, connected to goals, and do them every day. To do this, a habit list can help you track whether what you wanted to do, is what you actually did. I update my habit list daily. Sometimes I miss things. But looking at this list and updating it is enough to keep me focused on what actions I want to create.

If you enjoyed this article, I’d love to hear which is your favorite among this list or any other micro-habits that are important to your success. Consider leaving a comment below.

The post 21 Micro Habits To Boost Your Day appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

What a great question!

I thought about this question and did some research. From this I found the eight hobbies below that, if followed on a consistent basis, will improve cognitive capacity.

My belief is that any hobby that allows you to experience from the Learning Loop will make you better, stronger and smarter.

So long as you absorb and apply feedback through this loop, you’ll get better at whatever you do.

By applying this learning loop, these hobbies are proven to help people lead a smarter and more balanced life.

Reading – Expand Your Mind

Warren Buffet told students at a Columbia Business School: “Read 500 pages…every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” Enough said :).

Writing – Structure How Your Brain Thinks

Jeff Bezos doesn’t allow his employees to express new ideas as slides….he only accepts written documents and narratives. There’s good reason for this. Writing is one of the best ways to train yourself how to structure an argument, build a story and convey ideas logically.

Education – Build Intellectual Wealth

Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, said “I am concerned that too many people are focused too much on money and not on their greatest wealth, which is their education.” Education is one of the best ways to expand your mind and increase intelligence.

Music – Expanded Cognitive Skills

While studies differ on whether there is such a thing as the Mozart Effect (a hypothesis put forward by Dr Gordon Shaw, that listening to Mozart while studying boosts IQ), listening to music is one of the very best ways to get into ‘flow’. Whether you’re studying or working on a complex problem, music can help your brain do its best work. And playing a musical instrument has been proven to increase cognitive skills and brain function. So if music is food for your ears, eat well and nutritiously :).

Martial Arts/Dance/Yoga/Focused Exercise – Know Your Body, Know Yourself

Intellectual intelligence is different from body intelligence. Truly knowing ourselves requires us to connect our mind and our body. Any hobby that does this – martial arts, dance, yoga, sports – will help you build this connection and learn about yourself.

Open Mindedness – Take An Expansive Frame

A good deal of the world is closed minded…but thankfully, many people are open minded. Practice compassion, tolerance, love. Look for the good in people and yourself. Be curious and treat the world as a place with boundless opportunity for learning. How we frame things is how we see things, so select an expansive frame rather that a limiting one. Your world will expand and so will you.

Travel – Build Empathy For The World

Travel builds empathy for other cultures. And empathy is one of the greatest ways to build emotional intelligence. See as much of the world as you can, but don’t forget the value of ‘home’. Every country is full of wonder, and that is true especially of the places each and every one of us come from.

Lifelong Learning – Start Curious, Stay Curious

Learning doesn’t have to stop. When I meet eighty and ninety year olds, I can tell the ones that have chosen lifelong learning.

They are still curious and alive with possibility.

Few other pursuits other than lifelong learning ignite our curiosity, keep our minds active and our bodies engaged.

Start curious and stay curious. Share what you learn with someone. Aim to never stop learning.

What do you believe are the most important hobbies that have made you smarter? Please consider sharing your thoughts by adding a comment.

The post 8 Hobbies That Make You Smarter appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

A few years ago I would have been one of these people. Then I learnt something that changed my approach to goal-setting.

The lesson was based on a brilliant distinction I now think about each day.

This is how I used to think about the future.

It was as if the future was some point on the horizon.

I thought about it occasionally.

I knew I’d get there…someday.

But in many ways, I let the future define me, rather than me define it.

I related to the future as “something” that would just arrive.

In doing this, you could say the way I thought about the future, was like an extension of the present. And because the present was based on actions I repeated every day, the future would probably look the same. Let’s call this the ‘probable future’.

The probable future is like being on a train going to a defined destination. It’s taking you somewhere, maybe even somewhere you need or want to go. But if you’ve caught that train every day for months, maybe even years, you might not think to go a different way.

When I thought of that probable future, my thinking was not intentional. I wasn’t thinking I had a huge role in creating it. I certainly was not thinking the future was up to me and that I could intentionally design it.

The real insight came when I did a post-graduate degree, in the form of two simple words – ‘desired future’.

The desired future is what you see as your ideal and preferred path. It’s an alternative to what’s probable. It’s a way to ‘course correct’ and change the destination of our lives. It is an incredible distinction for us as individuals, as well as teams and even companies.

Whether we call it a ‘desired future’, ‘preferred future’, or ‘intentional future’, the idea is the same…to set a course purposefully toward an objective that reflects our deeper goals.

This can have a profound impact.

Consider this – according to strategist, Dr Joseph Voros, “the Apollo Moon Landing, for example, was a preferred future of President Kennedy which began as merely possible…because the knowledge did not yet exist at that time to achieve the goal.” ²⁾

I know, it seems so simple and common sense that it’s almost unremarkable. But when we start to intentionally think about and work toward a desired future, it changes everything.

4 Tools To Get To Your Desired Future

You have four tools available to you right now to pursue your desired future.

#1. Imagination
When we have an image of a desired future, that picture may be blurry. It might need better definition. We can bring it into high resolution. For that we need our imagination. We have to build out the future in our mind’s eye. What are we doing, seeing and feeling in that future? Who is with us? How has our situation changed? Building out that future in our thinking is one of the most powerful ways to make it real.

#2. Hope
When we’re imagining a desired future – whether it’s for 6 months or 6 years, we have to engage our sense of hope. Hope is one of the most underrated and not often talked about emotions. Yet for us to have any motivation toward a desired future, it’s because we have hope to improve our situation and that of others. It is a very real and inspiring energy source for personal action.

#3. Back-casting
‘Back-casting’ requires us to place ourselves in the future, look back and imagine what milestones have occurred to get us toward that future.

For example. if your future involves living in a new house, somewhere along the way you will have saved for a deposit.

These milestones are like pin-pointing the stops on a train line. Back-casting identifies the major stops to get to your desired future.

According to strategist Andy Hines, “the advantages of working backwards are that it is a fun way to explore the future….it avoids the constraints of thinking linearly forward from today, by first rushing rapidly toward the future, then working backwards.”³⁾

#4. Action
Finally, we need massive action.

Taking action requires consistent and repeated efforts. As you take action toward your desired future, you may find the steps you take are different from what you foresaw when you back-casted.

Things may not go as planned. You may need to take a side step now and then.

If you keep your desired future in focus, and pursue it persistently, you will achieve it.

Set Goals For Your Next 6 Months

You can apply these steps to set goals for the next six months.

Where do you want to be, what do you want to achieve, how will you know you’ve succeeded?

This method complements goal setting techniques, such as SMART and HARD goals, as well as other detailed goal setting frameworks.

In the book Principles, Ray Dalio ⁴⁾ says:

Define your desired future. Imagine it in every detail. Backcast and define the steps that will get you there.

Today, start one action that will take you forward. And then every day for the next six months, do another action to take you further.

You might even approach these actions as small experiments to rapidly expand your talents.

I guarantee you, if you do these things, you’ll be amazed by the difference you create. And these very steps will also help you to think like a strategist.

While many of the concepts in this article are based on my lessons when studying a post-graduate degree, I was reminded of this thinking in a book by John Braddock, A Spy’s Guide To Strategy. If you would like a guide to extending concepts of a ‘desired future’ with elements of strategy, it is a great read.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, please consider leaving a comment below.

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We look for a pattern in our improvement.

There are three patterns for high performance we might expect, but there is also a fourth pattern that, from my experience, we rarely think about. And it’s this last pattern that makes us feel frustrated, sometimes enough to give up our goal.

When we track our progress with a new development activity, ideally we look for small gains in our performance, every time we practice the activity.

The runner wants to see their time steadily decrease for a selected distance. The weightlifter aims to increase weight for each new session. The leader might want to see their team’s output increase over time.

It’s human nature to expect the measure to get better, whatever it may be –speed, time, weight, distance,  volume, quality. We feel a sense of achievement when we see these measures improving over time.

The four patterns I’m about to share with you are linear improvement, diminishing returns, accelerating gains and the zig-zag pattern.

These patterns won’t apply for a one-off task. But for habits or routines that we’re looking to embed into our regular practice to boost performance, knowing these patterns can mean the difference between success and failure.

Linear pattern for high performance

In linear progress, performance increases at a constant rate.

Let’s say you took on the task of writing, with the aim of writing 1,000 words a day, and increasing that amount by 10 words per day. On day one you would write 1,000 words. By the end of the first year of writing, you would write 4,640 words per day.

This is completely possible within a first year of writing. The performance trend would look something like this, progressing in a linear, even line.

Advice: in linear patterns, steady increases yield strong gains overtime. The key is to be patient, and allow the passage of time and small increases to reveal significant change.

Diminishing Returns pattern for high performance

In the second pattern, after an initial burst of gains, it becomes more difficult to realise increases in performance when compared with prior periods.

This is a pattern of diminishing returns – while we’re using the same amount of energy, we’re seeing smaller increases in the performance measure we’re tracking.

This occurs when we start to move closer toward a natural limit or threshold.

As an example, professional weight lifters who commence training see high gains in the initial phase of their training. As their strength increases, they lift higher and higher weights.

As they approach the limits of what their body can lift, they still realise gains through hard training, but these gains are likely to be smaller and smaller, requiring more and more effort to realise. The same is true in many sports.

Usain Bolt set the Olympic World Record for the 100m of 9.63 seconds in Jamaica in 2012. Before that, in 2008, he set a new record of 9.69 seconds, which beat Donovan Bailey’s previous time of 9.84 seconds in 1996.¹⁾

To realise these small gains required enormous effort, and that is the nature of competition in such sports, where fractions of a second mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Often when elite athletes reach these limits, they seek new knowledge, in order to break-through their limits. This is why many athletes seek new coaches at important times in their careers.

Advice: when we’re doing activities that result in diminishing returns, we need to do two things. The first is to realise smaller gains are not necessarily an outcome of our efforts. We need not be disappointed, because we’re reaching a threshold that is often not of our own making. The second is to seek new knowledge (whether that be in the form of a coach, our network, or self-learning) to move through this threshold.

Accelerating Gains pattern for high performance

Accelerating gains occur when the measure we’re tracking increases with every new day of practice. This is a pattern of rapid expansion and growth.

We often think of this type of gain in terms of the share market. A new stock may go through a burst in valuation, creating a steep rise in growth.

We don’t always think about it in terms of our personal development. But in life we can go through these periods.

When Steve Jobs rejoined as Apple CEO in 1997, the company had $1 billion of loses from the previous year. The next phase of growth he started for the company was one of accelerated growth.  This must have been an exhilarating time, but also one where everything moved with incredible speed, and where Jobs himself likely faced accelerated growth. ²⁾

We can see the same accelerating gains pattern in our own lives. If we read for thirty minutes every day for six months, likely we would go through a pattern of accelerated gains. Because it’s not just the new knowledge we’d acquire from each book, but the connections between this material, that would make the sum greater than the parts.

Warren Buffet told students at a Columbia Business School:

“Read 500 pages…every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” ³⁾

Advice: the struggle during accelerated growth may be to keep up with the pace of change, and also keep oneself steady and balanced. Questions like, “am I keeping up with this speed, how am I keeping myself steady with all that’s happening around me, am I focused on a ‘true north / mission / vision’ to guide myself through this pace” can be very helpful.

Zig Zag  pattern for high performance

While the three earlier patterns are well known to you and I, from my experience we think less about this final pattern.

The Zig Zag pattern for personal development involves a pathway of twists and turns and ups and downs that are far less predictable and stable to the earlier patterns.

This pattern can be observed in business as well as sports.

A collaboration of four researchers from Australia and Canada found the zig zag pattern when studying 256 athletes across 27 different sports, as they pursued pathways through amateur and professional sports.

The research uncovered that “more than half of the athletes (57.4%) descended from a higher junior competition to a lower senior competition level in order to eventually progress to Senior Elite competition.” ⁴⁾

34% all athletes in the study had at least one dip in their trajectory, with majority of this number experiencing two or more downturns in their trajectory.

This staggered pathway applied to both Olympians and non-Olympians. There were no significant differences between these groups, suggesting that the zig zag pattern of improvement is indiscriminate.

The study found that “trajectories of development are mostly characterised by non-linear patterns, with highly variable oscillations between and within the junior and senior competition levels.”

If we extend this thinking to our own personal development, we could expect to see a dip in performance, right before we see an uplift in improved performance.

The zig zag pattern is a classic rollercoaster of ups and downs, of breakdowns and breakthroughs.

As you’re reading this, you may remember a time when you have gone through a pattern that looked a lot like this. Perhaps you remember a particular moment, where you evaluated whether continue with the activity or do something else entirely.

In my own training, in a sport I’ve done for over ten years, I recall times where I saw little progress.

It would feel as though I was in a slump, like I’d hit a wall for my development in that area. It would be tough work emotionally and physically.

And then one week, everything would fall into place, and I would go through an accelerated path of growth.

At these times it was not unusual for other people I trained with to say, ‘something has changed in your training’, ‘things are just clicking for you at the moment’.

When we’re in the downward path of the zig-zag pattern, it can feel like our efforts are getting us nowhere and things are hard work.

This is where we need to rely on habits most of all. Because it’s by practicing regular activities that eventually the downward pattern will subside, and we’ll find ourselves again on an upward trend.

In fact, if there is one comfort in the zig-zag pattern, it’s that it feels very different to the other patterns.

Rather than a slowdown in the gains you are making, the zig zag patterns feels likes our performance is actually dropping off.

Those are the signals we’re in the zig-zag pattern. It’s also the signal that our mind is re-ordering what it knows, and is getting ready for the next big push.

Unfortunately often people become disillusioned during this stage. From entrepreneurs to athletes, when the zig-zag pattern feels tough, it’s tempting to stop the activity that causes us to feel like this.  But this is where persistence is actually most needed.

History is full of examples where people have experienced a zig-zag pattern and have continued anyway. They have been able to push through a temporary dip in performance, to then reach the next upward trend in gains.

In 1974, Spencer Silver invented a strange adhesive. He spent five years trying to interest colleagues in it. He could have easily given up. But he persisted. In 1977 he met Arthur Fry who gave him the idea to market the product as an adhesive for paper, and so Post It notes became a marketable product.

In 1936 a little-known writer created a book while working as a cartoonist for Judge Magazine. He shopped his book around and wracked up 27 rejection letters, before he bumped into a friend who encouraged him to submit one last time to Vanguard Press, who then went on to published his first book. That writer was Dr Seuss, who eventually published A Cat in The Hat in 1957 with great success.

Brian Acton was the software engineer that Facebook and Twitter rejected in 2009. Just five years later, Facebook bought the company he co-founded, What’s App, for $16 billion.⁵⁾

Imagine if these and many others had given up? What would the world be like without all of the outcomes which we have come to know and love, many of which resulted when people pushed through the zig zag pattern.

Advice: One thing that is incredibly important when we’re faced with a zig-zag pattern is to keep our enduring purpose front of mind. For us as individuals, this might be in the form of a goal or objective. For companies, mission and vision statements act as a reminder for what teams strive for in the face of adversity. It might be worth considering what makes a great mission statement and vision statement.

If you enjoyed this article, I would love to hear. Please consider leaving a comment below.

The post 4 Patterns For High Performance (And One Many People Miss Completely) appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

I’m sure you have asked yourself the question many times ‘what do I think is great leadership’?  There are so many examples of great leaders, but it’s sometimes harder to pick out the strong leadership principles we can adopt into our own life.

In this post, I share three personal perspectives on leadership principles that shifted the way I think, and may be helpful to you too.

Leadership As Consistent Practice

In a recent interview Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, spoke about how leadership is often observed over the long term, not the short term. He uses analogies to illustrate his point.

“When did you first know you loved your wife#8221;. The chances are it wasn’t at a specific moment, but instead it was felt overtime. Similarly, if we went to the gym and expect to see results instantly, we’d likely never go back.  Instead, physical fitness is seen over time, after a regular practice of attending.

In Sinek’s view, leadership is the same, “there’s nothing I can tell you, you have to do, so that people will trust you…it’s an accumulation of lots and lots of little things that any one by themselves is innocuous and useless….if you do it consistently and do it in combination with lots of other little things, like saying good morning to someone…..it’s those things that you do over and over and over; people will say ‘I love my job’.”

In this, Sinek suggests we challenge our assumptions about leadership.

Leadership is not something that is observable only in the moment, but rather can also be seen overtime, in the hundreds of small things that have occurred over an extended period. If we act in this way, leadership is not only about the highly visible and infrequent moment, it is about every moment, practiced on a consistent basis. It involves us assuming a perspective of continuous improvement and action.

Leadership As Interdependence & Cooperation

In his book the Culture Code, Daniel Coyle argues that the very best leaders are those who are comfortable questioning themselves and allowing others within their teams to do the same.

In so doing, leaders are able to better tap into the collective wisdom of teams, troubleshoot issues that they themselves do not see, and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

This shift involves establishing the right conditions where teams move away from an authority bias toward greater interdependence and cooperation. As leaders we cannot simply tell our teams to function like this, we have to provide them with the signals and environment that indicate it’s okay to do so.

Coyle provides plenty examples of this, from SEAL teams operating in high pressure situations, through to airline pilots who wrestle with highly unlikely and potentially catastrophic events, sharing split-second information and to avoid disaster.

In companies, we sometimes confuse the terms consensus with cooperation, where consensus is occasionally labelled as group thinking or agreement for the sake of it. What Coyle talks about is very different, where cooperation and interdependence is actually about people having the courage to say when something is wrong, based on their expertise and previous experiences. Creating bravery within our teams for people to speak their mind so we can pursue common goals is fundamentally what leadership is about, isn’t it?

This requires building leadership at all levels of a company, and starts with the leader establishing the conditions where this can occur and having the strength to be open to ideas. The impact of these subtle redefinitions and adjustments in leadership cannot be underestimated.

Leadership As Repeatable Rituals For Best Success

In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande documents how a simple checklist was rolled out to a pilot group of hospitals in both developed and underdeveloped nations, to curb the rising tide of millions of surgical complications that occur worldwide.

While the checklist was important, the way it was executed was equally so, often involving a simple principle that upturned the contemporary practice of many hospitals – if the pre-surgery checklist had not been satisfied, the nurse in charge could prevent the surgeon from proceeding with the operation.

This change inverts the unspoken hierarchy, allowing the person whose responsibility it is to sequence the checklist, to put patient-care above all else.  But beyond being a formulaic, process-driven step, it also reminds all people in the specific surgery that they are part of a team where each person is accountable, and that it is not their role to simply ‘follow the leader’.

The way the checklist is implemented creates a continuous practice of leadership as Simon Sinek suggests, and also fosters the interdependence and cooperation that Coyle observed in high performing teams.  Gawande’s checklist does many others things to reinforce these principles, such as also asking each person in the surgical team to introduce themselves to one another at the start of the case.

In this way the checklist is a guide for everyone, no matter what their role, to adhere to a regular pattern of what works and provides the very best outcomes. It brings together the collective intelligence of both experts and the data of thousands of earlier cases to deliver a repeatable pattern that increases the likelihood for success and reduces unnecessary risks.  The checklist also asks experts to pause their spontaneous perspective of what may be right, and to consider a tool that has been proven to work.

As a result of the checklist, in several years major complications in eight hospitals fell by 36 percent, infections halved and death from surgery fell by 47 percent.  Improvements weren’t just observed in developing nations, but also in some of the best hospitals in the world.

According to Gawande, “we have an opportunity, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavour. Even amongst the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place.”

Continuously Refining Our View Of Leadership

These examples remind us that great leadership requires us to continually refine our pre-conceptions about what leadership is and what it isn’t.

They serve as a call to take a broader and longer term view of leadership, that could include everything from how leaders work with teams through to ensuring a strong diversity of leadership styles in teams.

Elsewhere I’ve looked at wider concepts, such as resilience in leadership, how leaders can mentor others, questions leaders may ask of new staff, and also how mission and vision statements can help leaders define the purpose of companies; but these are just some directions, and I’m sure you will have many of your own.

As individuals you and I can also take simple steps to affect change in our own lives, by:

• reviewing our assumptions about what great leadership represents
• continually building upon our view of leadership through reflection and taking note of the times we have been in the presence of great leadership or exhibited strong leadership ourselves
• fostering diverse leadership styles within the organisations where we work, so that these may become exemplars, in which emerging talent may see themselves and plan for their future
• seek the views of others and create an environment where others can contribute their expertise without caution or fear

If you found this article useful or would like to share your view on leadership, please considering leaving a comment below.

The post 3 Expert Views On Leadership Principles That Changed My Own appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

When many companies go to write these statements, people can become distracted by the definition of a mission vs a vision statement, which takes time away from writing the actual statements.

Definitions are important so it’s natural we argue about them – after all, in just a few short words a mission or vision will direct the future direction of a company.

A great place to start is to look at examples how many companies have actually written their mission statements.  Beyond these examples, it’s also important to think more deeply about the definitions and differences of mission statements vs vision statements.

This is how I define these terms…

Chances are you will not find these definitions in any text book. In my research I found it difficult to find a clear sentence outlining each one.  So these definitions are based on my own research, previous studies in strategy and experiences working with different organisations.

The trouble with many other definitions, is that they’re not specific enough to show the exclusivity of these two terms.  And it’s important to have a degree of exclusivity, so we can understand which of these statements are best suited to which purpose.

We can highlight the difference between mission and vision with a simple metaphor.

A helpful metaphor

Let’s say I wanted to climb mount Everest.

My vision is to ‘stand at the top of Everest looking out over the Himalayas on a clear day, knowing that I had just climbed to the summit’.  This provides a very strong mental picture of the vision for the journey I want to take.

Now let’s say I wasn’t going to Everest for another year.

My mission might be to “prepare myself in all senses to ensure that my path to the top of the mountain was as safe and enjoyable as possible”.  Here, ‘in all senses’ could relate to how I get ready physically and mentally, including sourcing the right equipment and team.

Here, both the vision and the mission are involved in the path to achieving my goal.  At the same time, both give me quite different points of focus.

Taking a deeper look

A useful way to think about the differences between mission and vision statements is to compare them along a variety of dimensions.  This simple table summarises some major points of comparison.

Examples How Leading Companies Use Mission Statements and Vision Statements

These four companies use these statements in different ways.  I’ve included some commentary for each example, which references some of the definitions we used earlier in this article.

Disney

Mission Statement: “To be one of the world’s leading producers and providers of entertainment and information. Using our portfolio of brands to differentiate our content, services and consumer products, we seek to develop the most creative, innovative and profitable entertainment experiences and related products in the world.”

Vision Statement: “To be one of the world’s leading producers and providers of entertainment and information.”

Commentary: In Disney’s case, the mission statement provides a clear statement of purpose, including how the company will differentiate itself from the competition.  While this mission statement is longer than many others, it serves its purpose.

In my opinion, the vision statement is the weaker of the two statements, and could be made more specific to the company and its enduring purpose. 

For example, this vision doesn’t provide a clear or inspirational picture of the purpose that it is trying to create, other than to be ‘leading’, or how Disney’s vision is unique to the company or differentiated from competitors.

Reebok

Vision Statement: “We envision a future where humans return to their roots. A future where we recognize that each of us is a living, breathing, walking, talking, running, climbing, jumping, laughing, caring miracle—a miracle that happens only once.

Through tough fitness, we will push each other to honor the body we’ve been given, because we have only one body to honor. We will endure sweat, tears and even a bit of blood. We will flip tires, sprint hills, and do push-ups until we can’t do them any longer.  Why do we do this? We certainly aren’t flipping tires to be better tire flippers. We’re doing it to be better, period. Better leaders; better parents; better stronger, more determined humans—capable of anything. We do it to honor our bodies and sharpen our minds—to be more human.”

Commentary: Reebok’s vision statement provides a clear picture of a preferred future.  In a world overwhelmed by continuous change, Reebok reminds us of our enduring purpose – “to be more human”.  Both a call to arms and a return to the simple pleasure of hard training, this reminds us the journey is not just about being athletic, it’s about being better people in every walk of our lives.  

Nasa

Vision Statement: “We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.”

Mission Statement: “Drive advances in science, technology, aeronautics, and space exploration to enhance knowledge, education, innovation, economic vitality and stewardship of Earth.”

Commentary: Nasa’s vision identifies two eternal tasks which are likely to endure beyond any human life – ‘revealing the unknown’ and ‘benefit of human kind’.  The mission articles the domains of present exploration (science, technology, etc) and the benefactors of this research (education, innovation, etc).

Nike

Mission Statement: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.”
*If you have a body, you are an athlete.

Commentary: In contrast to Reebok, it’s difficult to find a vision statement for Nike.  Instead Nike’s mission statement is well documented and referenced. In this simple statement Nike defines its purpose (inspiration and innovation) as well as target market (every athlete). 

It is deceptively simple and yet at the same time is true to Nike’s purpose and provides enormous latitude for current and future activities.

Should you use Mission or Vision Statement?

The definitions and comparisons above will help you target the type of statement you would like to create for your organisation.

I’ve noticed many organisations will only write one statement, and sometimes this statement will be a hybrid of both mission and vision.  So which one should you choose?

Generally, I would say a single statement is better than no statement at all, because it will give a company a common goal.  This is important in aligning all aspects of an organisation – its people, its resources, its priorities.

I do feel two separate statements around mission and vision, that follow the guidelines above, will be even more powerful.  But if you have to select one, I would say that a mission statement tends to be the most pervasive choice among organisations.

Using Google Insights for Search, I took a sample of search patterns over the last 5 years for mission and vision statements.  I was surprised to find that companies look far more often for ‘mission statement’ compared to ‘vision statement’.

One theory why this occurs is that organisations are more comfortable planning for the ‘here and now’, instead of the future, and this is reflected in search patterns.  The term ‘mission statement’ may also be more popular in business language than ‘vision statement’. As a result, we could assume that if an organisation writes a single statement, it will likely reference it as a ‘mission statement’.

I hope you’ve found this information useful for yourself and your organisation.  You may also wish to take a look at my post 7 Rules of a Vision Statement That Lasts.  If you did find this useful, please consider sharing your own experiences by adding a comment.

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