In my talks and the masterclasses that our Big Bold Goals team run, we deep dive and explore into the leadership behaviours that are needed to achieve audacious goals. These are the patterns and traits that I see time and again from people achieving extraordinary things, the things that most people dismiss as being impossible.
What are those behaviours though that define the Big Bold Mindset, a different way of thinking?
Here are some defining characteristics that I observe from the many leaders I have worked with, spoken to and studied. These are the characteristics that make up the Big Bold Mindset which I want to set out and explore here.
As you read each characteristic, perhaps reflect and score yourself on a scale of 1-10. It is these characteristics that I invite you to reflect on and think about how you can embrace these:
Curiosity
I'm curious. What does this mean? Why does it work this way? Why did this happen? What else could we do?
Leaders who are always thinking of new questions to which they really want to know the answer. Leaders who are seldom satisfied with generic answers. Leaders who want to know more. Inquiring hungry minds.
What's the natural resting state for your mind? Is it seeking more answers or settling for what is?
Rightly or wrongly, this is very much a defining characteristic.
How curious are you? How do you score 1-10?
Humility
Everything changed when I went from saying "I'm right" to "How do I know I'm right?"
The words of Ray Dalio, founder of the worlds largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates which he shares in his brilliant book Principles.
None of us have enough life times to know all the information and insights we will ever need to answer all the questions we want answered.
To be comfortable with admitting we don't know the answers and to seek out the wisdom we need and be honest about the gaps we have doesn't come naturally to everyone.
I wonder if many of us in our formative years have experienced ridicule and humiliation for not "knowing the right answers" and this experience leaves a lasting mark. A lasting mark that means it's uncomfortable to be wrong and to get the wrong answer.
How do you score 1-10? How ready are you to hold your hands up and say "you know what I'm not good enough yet"
Dare to be Different
Why is it this way? Is there a better way? Is there another way?
A willingness to challenge the status quo is something all the leaders I've met share in common.
One of my mentors had a more punchy phrase "are you prepared to spit in the eye of the witch doctor and challenge the way it has always been done?"
Why don't we do this more often? Is it because we want to conform? Were we told off more than once for being difficult, for being challenging, for exhausting our parents?
What may be have been unhelpful in a former life is exactly the skill set we need today.
And this isn't just for organisations. This is for individuals wherever we are in our careers. As traditional career paths change, as technology threatens how we've thought about the world, conformity as a default pattern is not a great place.
How challenging are you? How willing are you to dare to be different? What's your score 1-10 and how open are you to dialling that up?
Experiment: Think Like a Scientist
Leaders who know the future looks different from today know there are no certainties. They know they will fail They know they will fail a lot.
It's this journey of experimenting and iterating toward the future that will create results over time.
Why don't we like failure? Why do so many of us feel uncomfortable with it and shy away from things that feel like failure?
What's your relationship with failure like? Do you see it as a body blow that really hurts and makes you want to avoid it like the plague? Or do you see it as a piece of really valuable feedback that helps you iterate to your next best guess to be able to move forward?
The most successful leaders I know see business and life as one long continuous series of experiments. They relish the experiments thinking what can I learn from this and how can I use this insight to iterate towards the big bold goal?
How experiment-minded are you? How do you rate 1-10 as thinking like a scientist and seeing each failure as another valuable data point to be able to move forward?
Reflective
Unless we study and reflect on the past, we are destined to keep making the same mistakes and repeating the same patterns into the future.
Big Bold Leaders take the time to reflect and notice what worked well and what didn't work so well. These reflections are then used to shape the hypothesis for the next experiment.
It's about working out your first best guess and running that experiment. Then reflecting. If it worked well, what can we do to improve on it and make it even better. If it didn't work well, what changes can we make.
A simple formula that I see across all reflective leaders who strive for greater things: the formula is Pain + Reflection = Progress.
When we hit that pain point, when we find something uncomfortable, what is your default reaction? Do you turn away from it or lean into the discomfort.
One successful senior leader I interviewed for this book shared his daily ritual of the first 30 minutes of the day built into his diary for quiet reflection on the 24 hours that had gone before. A discipline he has honed and developed to find ways to improve every single day.
Napoleon Hill's famous words resonate: "Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit".
These seeds only get planted if we take the time to reflect and to notice the message that the failure is trying to communicate to us.
What's your default? Do you turn towards or away from pain? The next chapter on Beyond Cognitive may provoke thought if you struggle (like most people) with leaning into pain.
Want to score 1-10 on your disposition to reflection? Where do you land? Is this an area for you to improve?
Nurture: Think Like a Farmer
Every impactful leader I've met who has made their own small dent in the world has on their journey at some point come to the realisation they can't do it on their own and that they need a team of people - people to compensate for where they are weak and to bring in people who are strong in that area.
Further, those leaders all have arrived at the insight that people only do things for their own reasons and not the reasons of the leader. It's based on this understanding that listening to, engaging with and nurturing people in their team is crucial.
Recently I was a guest speaker at the Garden Centre Association Conference and having spent two days immersed in the thriving world of garden centres and plants. One of the most successful leaders running a large chain of UK garden centres summed us his wisdom with the phrase: "You can't sell a dead plant".
All too often what I see is the impatience of money and returns can be so overwhelming that it drives out the nurture. It's about understanding the fundamental nature of the nurture business.
In the garden centre business, the lack of nurture shows up pretty easily in dead plants - the dead profits take a little longer to follow.
In business, how does a lack of nurture show up in teams of people? Disengaged, demotivated teams, "burn-out" or that phrase which I keep hearing of "quiet quitting?"
You can have a pretty good bet that dead profits follow from disengaged people.
Yes, of course, have an eye for the bottom line, but I definitely encourage leaders to take a leaf out of the garden centre book and focus on nurture.
When you put people first, the results will follow. This is something I see big bold leaders the world over understanding at their core.
How do you score? What are your nurture skills like 1-10? Are you focused only on the numbers this quarter W or do you have a long term perspective? Achieving bold goals needs the mindset of running a marathon, not a sprint.
Think Bigger
One year, three years, five years, ten years, twenty years from now you will be somewhere. That somewhere will be in direct relation to the choices you make from this moment forwards.
Why not make it the biggest and boldest you can possibly imagine? What if you had the tool kit and mindset to navigate the most seemingly impossible challenges? What would you do differently?
The pattern I see that epitomises this mindset is that stretch. When we set big bold goals we stretch what we believe is possible. Belief, such a core component which is examined in a chapter on it's own literally shapes the way we think, the way we feel and therefore the way that we act.
It's in this stretch of our beliefs, this new space that gets created that we make the space for fresh ideas, fresh thinking. It's when creativity gets released and magic gets created.
The first step which again has a huge psychological component is that of thinking bigger. Thinking bolder. What would it take to grow by 5x, by 10x, by 100x?
What would it take to completely reimagine what we do?
How inclined to big and bold thinking are you? What is your natural state today on the scale of 1-10. Where would you like it to be?
Re-invention
Our story of who we are, our identity does not have to be fixed. It can grow, expand, change and take shape over time.
Are you open to re-writing your story, your identity of who you are?
Did you consciously choose and create the identity you have today? How did you get it?
Did you work to define it or has it been shaped by the experiences you've had until now?
Are you happy with your identity and story?
If you expanded it and made the biggest wildest dream you could possibly imagine, what is the very worst thing that could happen?
"What's the worst that can happen?" is a thought process, a question that I see time and again from those showing a big bold mindset. When one really answers this question and reflects on it, we often discern that many of the beliefs we've been building on fall away and the downside risks are far less than we may have perceived them to be.
What comes up for you when think of re-writing your identity and story, of reinventing yourself?
Are you like my friend from college days, Paul who firmly believes you are who you are and you can't change who you are at your core?
Or are more open to the possibilities that Professor Carol Dweck, outlines in here book, Mindset? That our brains have neuroplasticity and we can literally expand and re-write our script. I love the small langauge tweak that she advises when a child (or adult) will say "I'm no good at this". The tweak is simply to add the word "yet" at the end of the sentence to become "I'm no good at this yet". Those simple three letters open a world of possibility.
What's the identity that you've not created yet? What possibilities could you create?
As our world changes and technology and Al redefine processes, jobs and roles that humans have traditionally done, this identity redefinition is vital.
Imagine if you will. In my early career, I defined my place in the world, the value I could bring to the world by the role I performed. It was as much an identity as a definition of value.
I was an accountant. That was who I was.
Imagine now technology can now do 80 to 100% of that role? Where would that leave my identity? I've been replaced by a machine. It's easy to see a pathway to feeling that one brings no value which would be a terrible place to be.
For you, for your work place, for your home team, how aware and equipped are you and they to re-write their story? Make no mistake that this is a skill set and one that I believe is vital. What is your skill level at re-writing your story and how equipped are you as a leader to help others on their journey?
For now please go ahead and score yourself on your ability to re-write and reinvent yourself. 1-10 - just make a note.
Relentlessly Action Orientated
Tomorrow only happens because of what we do today.
I love dreaming and imagining the future and getting excited about the possibilities. And equally I know that without the relentless action orientation it will stay just a dream.
Every single person who has achieved anything big and bold has an ability to shuttle between the big picture out there in the future and then the immediate actions and goals and small steps today to be able to make it happen.
Marc Randolph, Co-Founder of Netflix has a great visual for this which I paraphrase as:
"Imagine you're on a mountain bike on a steep slope heading down at speed. You have to keep flicking your eyes up to make sure you know where you're going and that you're headed in the right direction, and then quickly back down again to ground immediately in front of you to make sure you don't hit a rock or a pothole".
It's this ability to look up and look down, that I think is crucial.
Dr Grace Lordan, an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science writes in her book, Think Big, of the need to think big and to take the small steps needed to make progress.
Spend one day in the company of any accomplished senior leader or entrepreneur on a mission and it will be hard to miss the orientation towards action. It's quite simply a case of how quickly you can run the experiments needed and to take the insights from them to make the progress towards your goal.
One mentor ingrained in me the question"
"What I have done today to move meaningfully and measurably closer to my goal today?"
The questions we ask ourselves on a consistent basis very much shape who we become and how we show up in the world.
How relentless and action-orientated are you? Truthfully, where do you land 1-10? Make a note.
What’s Next?
Do you want to get deeper into the substance of what to do to develop a bigger and bolder mindset. We've rattled through the traits I see time and again from leaders who consistently think bigger and bolder and achieve results that match.
Some words that may also come up for you as you think about these characteristics are self-aware, open minded and determined. They are words that certainly come up for me, but are ones that I feel are already reflected in the characteristics above.
For now, I hope you have a rough check in of where you are today.
To dive deeper, here’s three options:
Book me to speak at your next event or for our team to run a workshop for you
Book a call with me to explore how you can action these ideas.
Interested in booking a talk?
The talk relevant to Leadership Behaviours is this one:
"Navigating The Future: Leadership Behaviours for Achieving Big, Bold Goals"
Join me on a voyage into the heart of leadership excellence as we explore the behaviours necessary to conquer the biggest, boldest challenges. Drawing upon my experiences as a sailor navigating the worlds oceans and as a leadership expert guiding teams to extraordinary success, I'll unveil the essential traits that separate ordinary leaders from those who achieve the seemingly impossible.
In this engaging talk, we'll delve into the mindset and behaviours required to chart a course toward audacious goals.We'll uncover the key principles that underpin exceptional leadership in the face of uncertainty and adversity.
Through captivating stories and practical insights, you'll discover how to inspire your team to embrace a spirit of adventure, tackle challenges head-on, and sail confidently toward the future. This talk will equip you with the tools and techniques to lead with confidence, purpose, and determination.
The horizon beckons—are you ready to embark on the adventure?