As the clock strikes midnight and the confetti settles, we're all brimming with resolutions that promise a fresh start. But what makes this year's aspirations different from the forgotten gym memberships of yesteryears? We'll dissect the anatomy of goals, the illusion of willpower, and the critical perspective needed to be able to properly resource ourselves and our teams for success.
How would it feel to know you are supported and resourced as you work towards your goals?
If you are tired of being hard on yourself or your team for not meeting your goals, I hope you join us.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
As the clock strikes midnight and the confetti settles, we're all brimming with resolutions that promise a fresh start. But what makes this year's aspirations different from the forgotten gym memberships of yesteryears? We'll dissect the anatomy of goals, the illusion of willpower, and the critical perspective needed to be able to properly resource ourselves and our teams for success.
How would it feel to know you are supported and resourced as you work towards your goals?
If you are tired of being hard on yourself or your team for not meeting your goals, I hope you join us.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
Hello and happy New Year. I'm super excited to be back. It's January 2024. We are back with Leadership Ripples, with Leah Fink, probably like a lot of people. We have rung in the New Year and a lot of people are talking about their goals. Right, we have these desires that we have that we want to switch things, make things a little bit better as the next year comes. We're actually going to switch up the show a little bit today because I'm going to use myself as the leadership example and share a bit more of a personal story in a moment here. What are you hoping for in the year ahead? We're going to start planning our goals. What do we want for Q1? What are we going to change? What do we want to look different as we start this journey into 2024?
Speaker 2:
There's this energy that's really great with January, when we get excited about what might be different. It's kind of this liminal space that we pass through this doorway as we go from the old year into the new one, and this hope that things are going to change. But what has actually changed? The challenges we had with our business didn't disappear. Poof at the end of December, the things that we hoped to handle, to look at differently. The situations probably haven't shifted. Our skills didn't magically improve. We're still the same people. So how are we going to make things different at this new year?
Speaker 2:
And I always love thinking about this classic New Year's resolution, which is to get fit, and I find this stat so interesting. But if you ever go into a gym in January, so if you go in the next week, you will find it is packed People on every machine. People are waiting in line. It's so busy because so many people had these really great resolutions. They felt this fantastic energy of the new year. They were ready to make this change they'd been wanting to make. If you go back to that same gym in a couple weeks time, in a month or two, you will find it is much quieter. There are studies that say up to 67% of gym memberships go unused. That is a huge amount of people who had a goal, made plans and took action and paid money to move towards that goal but didn't end up continuing with it. Do you think they just lost that goal? Well, I hate to say that a lot of goals and what people are going to be talking about over the next couple of months end up the same way. We set a goal, we get excited about it and things happen and things shift and maybe that goal gets lost. And I want to talk a little bit more about that side of things, not just the positive and how we're building our energy for it and what goals we're setting, but a little bit about what's behind. Say, those 67% of people not going back to the gym.
Speaker 2:
Now, think about any goals you met or didn't meet in 2023. Maybe you did achieve every single goal, maybe you surpassed them. That is wonderful. I still think this is worth listening to, but I'm really glad that you were able to take those steps that you wanted. If you didn't meet some of your goals, are you feeling a little bit of self guilt or doubt that you did not have the willpower to take the steps that you needed to complete that goal? If you are, that is perfectly natural.
Speaker 2:
This is when we talk about goals. We often talk about the willpower that's needed. That is, the ability to resist short-term temptation for long-term gain that we need to invest in order to achieve our goals. And you think about that with the team that you're leading as well. Did they all invest the time and the effort into the things that were needed to achieve your team's long-term goals, or were some things missed or not fully complete in the way that you want? I want to actually switch, when we talk about goals, to move away from this idea of willpower and your drive and your commitment to it being actually one of the most important pieces. You may find that controversial. I know lots of people have changed their life by getting down and using willpower to push through things. We're going to talk a little bit about that as well, but if you do disagree with me, please feel free to put that in the comments or reach out. I would love to continue that discussion.
Speaker 2:
As I said, I wanted to share a little bit of my story for this and for me, that starts way before I was in a leadership position. I have always been someone who you would say on the outset or from looking from the outside in, has very high willpower. When I was a teenager, I was a competitive freestyle mogul skier and I committed my life to that. I was up early, working out, I was training all the time. It was my entire life. I worked on mindset and commitment and I was focused, put in a ton of effort and that rewarded me a lot.
Speaker 2:
Moving on to university, I did full-time university. I worked about 40 hours a week. On top of that, I was committed. I did took a year off my degrees because I had everything planned out and I worked so hard and I loved it. Even when I started my first job, it was one of the first things my coworkers acknowledged was wow, you seem really hard working. I actually got knowledge for that in my first couple of weeks of work. So willpower was not something I would have ever said I had or would have a challenge with.
Speaker 2:
But here's the thing A couple years later, in that same organization, I was now in a leadership role. Right at the time we were going through a big organizational or programmatic restructuring. It was a really hard time. The whole staff team of full-time staff left aside for me so we had new staff coming in, the program was changing, I was making up for roles that weren't filled and trying to learn all of these pieces at the same time and train new staff. It was a really, really challenging time. Now I used the willpower that I always had to keep working hard and get through the situation and try to stay on top of everything, and it did work to an extent. But it won't surprise anyone to know that I burnt out.
Speaker 2:
I ended up on medical leave and eventually deciding that that position was no longer a good fit for me. I was probably no longer a good fit for that position to help people that a way that I wanted to. And the thing is, from when I'd always bounced back from stressful situations before, this took way longer. That willpower I had disappeared for a long time. It was months before I felt any drive to work at all and, I would say, honestly, over a year before I really started to find passion and energy to do that kind of work again.
Speaker 2:
So what changed? We never talk about willpower. It's very rare that we talk about willpower in terms of the systems that we're in and the things that are happening around us, and it's really hard, when we have a conversation about goals which can be so multifaceted, based on so many pieces, to think of them as just that we are committing the effort to making them happen. So for me, it was very easy to have willpower when I was very well supported. There was great boundaries around my work and life. There was a lot of support. It was really easy when all of my needs were met, not just physical needs, but psychological, emotional, safety needs. It was really easy when I was in a healthy mental state. Now, when the system was no longer supportive or balanced or well-bounded, then my needs were not being met and suddenly it was hard to keep up that sense of drive. This has happened for a lot of people. This is what happens with burnout, and I've met tons of people that have gone through that experience and described this lack of motivation that they suddenly have.
Speaker 2:
Another example I want to bring around this idea of willpower and what's actually happening in your life is addiction in general. I worked in addiction and mental health for a number of years and usually when people talk about addiction there's a lot of conversation and a judgment around why people can't just get clean. Why don't they just choose to not use drugs anymore? Don't they just choose not to gamble anymore? If they just had more willpower, they would change their lives and their lives would be better. Now, working in the field, you of course realize that it's about way more than willpower, even though from the outside it's much easier to say they should just have that willpower. But what kind of systems are those people generally, in Knowing about it more, there's lots of trauma, there might be poverty, there might be lack of education, there might be all of these different components in this person's life that make it very hard to just say well, focus, and you'll get through this. Addiction for substances, for example, was they found a different solution to some sort of stress in their life that wasn't willpower, and they're not just going to get over it because that solution they found is meeting some needs.
Speaker 2:
And it's the same when we start to look at goals and a lack of willpower that we have in our lives. Let's say you are one of those people who's had a goal to be fit, to eat healthier, to go to the gym more, and every year you find yourself starting out maybe with a little bit of energy doing that thing and then losing what you might call the willpower to continue that goal, to follow through, to achieve what you were hoping to. Or even if you did achieve something, to continue that growth or stay at that same level of fitness. What if it weren't about your willpower? But actually what else is affecting you in the world? Is there a piece of mindset that maybe makes it hard to believe in the work you're doing for yourself. Are there struggles around your time? Maybe you're taking care of a sick family member and you it's very hard to find the time to go to the gym or to make the kind of meals you want. Maybe you have support of people in your life, maybe you don't.
Speaker 2:
There's so many factors that we actually want to look at in the system around a person before we start talking about not having enough willpower. So think about this for yourself personally and for your team as we go into this next year. For yourself personally, as you make goals about how you grow and change, what truly needs to be resourced around you to do that. Maybe you need extra support. Maybe you need someone who is in your corner to help you talk through things like a coach and figure them out and just have that moral support. That is a genuine need you might have that maybe hasn't been fulfilled as you're trying to reach that goal. Maybe you need more resources. Right Resource could be time. It could be money. How would that shift, seeing that as part of a bigger system challenge of not fulfilling that goal? So what might actually be restraining you from getting to achieve your goal?
Speaker 2:
Now, as you look at your team, as we've talked about on this show before, as a leader, you have responsibility to how you support your team. We've talked about three things the shield, structure and supply. So not only are you maybe needing to protect your team from things that are coming down, maybe from above, to make sure that they're able to achieve the kind of goals you're asking them to achieve, but maybe you need to supply them with something that they don't have. If this is going to be a realistic goal, Maybe you need to do some restructuring or structure something specifically so this goal can be met. I hate to say how many stories I've unfortunately heard about a team even coming up with, or usually being assigned, goals by leadership. They're not given the resources they need. There's other situational or systemic pieces around that make it hard to achieve those goals, and then either those goals don't end up being achieved and usually it's the employees that are blamed, not leadership, for any lack of support that they offered or those same employees are ending up like me they're burning themselves out to try to achieve the goal that they were not properly resourced for.
Speaker 2:
So, as you think of your team goals for this year, as you're building them in as you're getting excited and getting the momentum for them really focus on what is in your system. What do your staff members as individuals need? What does the team need? What's going to prevent them from getting their goals and, especially, what's going to keep them in a mentally healthy state where their needs are met so they can actually find the drive, the passion, to create that willpower, because willpower is not a bad thing. I'm not trying to say we don't need willpower or that drive. I think it's very important. But if you want to get to that state of passionate, engaged commitment to movement forward, you need to look at some of the other resources that you have first. I hope that was a little bit of an inspiring or thoughtful way to start your goal setting for the year.
Speaker 2:
If you haven't already figured it out. If you have already figured it out, I hope that you have already figured it out. If you have already figured it out, I hope you've looked a little bit at what might be limiting you or what you could really use to support yourself in pursuing your goals for the first quarter. For the rest of the year, if you do want to share your own leadership story or ask any questions for the show, we would love to have them. The link for that is in the description below, and if you want to join us live so you can comment and ask your questions, we would love to have you. The link for that is in the description below. I just want to thank you so much for listening today, maybe having a thought and a little bit of gentleness to yourself, letting go of this idea of not having enough willpower and that's why your goals were not met, and I invite you to keep thinking of that as you set your goals. I hope you have a great week and thanks for listening.