Your Next Clear Move
Welcome to Your Next Clear Move™—the podcast for leaders, professionals, and high-capacity humans who are done “getting ready” and ready to move.
I’m Debbie Peterson, Leadership Readiness Expert, and in each episode I deliver grounded insight, clarity-driven mindset strategies, and one actionable step to help you stop the drift and lead yourself forward.
This isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It’s about reconnecting to what matters—and making decisions that align with who you are and how you want to lead next.
Subscribe for weekly clarity drops that fuel your next level—with confidence.
Your Next Clear Move
The Tools That Changed My Leadership Forever
Have you ever realized you might be the one standing in your own way? That unexpected gut punch hit me during my first Neuro-Linguistic Programming training, forever changing my approach to leadership and life.
I entered that training expecting professional development tricks but discovered something much more profound. The stress and reactivity defining my leadership wasn't coming from external circumstances—it was stemming from my own mindset. This revelation opened my eyes to the influence I already possessed but wasn't fully utilizing. Through NLP and HUNA principles, I discovered three transformative mindset tools that shifted me from feeling powerless to taking responsibility for my outcomes.
The first game-changing tool was understanding Cause and Effect—recognizing when I'm generating results versus generating excuses. This simple distinction revealed whether I was taking action (cause) or just reacting to circumstances (effect). The second tool, Values Clarity, helped me stop chasing someone else's version of success. By explicitly identifying what matters most to me, decisions became clearer, and I stopped wasting energy on misaligned pursuits. The third tool, Defining Success on my terms, freed me from the vague ladder-climbing that had consumed my career. When success has your definition, every move becomes more intentional.
These mindset shifts didn't just transform my leadership—they changed how I show up in all aspects of life. The beauty is that these same tools can be mirrored with your team to build a culture of accountability, values alignment, and shared motivation. What's your next clear move? Where are you living on the effect side with reasons, and where could you shift to the cause side with results? Which value needs more honor in your leadership decisions? Your answers reveal your path forward. For more resources to support your leadership clarity journey, visit www.debbiepetersonspeaks.com and discover how to take your next clear move with confidence.
Hey, hello and welcome back. I am Debbie Peterson of Getting to Clarity, and this is another episode of the Getting to Clarity podcast. This is the place where you come to get the tips, tools and techniques that you need to make your next clear move in business, in your leadership, in your career, and today we are talking about tools that I have come across that changed my leadership forever, and I want to share them with you, so stay tuned.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Getting to Clarity podcast.
Speaker 3:The place where busy leaders discover how to create more success in their leadership journey with less sacrifice in their life.
Speaker 2:Here's your host, debbie Peterson, of Getting to Clarity.
Speaker 1:Tools. What kind of tools? Well, you know, I will never forget walking into my very first NLP training. That's neuro-linguistic programming. Neuro is the mind, linguistic is language. Programming are our habits, our strategies that we go to, and it is about the language of our mind that we use to govern our outcomes, whether we get what we want, or maybe we get the opposite.
Speaker 1:And I remember going into this training and thinking that I was going there to learn a few professional development hacks, tricks. But what I didn't expect was the gut punch that I got, because I discovered I was the one who was the most in my own way when it came to my career and my life. I was in my own way, I was stressed out and I was in my own way. I was stressed out and I was reacting to everything around me. But that training also gave me something I never considered before, and that is that I had much more influence than I thought I did. I wasn't powerless. I could do something about my stress, my choices, my future, all of it. And that realization changed everything. So when I began to embrace these mindset tools, I started showing up differently. I wasn't as emotionally reactive, I saw myself differently and little by little, I started leading differently too. So these are mindset tools, and here's why it's important, because as a leader, we don't always realize how much influence we already have. So the tools that I discovered through NLP and HUNA helped me to see that clarity wasn't something out of reach. It was something that was already available to me when I chose to take responsibility, and these mindset tools came during a turning point in my leadership and in my life.
Speaker 1:So what are these tools that changed everything? I'm so glad you asked, the first of which is a mindset tool called cause and effect. So, to keep it simple, cause is an action. It's an action that you take. Effect is the consequence of that action. So you do something. Something happens as a result, whether that's positive or negative, it is just that simple. So either you are generating results in your leadership or you are generating excuses for why you don't have the results. So you're taking action and the consequence of that action is either what you want or what you don't want, and both of them are your responsibility. So when I understood that, I realized that I was responsible for my outcomes and my success. That level of clarity and responsibility was both humbling and freeing at the same time. So for leaders, it's a powerful check-in. Are you on the cause side of your results, or are you on the effect side and you're getting excuses? So what are you getting? Reasons or results? Are you piling up the reasons or are you stacking up the results?
Speaker 1:Number two, the next mindset tool, is values clarity. I had to learn the hard way that just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean that you should. Too many leaders chase what they think success should look like, even if it runs against who they are and what matters most to them. So when I got clear on my values, I understood what motivated me, I knew when to say yes, when to say no and when to wait, and that one shift allowed me to make better choices about my career, my leadership and, eventually, my business. So here's a simple NLP style values elicitation that you can try.
Speaker 1:Take a quiet moment and ask yourself what is important to me about my work and my leadership and write down everything that comes to mind without editing. If it pops into your mind, write it down because it did so for a reason, and I want you to keep going until you at least have a list of 8 to 10 items. Next, I want you to go through that list and I want you to rank them in order of importance and notice which ones rise to the top. These are the values that truly drive you, and once you're clear on that, the priority then are you honoring these values in a way that you're making decisions from it? Where are you out of alignment? It'll tell you, and this quick reflection often reveals where you're chasing someone else's version of success instead of your own, meaning that you know you don't know what success is for you, so therefore it's being defined by somebody else.
Speaker 1:Success is for you, so therefore it's being defined by somebody else, which leads me to number three, the next mindset tool, and that is defining success. And for me, that was defining success on my term. So for years I chased a vague idea of success. I thought it meant climbing the ladder, you know, checking the boxes, saying yes to whatever was next, as long as it was more or better or higher than where I currently was. But here's what I discovered Success without my definition wastes my energy. I'm just chasing things. And once I started naming what success actually meant to me because we all have different definitions then I made better decisions. I was less distracted, I was less stressed, and if I could do it for myself, I could help others do the same.
Speaker 1:So, as a leader, you just don't need to define success for yourself. You need to help your team define what success looks like for them too. That is when people are aligned. So here's how you can apply this. These tools don't just change how you lead. They continue to shape how you move to your next level of growth, how you lead in your life. For me, they shape how I run my business today and how I show up as a keynote speaker.
Speaker 1:So mindset clarity is about leadership clarity. And when you find tools that work, you don't just change yourself. You change the way that you show up and you change the way that you lead others. So let's think about some mirror language that you can use this with your teams. So cause and effect for teams that might look like you encouraging your teams to notice where they're creating results versus where they're offering reasons. It helps to build a culture of accountability, maybe values clarity for your teams, asking your team members what's most important to them in their work and use this valuable information to shape their assignments, to give them appropriate recognition and opportunities, defining success for your teams. Make success tangible for them, invite them to define what a win looks like for them in their work, and do that before the work begins. This creates alignment and it helps to share motivation.
Speaker 1:So here's my question what's your next clear move? Where are you living? On the effect side of the equation, you've got reasons, you've got excuses why you're not getting what you want. And then, conversely, think about where you're living on the cause side of the equation, you are causing the results that you want to have happen. Ask yourself, what is one value that you feel that you need to honor more in your leadership? You need to honor more in your leadership. What might that be? And then take it. So I'd love to support you in your next clear move. For more resources, tips, tools, head on over to my website at wwwdebbypetersonspeakscom. And until the next time, I am wishing you all the clarity that you deserve so that you can take your next clear move confidently. Be good to yourself and bye-bye for now.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to this episode of the Getting to Clarity Podcast with Debbie Peterson.
Speaker 3:If you enjoyed this show, please rate and recommend it on iTunes or wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
Speaker 2:To learn more about how you can bring Debbie and her transformational clarity leadership strategies to your organization, visit DebbiePetersonSpeakscom.
