TLP204: Just Sit Still. Moving from Doer to Driver with Sara Canaday

Sara Canaday is the author of You — According to Them, and Leadership Unchained: Defy Conventional Wisdom for Breakthrough Performance. Sara shares how leaders can better adapt to the changing landscape, because conventional or traditional success strategies can now limit our recovery and growth. Sara contends we need to shift from being a doer to being a driver.   Key Takeaways [3:00] Conventional or traditional success strategies that we’ve learned can now limit our future success as the landscape today is so different. [6:15] When Sara says take a strategic pause, she doesn’t mean to take a mental time out. She means to really absorb all the knowledge you’ve learned lately and see what stands out. [8:45] The idea of doing nothing scares a lot of people, even when they consciously know it could benefit them greatly. [16:30] In Sara’s book, You — According to Them, the biggest thing that leaders took away from that book was shifting the focus from being a doer to a driver.[24:35] It’s up to all of us to find our own purpose in the bigger scheme of things. A company tells you what your function is - not necessarily purpose. [31:35] As a young woman, Sara learned that if she wanted to be taken seriously, she had to be serious, and that thinking backfired on her. [33:40] There is a balance between standing out and fitting in. Be a renegade in your ideas, but not in your behavior.  [37:15] People like listening to the loudest person in the room because it feels like action-taking, but those people can create massive casualties in an organization. The only way to prevent this is to really slow down and think things through, but that’s not deemed ‘efficient.’ [39:55] You have a lot of control over who gets your time and attention more than you realize, even if you feel like you don’t have the ‘authority’ or a high-demanding boss in front of you. [43:10] In order to get people engaged, we have to show them that we’re just as engaged in what they want for themselves. [47:00] Leaders need to be willing to shake up the way they think.   Quotable Quotes “Take a strategic pause, make unbreakable appointments with yourself to sit, and let everything you’ve read/seen/heard in a week or a day marinate so you can see connections you may not have seen.” “How many of us were rewarded for being doers? We’ve been conditioned, so it takes a real mind shift to sit still.” “You can have all the smarts in the world, but that alone is not going to get you where you need to be.” “The experiences we give ourselves are important.” “If you enter the game of business, you enter the game to play. So play to win!”   Resources Mentioned   The Leadership Podcast is Sponsored by:     Cultivate Grit. Amplify Action. Investing in yourself isn’t selfish. Click to get gritty!     Free downloads of on Delegation, Time Management, Sales, and more.