The Perils of Short-Term Thinking

In our hype-driven world, some prominent leaders achieve fame by making bold claims and promoting themselves as geniuses. However, research confirms that true wisdom and excellence come from empowering teams, prioritizing quality, and cultivating long-term thinking.

Sustainable success requires valuing people over profits, craft over speed, and community over ego. It means making decisions informed by expertise and empathy rather than bravado.

The Myth of the Lone Genius

Stories of brilliant mavericks single-handedly changing the world make for great media narratives. However, academics note that most major innovations emerge from collaborative networks, not solo stars.

As Isaac Newton remarked, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Real progress comes from teams sharing knowledge and building on each other's work.

False Narratives About Overwork

Some prominent leaders perpetuate myths that their achievements come from working exceptionally long hours and making extreme personal sacrifices. However, extensive research confirms working excessive hours consistently reduces productivity, performance, and employee wellbeing over time.

Sustainable results come from supporting people to do their best work in humane conditions, not pushing them to exhaustion. As Sidney Dekker notes, some organizations “mistake disengagement, burnout, and negligence for heroism.” We must recognize the difference.

Short-Term Thinking Destroys Value

Obsessing over immediate results often degrades long-term reputation, returns, and stakeholder value. Research by McKinsey finds that companies focused solely on quarterly earnings underperform in resulting stock returns compared to those focused on multi-year horizons and compounding capabilities.

While maximizing short-term profits pleases some shareholders, it risks severely damaging corporate conscience, culture, and capacity for future innovation. Ethical, wise leaders consider systemic impacts beyond just this quarter.

Empower Teams Through Mastery and Autonomy

Studies confirm that enabling people to find meaning and mastery in their work breeds excellence over the long run. As Daniel Pink explains, humans intrinsically crave autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Command-and-control leadership crushes motivation and innovation.

Empowered teams who continually hone skills drive breakthroughs. Like Toyota’s andon cord, collaborative learning cultures turn problems into insights rather than placing blame. Psychologically safe environments enable sustained growth.

The Risks of Ego and Arrogance

Extensive research reveals the loudest, most arrogant leaders often lack wisdom and competence. True expertise is humble, nuanced and reflective. Wise leaders ask open questions, actively listen, and sincerely consider divergent views.

Surrounding oneself with yes-men breeds groupthink and epic blunders that could easily be avoided by promoting cognitive diversity. Actively seeking out broad perspectives counters dangerous blind spots.

If these topics resonate, I offer coaching on values-driven leadership, empowering teams, systems thinking, and long-term strategy. Reach out anytime to discuss coaching tailored to your context and goals. The road to lasting greatness starts with a single step.

Transcending Limiting Thoughts

Our thoughts often hold us back from reaching our full potential. The untamed mind frequently defaults into repetitive patterns of negative self-talk, doubt, and worry. Yet we need not be captive to this noisy inner voice. By cultivating self-awareness, we can recognize limiting thoughts, release our attachment to them, and reconnect with our highest selves.

The Pitfalls of Unconscious Thinking

The human mind has evolved to prioritize comfort, safety and efficiency. Left unchecked, it urges us toward what is familiar and easy, not what fosters growth. According to psychologists, unconscious reactive thinking can rationalize why we:

• Procrastinate on challenges where we could excel if we dared to try. Our brains urge us to avoid expending effort and facing potential failure.

• Settle for unhealthy habits rather than summoning discipline. Brains rewarded with dopamine cling to destructive vices that provide short-term pleasure.

• Isolate ourselves for fear of judgment rather than connecting authentically. Seeking approval from others is exhausting, so brains urge us to withdraw for self-protection.

This is the primitive, risk-averse mind clinging to its comfort zone. But is this who we aspire to be? As author James Clear notes, building our best lives requires taming this unruly inner force.

The Freedom of Conscious Awareness

The first step is cultivating awareness - recognizing when limiting thoughts arise. Without conscious attention, they infiltrate our self-narrative unquestioned:

• "I'm not capable of leading this project."

• "It's pointless to try improving my productivity."

• "I don't have anything valuable to contribute."

Yet these are just thoughts, not absolute truth. We can notice them with detachment, then let them go before they shape our actions.

Becoming the Observer

Meditation helps us peacefully observe our thoughts without identifying with them. We acknowledge anxieties and self-criticism non-judgmentally as they surface in our minds, without clinging to them as self-defining. Over time, we gain distance, seeing even our most deeply entrenched narratives as passing mental events, not as permanent reality.

Neuroscience reveals that naming our emotions in this way calms the threat response in the amygdala. Our thoughts no longer control us when we can dispassionately watch them.

Reconnecting to Our Highest Self

When we stop over-identifying with limiting thoughts, we reconnect with our essential nature - the intuitive true self that exists below the chattering mind. Here we find deep wisdom, confidence, compassion and creative vision flowing freely.

This highest version of ourselves is not constrained by anxious worry over perceived flaws or fear of others' judgments. We feel a sense of expansive freedom and inspiration when we tap into this realm of pure potential.

Continuing the Journey

Transcending limiting thoughts is a lifelong journey requiring commitment to awareness, presence and growth. The mind habitually resists, but we can gently guide it with compassion. Each moment we recognize and release attachment to negative narratives, we reclaim more of our boundless inner power.

I offer coaching for leaders seeking help overcoming self-limiting thoughts like self-doubt, excessive worry, and fear of failure. Reach out if you need support unlocking your highest potential by moving beyond reactive thinking. Together we can cultivate the mindset that makes everything possible.

Rethinking “Common Sense” as a Decision-Making Guide

“Common sense” has a deceptively comforting ring, evoking accumulated wisdom gleaned from lived experience and “simpler times.” But in truth, relying solely on common sense as your compass often leads to dangerously poor judgments and assumptions. While personal experiences provide one useful data point, true wisdom integrates broad, diverse perspectives.

The Flawed Notion of “Common” Sense

So-called common sense suggests judgments based on what seems obvious and self-evident from your specific background and limited life observations. But it suffers from severe shortcomings:

• It presumes that most people share your singular views, which is rarely the case in a complex world. In reality, different vantage points yield entirely different “common sense” conclusions.

• It recklessly extrapolates universal truths about issues from your own highly limited, subjective experiences and anecdotal information. There are typically exceptions.

• It conveniently aligns with your inherent confirmation biases that favor facts conforming to your existing worldview and discount contradicting evidence.

• It often lacks broader contextual facts, nuance, alternate hypotheses, and empirical testing required to determine causality versus correlation.

• It frequently conflicts with scientific consensus, rigorous data analysis, and subject matter expertise that reveal more complex dynamics.

Relying solely on “common sense” dangerously neglects to reality test your assumptions and mental models against alternative explanations. It breeds false confidence in gut reactions and facilitates decisions founded on intellectual quicksand.

Cultivating Broader, Evidence-Based Perspective

The attached Psychology Today article by Jim Taylor Ph.D. neatly encapsulates the inherent need to move beyond “common sense” alone if leaders wish to form accurate, nuanced perspectives. Some key principles include:

• Maintain an open, growth-oriented mindset willing to reach conclusions that may contradict your pre-existing hunches, assumptions or expectations. Don’t let bias limit input.

• Proactively hypothesize multiple, alternative explanations for outcomes, not just those you intuitively favor or wish to be true. Welcome having your beliefs constructively challenged.

• Seek out and collect a large, highly diverse sample of perspectives, data points and information. Don’t just ask those who you already know share all of your current views and biases.

• Commit to analyzing any information you receive completely objectively, not just selectively looking for data to affirm your preliminary opinions. Let facts guide conclusions, not the reverse.

• Draw reasoned conclusions predicated on synthesizing insights from a rigorous, inclusive inquiry process, not emotion, convention or groupthink.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201107/common-sense-is-neither-common-nor-sense

True Wisdom Requires Integrating Broad Inputs

While your past experiences and observations provide one very useful vantage point, true wisdom integrates a mosaic of many different sources of data, ideation, and expertise before reaching conclusions or choosing courses of action. Any leader who dismissively claims “common sense” alone is sufficient reveals their own profound intellectual limitations.

Lasting progress requires humility about how much you don’t know, comfort with ambiguity, intellectual curiosity about different worldviews, and skill synthesizing diverse perspectives - abilities executive coaching can directly strengthen. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you need any support combating the immense perils of relying solely on “common sense” as a decision-making guide. Our shared growth depends on moving far beyond the gaps and biases inherent in any one person’s subjective life experience. A bigger world awaits.