To recap, you’ve determined that you want to be successful, you’ve done the work on yourself to create an authentic definition of success that aligns with your personal purpose and values, you’ve identified your personal blockers to success and have developed the courage to challenge your internal itty-bitty-$hitty-committee and the expectations of society and your network. So what’s the next ingredient to achieving success?

Grit, Determination, Persistence, Perseverance, Drive, and Resilience

I get asked fairly often how an individual can improve this skill. So today, I’m going to provide listeners with a tool to improve critical thinking. Before we get started, a word of caution—improvements in critical thinking seldom happen overnight. Critical thinking skills are developed over years and maintaining this skill takes real effort—critical thinking can atrophy quickly if we abandon or reduce our commitment to continuous improvement and lifelong learning. It is sooo easy to get lulled into the status quo and easy to adopt a fixed, unyielding mindset.

I can’t put enough focus on the value of education and good decision-making that’s accompanied by a lifelong learning mindset as ways to reduce stress and anxiety. Too many in our society are on auto-pilot, going through the motions of life. Life is happening to them. Self-reliance developed through learning and education coupled with better decision making skills is the path to making things happen in your life and taking control of your narratives and outcomes.

To begin, it’s important to state what I hope is the obvious—that the number one job of all leaders and managers is to be a coach to their teams and team members. Unfortunately, in many organizations, coaching is viewed as a ‘nice to have’ and is not encouraged as the priority it should be. There are all manner of excuses for this lack of focus on coaching.

Most importantly, ask yourself if your reaction to a new acquaintance is based on the response that our hyper-polarized society expects you to have, or are you willing to learn and grow your thinking and your network beyond the confines of a fixed mindset to an issue, people, or culture.

Intellectually, I am keenly aware that I should objectively evaluate what went wrong through an after-action review (AAR), engage in a learning activity, communicate why what I’ve learned will produce different results in the future, and implement a change to my standard work (i.e., the current set of best practices) to reduce the likelihood of recurrence. Reality can be quite different. It’s easy to allow feelings of inadequacy to cloud my judgement. It’s easy to wallow in the valley of despair. It’s easy to throw a pity-party and remain “stuck.” A vicious cycle can ensue in which being “stuck” leads to more misses and feelings that you just can’t do anything right.