Four bold moves for your best year yet: How to elevate your potential in 2024
By Laura Kyttanen
Follow on Social
How are you planning to approach the year ahead? Who do you want to become? How do you want to show up and lead? Why is this important to you? How will you release the old and allow new seeds to be planted in order to create a beautiful garden of your desires with courage and intention?
As I wrapped up 2023, I discussed the importance of having courage to act with intention and how this starts with integrating regular reflection through the year to support the success of your desires and intentions. It is a habit which I birthed at the beginning of last year and it proved to be very valuable in terms of impact.
Although it was challenging to maintain this habit of reflection every single day, when consistent I found myself less judgmental, more connected with myself and my purpose, more at ease with my choices and intentional with my actions. As a result, I ended the year with clarity - illuminating four areas of personal expansion and igniting my vision for the upcoming year.
Yet regular reflection is not the only bold move that elevates your potential. There are three other bold moves which require courageous leadership in order to develop essential habits that act as a catalyst for your expansion and transformation.
In this article we will reflect on three main questions
Why are bold moves required?
What are the four “bold moves” of courageous leaders?
What impact do they provide?
Why are bold moves required?
Given the uncertain and volatile economic and political environment, over 90% of companies are going through some type of transformation. Of these companies, research shows that efforts fail about 70% of the time. And it isn’t so different for individuals. Over 90% of people who set goals fail to achieve them.
In August 2022, McKinsey published an article “Strategic courage in an age of volatility" which indicated there are two types of business leaders emerging in this era:
Leaders who are more cautious and defensive
Leaders who choose to move forward boldly.
Which type do you think enables more positive sustainable impact?
The defense-only or wait and see leadership tends to lead to an average company performance, and offense-only leadership delivers a mix of occasional wins plus some catastrophic failures.
The best leaders are ambidextrous
“They have strategic courage to aggressively pursue the upside while being prudent about managing the downside. These leaders are thinking about the longer term impact, not the next month or quarter.”
As a coach to individuals and teams, I believe this type of courageous leadership is essential for us all right now. Which is why I created our signature program “Courageous Leadership.”
The four bold moves of courageous leaders and the impact they provide
In order to be more of an ambidextrous courageous leader of your life, there are four bold moves I recommend when coaching clients which are all backed by science and research and this is why they are embedded in our Courageous Leadership program.
Bold move one: Set your visions considering the long-term impact
When embarking on a transformation journey, it's common to want to focus on specific goals. However, research shows that goals alone won't sustain motivation or ensure lasting results. Real change is enabled when you reconnect with the broader, longer-term desires and the impact of change.
Goals can create a “when-then” mindset - when I hit my goal, I will be happy; or a binary mindset - either I win or lose. These mindsets can lead to higher levels of dissatisfaction, overwhelm, exhaustion or burnout and even depression.
On the flipside, when you are connected to a vision with a longer term impact in mind, you are enabling more of a growth mindset - seeing the journey as a process where despite the ups and downs, all are chances for you to learn and evolve as you travel the distance. You find more satisfaction in the journey and as a result, are more able to overcome challenges as they arise.
To set your bold vision, and consider the longer term impact, it can be useful to journal on questions like:
What is one area I would choose to expand in when it comes to my life?
Why is this important to me?
How might it align with my values?
How does it enable me to become who I desire to be?
What impact would this expansion have on me and my life?
What kind of support will I need to achieve this vision?
The impact of a strong vision: Setting your vision is the first bold move you can make to elevate your life. This creates the “why” which is important for sustained motivation, commitment and the building the resilience you will need to push past the challenges you will inevitably face.
As Elon Musk said, "When you are not progressing, you are regressing.” In order to progress, you need to have a strong desire with an “important reason” firmly planted in your mind. If you don’t, you are much more likely to lose focus and regress.
To help you with your vision, you can check out our annual visioning toolkit here.
Bold move two - Become a master at focusing your energy
As mentioned, when you set a vision and embark on some type of expansion and transformation, there are bound to be moments of uncertainty and challenges you must overcome. This can elicit reactive behavior, based on memories of your past experiences.
Memory is very powerful as it influences our Mindset Energy (thoughts, emotions and actions). We are never reacting to what is in the present moment. It is the interpretations or thoughts about the experience that gives emotion energy.
Therefore, to reimagine your experiences, you must first travel within your body and learn to focus your energy.
I am sure you have heard about mindfulness, yet are you aware of the incredible benefits of having more bodyfulness to elevate your potential?
So many people are disconnected from their body and have developed a tendency to believe that our body is primarily there to house our mind. It makes sense since many people grow up encouraged to lead with their head and suppress their feelings in our body. Over time, this can create illnesses, burnout or other physical pains.
Bodyfulness is the practice of turning into the wisdom of the body to feel more embodied. An exercise which is aimed at developing ‘somatic awareness,’ or directing our attention to the interoceptive experience and our associated feelings.
This is important because our internal surveillance system is constantly taking in a stream of information and responding by making autonomic adjustments based on the question: Am I safe? Depending on the answer, which is communicated as sensations in the body, the reaction is either protect (fight/flight/freeze) or connect. This is all happening below the realm of consciousness - based on memory, a process known as Neuroception.
So in order to lead with more courage, you must be able to reset your outdated nervous system patterns. By developing more awareness around certain experiences and body sensations which trigger coping behaviors, you can learn to focus your energy into a more calmer connected state.
Using our signature 4R framework combined with other tools that help with regulation (e.g. breathwork) you can help become more in tune with your body.
The impact of focusing your energy: When you become more in tune with your body and outdated patterns, you can strengthen your resilience, enhance problem solving, make better decisions and more consciously respond to all your experiences.
Bold move three - Integrate time for regular reflection
As a coach to ambitious high achievers, they often excel in goal setting and action-taking. However, the game-changer lies in embracing time for stillness and reflection.
Reflection is the most underused yet crucial tool for your transformation success. In fact, one study done by a professor at Georgetown University of 442 executives, shows that reflections proved to be the most valuable in helping leaders learn and grow in their careers.
Reflection is about uncovering strengths as well as opportunities so you can make intentional choices about how you want to move forward. To gain the benefits of reflection, it is important you are asking yourself effective questions which expand your Mindset Energy and elevate your potential.
The impact of regular reflection: In the hustle and bustle of life, the idea of adding another task to your routine might seem overwhelming. However, regular reflection increases performance, enhances engagement, strengthens emotional resilience, boosts self-awareness, and increases commitment to change, leading to greater success.
To help you get started with implementing more reflection, you can download our complimentary Mindset Energy Reflection Journal Workbook here.
Bold move four - Learn to ask for and receive support
Many articles like this one on Medium have talked about studies which show that by publicly committing your goals to someone it gives you at least a 65% chance of completing them. And that having a specific accountability partner increases your chance of success to 95%. These are powerful statistics, yet it is hard to actually find the research behind this data.
Thus, let’s look at this from a biology perspective - we are wired for connection. Isolation, even the perception of it, leads to a compromised ability to regulate our autonomic states. We have talked about the importance of our nervous system and being able to focus our energy in order to support our vision of growth and expansion. Therefore, finding the right support is key to helping us achieve our vision, not just for accountability but for emotional support too.
The challenge is that most people don’t know what support they need and have a difficult time asking for or even receiving support. Therefore, the first step is to identify the type of support you might need to achieve your vision - expertise, emotional, mindset or accountability. In fact, I have found that having a network of support is very useful. It is often hard to find one person that can offer all the various support you will need to reach your vision and overcome setbacks.
After you identify what you need support for, it is important to consider questions like - who are the right people to ask, what is the specific request, how often do you hope to meet and how. For example, if you require emotional support the person should have excellent communication skills, with superior listening and nonverbal techniques.
The impact of asking for and receiving support: Becoming aware of your needs and learning to ask for support can lead to improved communication, collaboration, conflict resolution, productivity, personal development. And within teams, it leads to greater team cohesion, higher performance and a more harmonious working environment.
Uncertain times call for bold moves and courageous leaders
There is a call for us all to expand our courage and boldy lead our lives with intent. The world is experiencing a lot of turbulence right now. It is up to each one of us to do our part. This starts with your inner expansion - igniting awareness around your limiting beliefs and outdated patterns, expanding your Mindset Energy so you can elevate your potential.
If you can imagine that just like when you blow the fluffy white seeds of a dried dandelion, and they are carried for miles before finally setting down to grow again - you have the same impact around you as you expand and elevate.
