Progress is Power

It seems like such a small thing – progress. And yet it carries our hopes and commitments forward towards a desired future. I used to think disparagingly about progress, focusing instead on results, seemingly the ultimate arbiter.

Now I consider progress to be an essential building block in a meaningful life. It is another word for development, goal-directed movement. We’re dead without it, literally. And it’s one of the ways we humans keep score of where we are and even who we are and are becoming.

With my business clients, the reason we work together is because there is a gap between where they are now and where they want to be in one or more domains of their life. They believe (and who am I to argue?) that partnering with me will accelerate their learning journey, increase their likelihood of success and make the growth experience more enjoyable. When they take steps forward and produce relevant interim outputs, we recognize them as progress made. We use the data to draw implications for what might be next and formulate new narratives.

When Darlene, executive director of a not-for-profit service organization, chose to work with me to improve several of her leadership behaviors, she also asked for help in addressing other areas of her life. She was overwhelmed, tired and frustrated. To engage her as a whole person, I suggested using a ‘wheel of life’ exercise to identify the important domains of her life and assess her current level of satisfaction in each of them. She then declared what her desired satisfaction level would be when we completed this journey. Each gap became the space for creating a game of how she would make progress and achieve her desired future. My coaching supported her efforts, learning and resilience.

Thirteen months later, we completed our work. She had met or exceeded her goals in all three of focus (including her leadership), improved in two other areas and maintained the same level of satisfaction in two others. Along the way, Darlene was rigorous in reviewing her scorecard, making updates as she made progress, naming and claiming what she was learning and adapting to changing circumstances to stay on track. She was overjoyed with how she felt, who she knew herself to be and how she could continue to powerfully navigate her world. She demonstrated her ability to expand her own capability and capacity by taking small steps, making progress and closing gaps.

We express our agency by having an agenda, a desired better future towards which we can strive. Rather than drift and hope, we intentionally take on influencing and creating our world. We choose to be on the court rather than in the stands, engaging with ambition and curiosity. We develop new practices and keep score by our actions and what they produce. We generate narratives about our journey, who we are and what is possible. Those stories become the contextual glue that maintains the coherency of our identity in our own eyes. To make sustainable changes and transformations often demands that we author different stories to accommodate and affirm the new horizon of possibilities into which we live.

So what’s true for you? Where in life have you been drifting rather than designing? Where could it make a difference to author your direction and destination? What game might you declare and design that could become a meaningful context for your efforts? What higher purpose might be served? What practices would be critical to develop? How would you keep score? What would progress look like? Does it include others? How could you use progress to foster your own learning and encourage a desired, emergent future?

Keep it simple. Manage the things that matter, with grace and ease. Create your own intentional self-fulfilling prophecy. Have fun along the way. Get going.

#selfleadership #designyourlife #higherpurpose