“So how do you keep yourself calm with all this happening in the world?”
Someone asked me that at an HR and culture breakfast this morning.
The war in Ukraine. The Middle East. The difficulty of getting home, communicating with people you love. (Being half Ukrainian half Russian, living in South Africa, traveling back home through the Middle East)
“I do the same thing I teach my clients to do — I practice focus control.”
When my mind goes into the worry space, I ask myself this question: Is this something I can actually control or influence right now?
No.
So I visualize my attention — my focus — like a ball of spotlight inside my head. And I deliberately move it.
Away from the worry. Toward my agency.
Toward the things I can actually work on, improve, build. The things that move my life forward.
Away from war and how I’m gonna fly back home to here, now, doing the work that grows my business, creates more opportunity and positive impact in the world.
“Yes, I do this, but my mind still worries, even when I know all of that.”
Yes. It does.
And then you shift your focus again. And again. And again.
And then you get better.
You spend less time worrying and more time in your life. Where you can do and experience things.
Just like experienced meditators.
Their minds still wander.
Every single time.
The difference is they’ve gotten good at catching it and returning. To here. To now. To what is.
At breakfast, my new friend and I kept circling back to the same thing: the knowing-doing gap.
We all have it. In different areas of our work and life. To different degrees.
But nowhere does it cost more than in leadership and organizational development.
Workshops get booked. Frameworks get learned. Thousands of rands and dollars spend. Insight happens in the room. And then Monday arrives, and very little of it makes it into consistent behavior.
Knowing ≠ doing.
And all the results live in the doing.
You can know everything there is to know about nutrition. Read every book. Follow every expert. And still just marginally change your health.
Same with leadership.
Understanding what great, people-centered leadership looks like gives you almost nothing. Unless it becomes a daily practice people adopt. Something people do daily, in the room, in the moments that matter.
Over to you, dear reader,
Where in your life, or your work, do you keep chasing the next insight, the next course, the next framework... when consistently doing what you already know would bring you far more?