“Yes, Thank You, And:” A Powerful Practice for Leadership and Life

This afternoon, as we slip headlong into winter, I find myself in southern Baja or Baja California Sur, the southern tip of the peninsula originally part of Las Californias, which included the Baja peninsula and the upper mainland territories including California, Arizona and Wyoming. Las Californias were most likely named after a mythical land described in a 16^th century Spanish romance novel. In the novel, California is an island inhabited by women and ruled by queen Calafia. The peninsula may have been mistaken for an island and the population of cardón cactus, the largest cactus in the world, may have been mistaken for its female warrior inhabitants.

To the west of me are the Sierra de la Laguna mountains—a tropical dry forest with salmon colored earth and green scrub pine, cactus and mesquite trees. To the east are the turquoise waters of the Sea of Cortez. But what is most extraordinary about this moment, beyond its immense beauty, is how I came to be here. It is the result of a practice that I call “yes, thank you, and.” Or to put it another way: acknowledgement, gratitude and invitation.

I learned this practice in a number of contexts, through coaching, through meditation, and again more recently, in conversation with a wise colleague and mentor. The practice is so simple, so effortless—almost deceptively so—and yet when I engage in it regularly, the most amazing shifts occur in my business and my life.

I have slowly been sharing this practice with some of my coaching clients, and they too have experienced the extraordinary power of “yes, thank you, and.” So in the spirit of the holidays, I wanted to share the practice with each of you.

1.  YES: Acknowledge What Is Challenging
   
   
   Yes, I am short staffed.
   Yes, I am overwhelmed with the number of thing I need to get done this week.
   Yes, the organization has rejected my last two requests for additional funding, or I have lost a major client, or…you get the idea.
   
   
   2.    THANK YOU: Express Gratitude for What is Working
   
   
   I am grateful to have an incredible amount of talent and skill on my team.
   I am thrilled to have such an interesting and demanding position.
   I am grateful for the number of creative solutions generated in response to this financially challenging time.
   
   
   3.    AND: Ask for What it is You Want More of
   
   
   I’d like to have more support from my team in accomplishing _______.
   I’d like to be able to come home earlier a few evenings a week to have dinner with my family.
   I would like to transform my department’s or company’s financial situation so that we can _______.
   
   
   4.    Spread the Word
   
   
   Tell others what you are trying to create. Ask for support. Focus your energy and effort in affecting this change. When everything and everyone is aligned in the same direction, there can only be one outcome: the one that you want. 

In my own example of creating this wondrous winter vacation, I started with the acknowledgement that a dear friend had just died and moving into the holidays was engendering an even greater level of grief and loss. Then I expressed gratitude for her friendship, for all the amazing friends in my life. Then I asked that my winter holidays be filled with time with friends and, if possible, a warm body of water. The next few weeks I told all my friends how much I loved them and asked what they were doing for the holidays. Then, quite suddenly, I got an invitation to spend a week in Cabo Pulmo with an old friend and her entire family.  And what a lovely vacation it has been.

You will notice that what is missing in this practice (and from my personal example) is complaining, nay-saying, criticism, resentment, apathy and disbelief. These absences are as important as the steps outlined above. We all go through challenging experiences, personally and professionally. What matters is that we acknowledge what is, express gratitude for all we have, and ask for more of what we want.

Complaining and negative thinking are part of the human condition. But they do not advance our personal or professional lives. On the other hand, “yes, thank you, and,” can bring about wondrous shifts in our experience. Give yourself a gift this holiday season and make this practice your own.

Transformational Leadership Practice

Leadership is not only about influencing the behavior of others, it is about aligning your own purpose and focus to achieve impactful results.

To this end, there is one simple leadership practice that is absolutely critical: “reflection in action.”

After spending the last few weeks coaching a number of leaders in various roles and sectors, I was struck by the commonality of each of their needs. “I just need time to step back and think more strategically,” was the refrain I heard over and over again.

It seems simple enough: give yourself some quiet, focused time to think and strategize. Certainly research identifies reflection as a critical practice for successful leaders. Schon, a leadership scholar, defines “reflection-in-action” as a process that consists of developing strategies of action, understanding phenomena, framing and reframing situations encountered in day-to-day experience. Something truly effective leaders actively engage in.

At its root, reflection requires time. And here is the rub. Who has the time? The answer is of course that we all have the same 24 hours in a day. It is how we use it, what we attend to, that makes or breaks us. If sleep was optional, there are some who would skip it. They would of course get seriously injured or ill, but they would have a few extra hours over the rest of us. Reflection is like sleep in its criticality. Unlike sleep, it is optional. But without it, we often find ourselves on the reactive rather than proactive side of the equation. We can certainly survive. The question is, will we thrive?

To be an effective leader, to be a strategic leader, we need to carve out some time each day, or, at a minimum, each week to take stock of things, to look out toward the horizon, to anticipate what’s coming and make preparations, to define where we are going and forge the path ahead.