Breakthroughs: How to confront assumptions

By Oscar Trimboli

Clarity creates change. Communication, when clear and consistently explained, will cut through and create lasting change.

 

Throughout this book, you will explore how to quickly become aware of your assumptions and understand whether they are serving you or holding you back.

 

Whether you view the world through

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oscar Trimboli
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9780645035506

Oscar Trimboli

Oscar Trimboli is an author, host of the Apple award-winning podcast Deep Listening, and a sought-after keynote speaker. He is passionate about using the gift of listening to bring positive change in homes, workplaces and cultures around the world. Through his work with chairs, boards of directors and executive teams in local, regional and global organizations, Oscar has experienced firsthand the transformational impact leaders and organizations can have when they listen beyond the words. He believes that leadership teams need to focus their attention and their listening on building organizations that have impact and create powerful legacies for the people they serve—today and, more importantly, for future generations. Oscar is a marketing and technology industry veteran with over 30 years’ experience across general management, sales, marketing and operations for Microsoft, PeopleSoft, Polycom, Professional Advantage and Vodafone.He consults with organizations including Air Canada, AstraZeneca, BAE Systems, CBRE, Cisco, Commonwealth Bank, Energy Australia, Estia Health, Google, HSBC, IAG, Macquarie Bank, Microsoft, PayPal, Qantas, Reebok, SAP, and TAL. Oscar lives in Sydney with his wife, Jennie, where he helps first-time runners and ocean swimmers conquer their fears and contributes to the cure for cancer as part of Can Too, a cancer research charity – www.cantoo.org.au.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1: CLARITY CREATES CHANGE

‘Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.’ Carl von Clausewitz

♦

I’m frustrated with where I am at the moment. For the last decade, I have had a clear direction about where I want to go. I have been clear on what I want to achieve at work and in my personal life, yet in the last 24 months, I have been on autopilot.

I have been so busy with what I need to deliver I haven’t taken the time to think about what I want and what I need. People used to reach out to me and my next role would just appear.

Now, I am stuck. Something has changed.

People aren’t approaching me about roles. I am lost; it’s like a fog surrounding my thinking. I wish I could get clear about what is next for me but I am so busy with my current role.

I feel swamped and out of control. There aren’t enough hours in the day: the more work I do, the more work I create. The more I do, the more I am expected to do. Then the more I do, the more I am asked to do for others. I can’t see a clear way forward. I am confused and frustrated because in all the work I am doing, I am lost.

I am struggling to find myself and struggling to get out of autopilot. What I want is to see a way forward for my career and myself. The techniques, tools and approaches I have used in the past aren’t working for me. Somehow, I have managed to lose my way.

Marketing Leader

When you know what you stand for you start the journey towards clarity. Clarity of purpose is neither simple nor complex. It is a state of mind rather than a state of being. It is a process rather than a place.

Clarity isn’t about one single dimension of your life; there will be situations where you will be unclear and others where you will be clear. Being clear on your purpose isn’t one dimensional. If your one purpose in life is to have lots of money, that’s one dimensional—you can have lots of money, simply rob a bank.

If your personal values are challenged with the idea of robbing a bank—good. It means you are conscious of your personal values.

Clarity has many dimensions for people: clarity of purpose, clarity of values, clarity of strength, clarity of plans and clarity of a support network.

Clarity is about your perspective; it is about understanding the power and limitations of focus.

By focusing on something up close, we see it more clearly and we see it better. Detail helps us better see the connections and interactions between moving pieces—like looking at the world through a microscope. If we are too detailed and focused, we can lose our perspective on how each individual part fits into a bigger system.

How does each part fit into a broader ecosystem and collection of interdependent people, neighbourhoods, systems, organisations, nations and our global village?

As critical as clarity is to us achieving our purpose, if we look at the stars and our future through a microscope we are unlikely to see our future in the right perspective. Conversely, if we look at our daily routine through a telescope, it is likely to be out of focus and confused. Whether you choose to use a telescope or a microscope, the most critical skill is to pick the one that is right for the current situation.

Clarity is understanding what you stand for, while using the right tools to get there.

With the right vision and the wrong tools you can sound as frustrated as our friend the marketing leader who is stuck because he can’t make sense of his past, can’t understand his present and can’t become energised or excited about his future.

This approach is about being fixated on progress rather than assuming that there will be a point in time when everything becomes clear through a flash of inspiration.

Clarity is an approach, a mindset and a process. It’s an understanding that the clearer you think you understand an issue, the more likely you are to understand that you’re simply understanding more about it rather than everything about it.

Through a process of becoming clearer about your purpose, your values, your strengths, your plan and your support network, you become aware of the components that drive and integrate into a systematic approach and state of mind around clarity.

Clarity is about being aware of what you will say no to before you are asked.

Clarity is about being consistent in what you will say no to.

Clarity is about others understanding what you will say no to even before they have asked you.

Equally, clarity is the process through which you are clear about what you will say yes to. Which opportunities will you explore, embrace, focus on and achieve?

Knowing how to be clear to others and ourselves will bring energy and momentum to the projects we are passionate about— today, tomorrow, in a year, in a decade. Ultimately, it will become our legacy.

Clarity can be viewed through the lens of three unique perspectives: me, we and us.

Although each perspective is unique, they are all connected to each other. Each perspective allows you to think about the journey from me, to we and then to us.

Through understanding the distinction at each point on this journey, we come to the realisation that each of us is on our own journey. As people, we think our perspective is about we or us and yet it will take only the simplest trigger and we will automatically default back to a place where the only clarity you have is about me—about you and your perspective. Your perspective, your point of view is the only one that matters to you. You will argue energetically and passionately for your perspective and block out all the other perspectives because you are focused on you and only you.

Why does this happen?

In some cases, we are triggered by our past experiences, by our relationship with the other person, or by a situation that we feel is out of our control (and of which we want to regain control). In other cases, we are triggered by our own lack of clarity. We are simply reacting to the fact that we don’t have the same level of clarity that the other person has secured for themselves. We are frustrated by their clarity, their lack of clarity or the lack of our own clarity.

The framework we will explore throughout this book will enable you to engage in multiple levels of awareness and use those levels of awareness to create a space and a place where you can examine and progress towards clarity rather than ultimately arriving at clarity.

The process and the framework will guide you on your own journey to clarity through multiple perspectives and distinctions.

You will explore each component through a microscope, which will provide detail, and a telescope, which will provide perspective.

The perspective will help you gain a better insight into clarity through time, your past, your future and through the perspective of others (those close to you and those whom you influence through words and actions—how you create your legacy).

We will dance with the balance between short-term and long-term: a skill of which we need to be mindful. It’s about balance and judgement. It’s about how we integrate the short-term and embrace the long-term.

Along the journey, we will explore key tipping points in our understanding; where our assumptions, our alignment and our perspective emerge, converge and diverge.

Using our telescope, we will discover simultaneously our inner space and outer space and come to terms with understanding our awareness, exploration and impact, personally, professionally and beyond our lifetime.

We will search the boundaries of our activities, and the outcomes they create. In our pursuit of the balance between activities and outcomes, we need to be conscious of how we need both and how each is dependent upon the other. We need our clarity to be comfortable with the space where it embraces activity and outcome—short-term and long-term. Rather than naturally assuming it’s either short-term or long-term, we explore a space where we embrace creativity, proactivity and possibilities.

As we move through the model, we encounter different assumptions we have made about others, the systems and ourselves and organisations of which we are part. In becoming conscious of our assumptions, we are able to progress from left to right and move towards long-term legacies.

As our awareness of our assumptions becomes broader and deeper, we become more comfortable dancing between the short and long term and with the paradox of activity and outcome. We become aware that using energy and becoming frustrated about either dimension is meaningless because without the short term, there is no long term and without activities, there is no outcome.

A mindset of mastery at any of these levels is futile. If your plan is to become the master of the short term, at the expensive of the long term, it’s false perspective. Likewise, if you look to become a master of the activity without the perspective, you will miss that the outcome is why the activity exists.

It is the pursuit of the intersection between the two. The mindset of integration of each creates harmony and momentum. Rather than seeking absolutes, seek the intersection between the two. Where is the overlap? How can you focus on progress rather than perfection?

Mastery is about the flexibility to understand what the situation needs. The situation could be a meeting, a project or a relationship.

Mastery is about detaching yourself from the situation so you can bring consciousness, creativity and deliberate thinking focused on success rather than the problem.

As you become more deliberate and consistent in your approach beyond personal mastery, you look through a perspective that affects impact, and what others have in common.

A flexible leader, with a mindset focused on what they are creating rather than what they are solving will be open to possibilities rather than anchored in constraints. You will look to see what others can bring to the longer term and to accelerate the impact of the group. The group could be a team of two or more, the group could be a team of teams, a neighbourhood, a nation or beyond.

A