Every organization wants high performing individuals and teams. This is the goal of the talent acquisition, talent development and leadership development programs. And while there are some amazingly talented people to be found, all of us need ongoing development.

The challenge with many development programs is that while they have good intentions and meaningful goals, it comes down to execution. And the biggest challenge with execution is Autopilot; our brain’s inherent ability to create automatic behaviour based on our instincts and previous experience

When things go sideways, where are you? When there is trouble, are you the one they call? Are you the Hero who jumps in with both feet, solves the problem and saves the day?

On the surface, being a Hero seems like a good thing and definitely can be at times. We need people to step up and make a difference. And it is appreciated. Most of us have been rewarded throughout our career for our ability to jump in, be smart, determined and fix things. But it becomes a trap. As our careers progress there comes a time where our heroic efforts are more detrimental than helpful, to ourselves, our colleagues and our families.

You may have noticed that some days it is hard to make good choices. You would think by now that you would have figured out how to make it easier. But here is why it will always be a challenge.

The name of the game up until recently was 'survival'. Over millions of years, life evolved a nervous system that beautifully responds to the many threats an organism will face. It is often referred to as ‘fight or flight’. While we seldom need true fight or flight reactions to the ‘threats’ we face today, these old neural pathways remain alive and well within all of us.

Related to our threat response, we also have a very strong desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Pleasure seeking drove our ancestors to find food, stay warm and reproduce, while pain avoidance kept us safe and alive.

However, today these traits can unconsciously drive us to overindulge in behaviour that is pleasurable or to develop unhelpful strategies to cope with or avoid many of the ‘pains’ we face (our worries about the future, criticism or feedback from others, concern about being valuable enough, concern about having enough, and even the pain of boredom).

The good news is that we also possess this amazing ability to see beyond

‘Autopilot’ is an aspect of your subconscious brain, one that is the brilliant outcome of millions of years of evolution. Over the millennia, our ancestor’s brain and nervous system beautifully evolved to protect the body and maintain its survival, doing so using the least amount of energy (since scarcity of resources was often the norm). Autopilot is so good at this that most of the time you don’t even notice it. You can literally go through many of your daily functions (bathing, eating, dialling into a Zoom meeting, checking your phone, etc.) barely aware as you do them. Brilliant and efficient!

And yet, when I'm working with CPAs and leaders, Autopilot is their bane.

Have you ever had a time where your phone battery seemed to deplete far quicker than you expected during the day? Only to discover that you had some program running in the background that was draining power? Once you turn the App off or change the settings, your phone now has so much more power. Power to do the work you need it to all day long.

In many ways, we are like our phones, where we can have invisible energy ‘leaks’ in our lives that drain us of the energy we need to do our best work and enjoy our life.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a tool to keep you on track through the day?

If you pay attention, you will notice that your mind can be a fickle thing. It can easily drift to thinking about things that are pleasurable (food, drink, entertainment, improving your status, defaulting to the easy task) and that it often tries to avoid things that may feel less desirable (the hard (but important) task, patience, disciplined focus, being OK with uncertainty, boredom or solitude).

Over the millennia, our nervous system evolved to naturally desire and pursue pleasure and to avoid pain and discomfort. This aided in survival – this is our survival brain doing its thing. However, this deeply wired-in tendency can create unproductive thinking patterns if we aren’t careful.

Shock. Fear. Adapting. Letting go. Accepting. Resilient. Tired. Saddened. Unmotivated. Lonely. Hopeful. Proud. Grateful. These are just a few of the words that describe the range of feelings many of us have experienced in the last 18 months.

And here we are in Year Two! None of us would have imagined this. In many ways we have done well. We have survived! We have shown resilience and adapted to everything from toilet paper shortages to wearing masks every day.

Yet, deep within us we you can feel the urge for something more than resilience and surviving. You can feel something missing. Surviving has been necessary. But thriving is what we long for.

It is easy for life to get complicated. Too many emails and meetings. Less than ideal clients who take far too much of your energy. New opportunities that are hard to say 'No!' too. Not to mention endless news and social media feeds on our devices, and bottomless streaming content when we get home.

It is no wonder our minds feel cluttered and overwhelmed with so many demands on our attention.

Which is why Greg McKeown's Essentialism - The Disciplined Pursuit of Less is probably more relevant today than it was in 2014 when first published.

How often at the end of your day do you feel like you did your best work? I don’t mean great work all day long – but I do mean where you feel like you crushed it in some tangible way at some point.

Whether it was an important conversation with a team member, a meeting where you were solving a complex client issue, or where you were absorbed in an important piece of work – all of us relish those days where we are able to do our best work.

What if you could create more of that?! Read on for more…

If you are like me, I'm betting that in at least one area of your life there is a gap. A gap between where you are and where you would like to be.

What we forget is that all too often, we are making choices, often little choices, that aren’t helping us to close that gap.

Jeff Olson's book The Slight Edge reminds us that whether we like it or not, we are either on the success curve, closing that gap inch by inch, little by little. Or we are neutral and stuck, not making progress. Or sometimes we are on the failure curve, sliding inch by inch further away from where we would like to be.