How do you eat an elephant?…one bite at a time.
How to get through eight cycles of chemo
This morning I took the last of the 154 500mg chemotherapy tablets of this latest 14-day cycle. I now have 7 days where I don’t have to time my meals to swallow these things that I am voluntarily taking to poison my body, taking a healthy person and making them ill, for the obvious benefit of reducing the risk of cancer recurrence after my successful operation in March.
I do admit, as you can probably tell, that I am already getting “tablet/chemo fatigue”. Am only 2 cycles into the total of 8 I am to take, and I (honestly) don’t know if I can get to the end. My mind is telling me “I can quit now, these chemicals will already have done their work, no need to keep taking them another SIX cycles”.
However, I talked to a friend about this yesterday and said “I know I can make it through four cycles, so I will quit then, not now”. Simply saying that had me realise that if I give myself permission to quit after four cycles, chances are when I get through four I can then say “I can make it to six”, and then from six, I can get to the end, to eight.
How to get a Kindergartner through 14 years of school
This week the youngest of my three sons finished high school, marking the end of 14 years of school at the same school (and 24 years for me as a parent at that school). For those of you who are parents, you will likely remember dropping your four-year-old off on the first day of Kindergarten. Quite possibly your child had some separation anxiety. They may even have said to you when you picked them up later that day: “I don’t want to go to school”.
If they said that, I am sure you did not say to that very young child “don’t worry, only 14 years of this to go!”. No, you will have said to them something like: “well, let’s just go tomorrow, you’ll get to know new friends and the teacher is very nice”. Pretty soon, as children are far more flexible and resilient than adults, they get into the flow and, before you and they know it, they are 18 and 14 years have passed.
Leading transformative change in a business
Now, imagine you are a business leader with a big, brave and transformative vision for your company. Such change will mean rethinking, redesigning, reworking, and restructuring much of your business, such that you will normally go backwards (eg in areas like margin, profit, revenues etc) before you then accelerate forwards.
In order to get through this journey, to “eat” this particular “elephant”, you not only need to do it “one bite at a time”, but you also have to anchor everyone in your business to the “WHY”.
For my chemo the WHY is “to reduce the risk of cancer coming back”, so even though it is tough to take chemo, that is a powerful WHY
For a child starting school, when they are starting out their WHY will be about making new friends and having fun, then as they get towards the end it shifts to be about getting the grades to go away to University and start life as an independent young adult.
A WHY is so powerful, particularly for truly transformative change in business. Your role as a leader is to communicate the WHY, over and over, and with the right context for the right people at the right levels in the right areas in your business. You need to give your people the right WHY so they can eat that elephant one bite at a time!
Two quotes (and links to related posts from me around each one) from Antoine de Saint-Exupery to help you with this.
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
Post: Get clear on the WHY and the HOW is easy
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Post: “Are you ready for #OpenLeadership?“
A closing bonus from that second post, a post that is at the core of my thinking on Leadership, is the full translation of the original passage from “StEx”. For leaders, I encourage you to read the full quote below, I believe you will see a strong parallel for being an Open Leader, asking the right questions of your organisation and creating the environment for them to come up with the answer you need to come up with and execute the thousands of “HOWs” into the activity that will deliver upon your collective WHY.
“And if, on the other hand, I communicate to my men the love of setting out to sea, and each of them is so inclined because of a weight in the heart, then you will soon see them diversify according to their thousand special qualities. This one will weave the canvas, the other in the forest by the sharpness of his axe will fell the tree. Another, again, will be forging nails, and some will be watching the stars to learn how to navigate. And all however will be one. To create the ship is not to weave the canvases, to forge the nails, read the stars, but to give the taste of the sea which is one, and in the light of which there is nothing that is contradictory but community in love”