Clean Push for 2025
Welcome to 2025!
I tend to be less of a fan of resolutions for the new year. Resolutions often seem to be a list of aspirational yet broken promises to ourselves. That is generally not a very attractive start to whatever growth or success you want to experience in the upcoming year. I suggest a different picture to hold in our minds.
If you have ever watched Olympic bobsledding, you quickly understand the success of an entire run down the course starts at the top. The strength, coordination, and timing of the first few steps of the team pushing the sled at the top of the hill dictates how well the entire rune will go. Then, after that big initial tightly choreographed push, the ride becomes all about the navigation of tight corners at high speed without creating friction.
The cleaner the push at the top, the faster the run. Also, ironically, the faster the speeds, the more challenging it is to control a friction free run, avoiding brushing the walls or worse, losing control and rolling the sled over at 90 miles per hour.
The push, the speed, the navigation, the reduced friction, and the confidence and courage to “let it ride” are key to the most competitive results. The scores highlight competition between teams but when you carefully listen to the team members discuss their performance, you notice something. At every step of execution from how they push, load the sled, break or steer, they are competing with themselves, looking to achieve their personal best for every stage of the run. It’s a team sport with an intense component of individual performance. When strong individual performances come together, the end result can be a multiplier for elite execution and results.
What does this have to do with 2025? I like to think that the January of a new year is like that push at the top of the hill. It sets the stage, sets expectations and aspirations, takes courage and is where you get to build your best momentum for the best results at the bottom. It’s a beautiful picture where every run is full of potential and opportunity.
When you show up for your 2025 run, your preparation, your mindset, and your execution of all you have learned and practiced previously comes together to drive your own personal and professional growth towards great results at the bottom of the course. Better yet, you can have great runs and not so great runs but are still able to get better and keep growing.
I think this makes for a better strategy than the classic approach to resolutions and depending on willpower to magically help you accomplish your best. For 2025, dare to put yourself in the driver’s seat.
Be Real
The concept of grasping and experiencing the genuine and authentic part of life can seem increasingly more elusive with hyper-mobile societies and the advent of generative AI and deepfakes technologies, among a dozen other trends. Many of us run faster and harder in most every area of our lives than ever before in human history. The best deep and meaningful connections and true community requires an intentionality and a reduced speed that is in a state of friction with much of what surrounds us culturally and technologically. Despite all of those headwinds, my sense is that being real and authentic is worth the fight and effort. What does it take? Her are some practices to keep in mind and continually practice.
Seek to give attention more than seeking it.
Let others know they are important.
Discern when others are being genuine or just masking and manipulating.
Your own skin feels great on you, not uncomfortable.
What you say and do demonstrates trustworthiness.
Seek out simplicity of needs over the complexity of wants.
Mature EQ enables you to manage critique and feedback whether on target or not.
Aware of strengths and blind spots while avoiding both arrogance and self-depreciation.
Consistentcy is a hallmark behavior.
Making Bank
Most people work hard in life to make the investment and effort to be successful at any number of things through time, energy, resources, and perseverance. There are times we look back at all the work and can still be unsure of our progress and question its value.
A powerful mindset to explore is to orient your mental posture towards having confidence that what you have done so far has been banked, meaning it’s there, it counts, and is a compounding investment. This perspective frees you up to turn 180 degrees from assessing and critiquing what’s already done and recast your focus on looking ahead and moving towards what’s next, leveraging what’s in the bank.
RPM’s
If you are the type of person who likes to create checklists as an execution guide for your day, week, or even your life, here are some targets to incorporate into your behavior patterns, professionally and personally, to keep moving the needle.
It’s really about the RPMs. In this case we’re not talking about “Revolutions Per Minute” but “Resonance Per Moment”. Creating harmonization across all you do and invest in yourself is what builds up the amplification and impact of who you are.
Try these:
Learn something
Teach something
Inspire others to keep going
Take the best risks
Manage change well
Make decisions you can feel good about
Do work you are excited to do
Performance Killers
Toxic leaders don’t foster performance, they undermine it.
Toxic leaders breed inferior work, break down collaboration, impede ownership, and extinguish purpose and engagement.
Toxic leaders generate a constant hum of incivility that breaks confidence while creating increasing resentment and unrest.
Toxic leaders’ behaviors dismantle others from the inside out.
Toxic leaders take away agency and violate the physical, emotional, and psychological experiences of others, diminishing and assaulting professional and interpersonal identities.
Toxic leaders exert control and violate boundaries that result in repeated and unilateral damage.
Toxic leaders are grifters, conmen (and women) who spin up operating realities that are untrue and distribute conflict and fear to empower themselves instead of others.
Toxic leaders are abusive, but the abuse too frequently goes unrecognized as such in professional spaces.
Respect ALWAYS generates the best results. When leaders uplift and support others for the greater good, they inspire true leadership and foster a culture of trust and empowerment.
Interviewing Is Story Curation
When an organization interviews a candidate for a job opening the interviewer is most often focused on a candidate’s skills and experiences. It’s too seldom understood that the most valuable and impactful interviews go beyond these basic components to include a greater sense of the candidate’s professional story, inclusive of their values and motivations. This means asking better questions and practicing much deeper listening and conversational reflection and mirroring.
A more powerful wheilding of the interview process can be found in exploring the intersection of the candidates professional and personal story arc and the organizations own story and narrative direction. To capture that value, the interview must move beyond a skills and experience inventory and inspection approach to venturing into deeper waters.
Much like a movie director pulls the context and meaning out of a script to transform it and create an impactful experience on screen, interviewers can work within a larger frame that creates a broader landscape for both the candidate and the hiring organization. It allows both parties to attain better clarity and a sense of the potential opportunity related to joining into one another’s stories. In most organizations, there is room to develop interviewing skills to be more impactful and foster the benefits that come from becoming intentional story curators.
The Practice Path
It takes exposure and interaction with your own experiences to drive elevating your abilities and developing your craft in your own unique way. Putting in the repetitions of doing the work is the only sustainable path and it’s not a quick shortcut scenario.
A well-known quote from Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers: The story of success says, “Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
Take heart in the process along the way and realize that investing in yourself has a compounding effect on the value you offer and your own satisfaction and confidence of doing what you do well in the service of others.
Calculated Risk
Any given day that you make the intentional choice to open your mouth to share thoughts, ideas, understanding or insights, is a calculated risk. You can potentially be seen as wrong and misunderstood or you can be right on the money and positively impact any number of others.
What is your own risk-reward scenario?
Keeping your mouth shut will offer zero gain but saying something can create an opportunity that you may be unable to see completely but potentially realize unharvested value.
We all like clarity and guaranteed outcomes but the uncertainty that resides within some degree of unknown chaos is where the opportunity lives. Taking the occasional leap is good for the mind and body. It’s how you develop demonstrable competency and foster your confidence.
Taking that calculated risk is the only path to the payoff of trying, learning, growing, and generating positive change in yourself and others around you. Your life is a living, active, and flexing container. Don’t mistakenly treat it like an infrequently visited wing at the museum.