“We have a lot going on right now.”
I hear that constantly. A full plate feels like proof. Busy reads as healthy.
I understand the instinct, but busy and focused are not the same thing. Most of the companies I work with have plenty of the first and not much of the second.
I recently started practicing yoga more intentionally, and it has taught me a lot about focus. When you’re holding a balance pose, the instruction is to direct your gaze on a single, fixed point. It can be a spot on the wall or the edge of a window frame, but it doesn’t really matter what. What matters is that you stop scanning the room.
The second your eyes start wandering, everything falls apart. Your balance goes, and small corrections turn into big ones. You start noticing things that weren’t bothering you a moment earlier, and the harder you fight it, the worse it gets. Then you remember the point, you find it again, and somehow everything settles. It sounds too simple to take seriously until you’ve actually done it.
Leadership has always felt somewhat similar to me.
The companies I encounter rarely suffer from a shortage of ideas. Any decent leadership team can rattle off more opportunities than they could chase in a decade. Most of the ideas are even good, and that’s the trap. If they were obviously bad, you’d shelve them in a meeting and move on. The difficult part is looking at a list of genuinely worthwhile priorities and deciding, on purpose, which ones you are not going to pursue this year.
That’s the part people avoid, because it feels like loss. But companies move forward by choosing a fixed point and holding it, even when there are plenty of other things in the room worth looking at.
