The task of an executive mentor: Advancing your brain to “next level” thinking patterns
From being lead to setting course
Floating on turbulent sea, constantly avoiding sharks or dangerous waves, today’s reaction goes left, tomorrow it goes right. You are frantically trying to keep the ship on course on turbulent sea, long hours with dropping eyelids and decreasing efficiency, hidden anxiety and increasing fatigue, …
You’re feeling things slip. Unclear what your role is becoming or in which direction you or the company are actually heading?
That’s where your leadership brain is unconsciously sliding into a pattern allowing the forces of the universe to take over your fate. In that state, you are at the mercy of the competitive currents and the winds. Silently scared of the challenges that lay ahead……We try some incremental adjustments, known tricks, but stay stuck in more reactive brain processes and are not moving into the mental space of full game mastery where we are defining and setting the ‘new winning course’.
Does being stuck, at the mercy of circumstances feel comfortable? NO! It’s feeling frustrating, scary and immensely tiring.
This is when you want to consider moving from the reactive thinking patterns to unlocking your next level brain power called ‘figuring out the new direction, tightening the sails and leading to set a new winning course’.
Activating a higher level state of mind to strategize about what’s next.
All of the above symptoms are signals that we are stuck into a more passive thinking pattern where uncontrollable external circumstances or someone else may directly or indirectly decide where we head.
If we want to change this, the first thing is to notice the discomfort of ‘not knowing anymore’. When we notice the stuckness, we can decide to activate our brain into a pattern and mindset of more proactive willpower, curiosity, analysis and innovative thinking to look at what “next level” or “winning course” means in order to find the winning direction to set course to.
Leaders who can activate their brain to get into a higher mental gear, will take the company along to the next level up. Those who stay passive or stuck will stay at the current thinking level, and sooner or later become the victim of external forces.
Time for a next level mentor!
Often times leaders do not even notice why and how they arrived in this plateauing state of mind. But, they detect the worry, the sleeplessness, the unease or the discomfort of becoming bored or getting out of control.
If you’ve arrived there, but don’t see how to get to that “next level course-setting stage”, this is where the right mentor may come in. A proper executive mentor will help you raise your thought patterns beyond the atmospheric cloud cover to new more stratospheric business oversight and reasoning. That comes with new ways of reasoning, new questions, new things to structure and new paradigms to look at. This is about a level of mental processing you did not know before and need to get used to.
Beware! It is crucial to pick a mentor who knows what it means to operate in the next level stratosphere though. Beyond bringing their sector, industry, functional or other knowledge our expertise, they first and foremost need to know how to get you to reason and think in the next level stratosphere. Otherwise you’ll just sit together, having a couple of conversations about new tricks, incrementally adjusting life, under the frustrating atmospheric cloud cover.
How far can I go next level? How do I stay ahead of AI?
The next question for leaders is obviously : What can I do and where can my environment help me to activate my own next level brain algorithm? How does my brain algorithm keep up with AI?
Mother nature gave us innate brainpower, called ‘potential’. The earlier we become aware that we need to stimulate, train and unlock this potential, by exposing our brain to increasingly complex enigmas, the faster we and our environment can create opportunity to develop our own algorithm. Just like AI, we need to train our human reasoning engine. Actually AI is using the same learning mechanisms with an “untirable willpower”: analyse data, detect trends and patterns, create memory of use cases to tap into, making connections, associations, find train and learn etc…
What is needed for us to keep up?
On our side, it is active willpower, curiosity, innovative thinking, autonomy, and a mindset to get into the driving seat which will drive us into next level thinking spaces.
New challenging roles or special mission projects with higher complexity levels form the practical nurturing ground to create your next level mental algorithm.
That is where employers can help stimulate the maximal use of the potential of their workforce. By matching roles to people who have the potential and will experience the desired stretch.
Great next level executive mentors and coaches help leaders stimulate the development of new forms of reasoning.
And … trained mentors use expansive metaphors to help you understand what we talk about!
