Rick Snyder is the author of Decisive Intuition & the founder of Invisible Edge LLC.
Rick is also a highly credentialed Consultant & Business Coach, he is based in the United States. We thought it would be an ideal time in this current climate to get Rick on board and just have him share with us some of his thoughts around Covid, his book and how we can utilize intuitive decision making in our current environment and what we can take into the future from the intuitive decision-maker.
The book is about the six steps to connect with your intuitive intelligence. Just imagine what a skill that is right now, when there’s so much uncertainty in this space, how can you get a little more certainty and more confidence with your gut, with your clarity, with your purpose, with really seeing things accurately and sifting through all the data and knowing exactly what to pay attention to and what’s actually not helpful.
Check out the webinar below or read on to find out the best bits from the webinar.
We are living in a time right now where all of a sudden our whole reality has been shattered and everything that we thought was solid and consistent, we are dealing with chaos, unpredictability, volatility, and just not knowing. We just do not know how this world market is going to get back on track or if it ever will in the same way
Whenever our world shatters and everything we thought we knew shifts like that, there is also an opportunity. There is an opportunity to see things in a different way, different parts of our life start to rise and get highlighted. New businesses right now are being created because there is a new demand in the business space and different ways of working together and helping each other are showing up that would never have happened months ago. Do we just fixate on the problem where we feel shattered or where it seems like there’s no hope or are we able to also look at the opportunities that are here.
Now is the time to find the way to get into your leadership mindset, because there is a moment where we all get rocked. And that’s part of the process when we get knocked off centre. But what I love about having a leadership mindset is this idea of resilience, how quickly can we come back? How quickly can we recover?
All of our preconceived notions, how we see the world, how we frame the world, for example, do I have more of a negative mindset where all I see are the problems, or do I have more of an optimistic mindset or even more of a realist mindset? There can be many different versions of this. What is the kind of mindset that my team needs from me right now? What is the kind of mindset that my customers need from me right now? This is an important question. What is the leader that’s needing to be called forth inside of me, that needs to be showing up right now for my team, my family and my community?
Something to think about right now is just getting a sense of where are you located with your company culture, what is the mindset of your company? What would it look like to bounce back? What is being asked from you as a leader? Checking in with your staff and actually saying, Hey, before we get into the tasks of the day, how are you doing, how are things at home right now, and spending a few minutes, checking in as a person before you go to the tasks. It is that kind of recognition of really connecting with your team, that is going to build more connection and collaboration.
What if you had the mindset around – What if I could walk away from this experience feeling even closer to my team than before? What if I tried that on as a mindset, how would I even do that? What would be the steps I would take, but it must start with that frame of mind.
There are two different pandemics right now, there is a real viral pandemic that is going around, and we must be smart about that. We must take precautions. We want to stay healthy, safe, protect our loved ones. There is a second pandemic though and that is the fear pandemic. If you look at the incessant media cycles and all of the sensationalism and the way that it’s nonstop media attention around all the fear around Coronavirus, that actually hijacks our own cortisol levels, which creates more stress and actually hurts our immune system.
We cannot ignore the media, so we have to be smart about it. You need to find the right balance for you to keep you sane around the two pandemics and not letting the fear pandemic get the best of you, because that will hijack your mindset.
We have never had a more chaotic environment and yet, this is also a golden opportunity to start thinking about how I can Intuit the needs of my future customer and where things are moving. How can I anticipate the needs of my team before they even ask, how do I need to relook at my budget and resources? How do I need to move things around? How do I need to get smart about my liquidity in my cash and look at my assets and start to have those conversations with my advisors? What are the ways I can be agile and adaptable in this moment and how can we learn to trust ourselves and our strength as well as our resilience and not get too overwhelmed by all the noise in this space?
Think about your company culture and about yourself, we have three different zones. Most businesses are just chugging along in the comfort zone. Basically, on autopilot, sleepwalking and that is when we stop being innovative. What has happened with coronavirus is we went from comfort zone all the way to panic zone right away we are literally in survival panic. And the problem with that is we stopped taking in new information. We literally get frozen in time and we don’t make our best decisions from that place.
So the real key is how do I stay in the learning zone as much as possible, and how do I get my team in this place? So, if we are panicked, what do I need to do as a leader to talk them off the ledge? How do I bring them back to that sweet spot? And when we are in a learning zone, that is where we are engaged, we are alive, we are coming up with new ideas. We have our resources back and we are willing to experiment and innovate. Once again, the hidden benefit of this moment is if we can really get ourselves into that mindset of what are the opportunities that we’re not seeing right now, what are the conversations that we’re not having right now that we need to be having.
It is not that the rules of the game have changed. The game has changed. We are not going back to a new normal, or an old normal of the comfort zone. We are not going back to business as usual. There are going to be businesses that do not come back. There is going to be new businesses that emerge like a Phoenix out of the ashes. It is going to be a new reality that we come back to, that we come forward to. What are the innovations that we need to make that are going to keep us on the leading edge? How can you take advantage of being in the learning zone?
How is our intuition different from our thoughts and different to our swirling mind in the ways that we can overthink? It is different from our emotional reactivity, what if there actually is a difference between our gut intelligence and our intuitive intelligence and when we’re emotionally reactive and we’re making decisions out of stress, out of fear, out of anxiety, or even out of overexcitement in a sense of urgency. When we do that, it usually does not go very well and not just in business, in personal relationships too. There is something about a deeper intelligence and how do you access that as a leader? How do you get better at sensing what is happening in your team meetings right now, or the landscape around COVID and how to respond?