Lead Your Practice

A proposal is sometimes part of what is required in the commercial world of thought leadership.

Proposals come in many forms. They can be as simple as an email with a few bullet points, or as detailed as a 50-page response to a public tender, answering specific questions and establishing the commitments around a proposed piece of work.

As Thought Leaders, though, we want to be careful about getting too caught up in the proposal game.

Learn more at https://thoughtleaders.school/

I've been thinking a lot lately about something Phil Stutz calls our Life Force. If you've seen Jonah Hill's documentary Stutz, you'll know the idea. He describes it as the energy that animates us, the vitality that allows us to engage fully with our lives and our work. When that force is strong, we feel present and available. We are more curious, more generous and somehow more ourselves. When it is depleted, everything can begin to feel a little heavier and more effortful.

We can no longer assume our clients are interested, or that we're interesting. What used to be a differentiator is now just the cost of showing up.

What have you done about it?

Right now, a very helpful belief, a grand positive delusion if you like, is this: the work you do as a commercially smart thought leader is a tonic for exactly the times we find ourselves in.

There's a phrase I keep coming back to this week: jump before you're pushed. It's not a new idea but it's landed differently lately, watching what's unfolding in real time.

If people struggle to stay off their phones at the beach, what does it take to keep them present in your workshop, or engaged in your writing? We are at a tipping point for attention. The simplest and most powerful move we can make is to shift from telling people things to helping them experience something that matters.

Let’s talk about the power of permission. One of the most limiting frames of reference in running a practice is hidden in the idea of permission.

One of the most interesting things about building a thought leaders practice is that it is full of contradictions. There are natural contradictions in the work and you get better at managing them as your practice grows. The work asks you to sit in the middle…between commerce and contribution…identity and service…creativity and consistency.

Learn more at thoughtleaders.com.au

The cluster strategy is how we, as subject-matter experts, take our ideas to the world. You could think of it as a strategy, but that both overstates/understates it at the same time.

If you would like our curriculum handbook for creating commercially viable clusters, simply email me ([email protected]) a little bit about what you're offering to the world, where you live and what drives your work. Seriously, I will personally read it and reply. Our Business School is a mentoring proposition and requires that we have a sense of each other.

A belief that appears often in our community is this: all the good ideas are already taken. It sounds true, but it is not.