“A prudent man should always follow in the footsteps of great men, and imitate those who have been outstanding.” Niccolo Machiavelli
You’ll either be aware or unaware that we are operating on autopilot for most of the day, and generally unless something changes or is brought to your attention, you will keep operating in a perfectly functioning bubble of automatic habits until something changes or is brought to your attention…..!
There are some limits to this, and at times it’s beneficial to get a jolt of awakening into how you’re doing what you’re doing.
A few of these benefits are that you can’t improve how you’re doing something until you become more acutely aware of what it is you actually do to get the results you do, you can teach others and you can contribute to your environment or culture more if your attention is more ‘out there’ as opposed to ‘in here.’
Questions to ask yourself to help burst your autopilot bubble:
- If I was new to this job, what would I be seeing or feeling about the environment and team around me?
- If someone came to ask me why I do what I do, what would I say?
- If I had to coach someone to do what I do, how would I do it?
With your top performers, you may well want to tap into what it is they do unconsciously and at such a high level. To do this you can “model’ them, which is a concept in the NLP world that helps identify and then replicate excellence.
People you might want to model are those leaders who run extraordinary meetings or flawless interviews, or those managers who continually creates happy clients and a referral cycle, or those supervisors who gain the buy in of all those on site to new guidelines when presenting new safety initiatives.
Questions that help the modelling process
- In planning – what do you visualise, hear, feel and say to yourself beforehand? What are the steps you run through in your head before execution?
- In doing – What is your body language doing? What is your tonality saying? How aware are you – are you able to simultaneously watch yourself as a fly on the wall?
- In reviewing – what do you think and do after the event? How does this link into your overall goal or vision?
Operating on autopilot serves us to a certain point, but if you want to see change or improvement, you may well need to start switching on to what it is you usually do switched off.