How much of your day do you control?

Leadership is anchored in choice.

Every moment, a leader is choosing - how to show up, how to respond, what to prioritise, and the impact they have on those around them.

And yet, it often doesn’t feel like that at all. When I ask leaders I work with a question like, “how much control do you have over your day?”, the most common response is “very little”. 

And no wonder.

Faced with a raging river of emails, meetings jammed back to back, urgent jobs for review, a report to write for the exec team and myriad other demands to respond to, leaders can very quickly feel like they are flapping in someone else’s breeze.

Add to that the fact that many leaders come in the front door already carrying a load - rushing to drop off the kids, an emergency dash for milk, waiting for the tradie who’s running late, a cancelled train… the idea that your leadership is anchored in choice starts to sound like, well, a cruel taunt.

Over the last few years, I’ve come to realise that one of the most valuable aspects of the leadership programs I run is not the content, but the context.

The context for leaders to take a step off the treadmill, breathe, and re-examine the choices they are making. To compare notes with peers, reflect on the challenges they face, and come to recognise that their default response is not the only possible response.

That context is not just a powerful opportunity to re-examine choices, but to reset a leader’s agency - in other words, their belief that they have the ability to make choices in the first place.

Which brings me to the key reflection here: one of the most common derailers for leaders is a loss of agency. 

Not capability. Not intent. Agency.

The quiet shift from I choose to I have to. From shaping your environment, to being shaped by it.

And once that shift happens, everything downstream follows.

• Conversations become reactive 
• Priorities get inherited rather than influenced
• Presence gets diluted
• Impact becomes accidental

And so the question for leaders is this: 

Knowing that there is plenty in each day that is out of your control, what are the practices that serve to anchor you in choice… and reset your agency?

Not big, heroic changes. Just small resets, done often.

Here are a few that I hear other leaders say work well for them:

Anchor your day in a ‘create’ state.
Start by writing down your Top 2 for the day - the big things that matter amidst the noise of the day. This is the opposite of starting the day in ‘react’ mode (eg. checking your emails first thing). For others, ‘create’ state might come from journalling, a short yoga session, making a special pot of tea… the choice is yours.

Picture yourself.
You might ask yourself the question, “How do I want others to experience me today?” Or take 60 seconds to imagine how an important conversation will go. 

Clock up an early win.
Brian Tracy’s legendary book “Eat that Frog” encourages us to do the thing you’re avoiding early in the day, so you don't carry it as a burden all day - draining your emotional energy. 

Preserve a sacred window.
Choose a moment in the day that’s yours - to stop, breathe and choose again. Perhaps that’s first thing in the morning at the local café. Perhaps it’s a ritual of closing down your office for the day before you head home.  

Agency is not easy to maintain when you’re at the mercy of the day. And yet it’s the fuel of leadership.

Notice how “in control” you feel… and then decide what practices might strengthen that.  Over time, this is the stuff that shifts a leader from being carried by the day… to shaping it.

Until next time,
Simon