Focus and intention require real discipline—to understand what’s important (and what’s not) and to proactively make choices to weed out all the extras.
Achieving more—more success, more results, more impact—isn’t about doing more. It’s about having absolute clarity on where to focus and invest our attention. Hard to do with so much distraction—so much noise—around us. One of the keys to success is being able to recognize noise for what it is and turn down the dial so you can focus on what matters.
Modern Mentor is hosted by Rachel Cooke. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hey, it’s Rachel Cooke, your Modern Mentor. I’m the founder of Lead Above Noise—a business designed to help companies craft amazing employee experiences and run leadership development programs that activate change. Also, apparently, a business whose name mystifies many.
The process of naming this business felt a lot like naming my kids. Like a baby, you bring a business into the world, you imagine it all grown up and you ask yourself—who do you want it to be? And what name best captures that? And then you explain to Aunt Bertha why you’ve not named it after her.
My goal in birthing this business was to really help leaders and organizations see that the fastest path to success was paved with focus and intention, not crowded by meetings and crises and general busyness—you know, all that noise that’s constantly clamoring for our attention.
But focus and intention require real discipline—to understand what’s important (and what’s not) and to proactively make choices to weed out all the extras. The noise. Only once we see it can we rise above it and lead ourselves and our teams toward impact—toward purpose.
Easier said than done. Noise is loud. And powerful. But when we know where it tends to hide, we’re better positioned to spot it and shut it down.
Today, let’s talk about some of the most common sources of noise that I see around me and how we can start to rise above it.
I’ve named it kind of harshly. But I call ‘em like I see ‘em.
Head trash is indeed the garbage that gets in your head that tells you—so convincingly—things that aren’t true but leave you feeling awful. It’s a power player in holding you back from doing the thing that most needs your attention.
Maybe you’re a product manager overseeing a product with a small but rabidly loyal fan base. And you’re striving to get this product into more hands.
To achieve this you know you should either:
Either of these moves would help amplify your impact. But that head trash is saying
“You can’t apply for that promotion because you don’t have enough experience or you’re not yet the public speaker you need to be.”
Or, “That idea is ridiculous. Your boss will sooner LOL than throw their support behind it.”
If this is resonating with you, don’t feel bad. You’re in good company. Because every one of us carries a version of this voice with us. Funny thing is, we can usually see someone else’s head trash for what it is (false and ridiculous) but our own manages to disguise itself as truth.
So next time that voice pops, pause and name it. It’s head trash. And then ask yourself: is that indisputably true? Do I have facts to support that? And if not (because almost always you do not) what is another possibility?
What if your boss hasn’t mentioned the promotion to you because he doesn’t think you’re interested… but he’s sure as heck hoping you lean in?
What if that idea is exactly the ingenuity your company’s been looking for… they just didn’t know you’d locked it up inside you?
Listen. Maybe you’re not ready for the job and maybe your idea isn’t the winning one. But there’s only one way to find out.
So let that head trash go. And do the thing.
Next up? It’s fire drills.
What I mean is this. You have a clear goal to achieve. And you've planned your day, intentionally, around the actions designed to get you there.
But then something urgent pops up—a frantic email, an urgent request for data, a meeting that just appeared on your calendar.
Next thing you know, your day is over, you’ve achieved two of the six things you’d planned, but you addressed 14 unexpected issues.
Listen. I live in the real world. Surprises, emergencies—they arise. But they should be the exception. Not the rule.
These are fire drills. And boy are they noisy.
Your job—the path to leading above this noise—is to address these fire drills head-on and distinguish the true emergencies from other people’s failure to plan.
The latter is not your problem to solve. But it is yours to call out.
My friend was recently complaining her boss, Scott, does everything last minute. And as a result, she’s often getting frantic emails and requests—“can you whip up this slide?” or “can you get me this data?” And always the timeline is ASAP because whatever it is was due yesterday.
So she scrambled and gets him what he needs. And then ends up missing deadlines of her own. This just isn’t OK.
She has since talked to Scott—she’s explained how his choices are impacting her and the organization. Candidly, Scott had no idea he was creating such a headache. And has since committed to doing a weekly review of his upcoming presentations, and giving her a minimum of 3 days notice on anything he might need from her.
It’s early days, but so far so good. For both of them.
Fire drills are often avoidable with a little bit of planning.
Aimlessness is the thing that happens when we know the outcome we want to achieve, we know what we need to do to achieve it… but we just don’t wanna do it!
This was my noisiest noise in my early days.
I’d have a program I wanted to start selling. What I should have been doing was calling colleagues to get feedback, calling prospects to start selling. But what was I doing? Designing slides for the program, watching other people’s programs, you know—lots of time-consuming things keeping me fully distracted from the things I didn’t want to be doing.
On your end, maybe you want to build some momentum around your product idea. What you should be doing is having coffee chats with subject matter experts or practicing your pitch. But instead, you’re “procrasti-learning”—you know, taking online courses that are great… but you know this stuff already. What you need to do is hit that gas.
Let go of the noise and do the hard thing.
And here we are. At self-importance. I saved it for last but truly it’s the noisiest of all the noises. It’s the stuff that keeps us busy—the constant flow of emails, Slacks, texts, back-to-back meetings—and we let it because we conflate “busyness” with importance.
But being constantly in demand is not a sign of how important we are. It’s actually—tough love alert—a signal of our own lack of discipline. To say no, to bow out, to claim our lane and stick in it.
What can you do—what permission do you need—to start opting out of rather than into these things? What can you delegate or postpone or just let go of completely?
Remember, your value is not in how many hours you exert, but in how much impact you create. What will get you there? What won’t? Call out your noise. And lead above it.
Join me next week for another great episode. Until then, visit my website at leadabovenoise.com if your organization is looking to dial up its Employee Experience.