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Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast, the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work. I'm your host, jean Balfour, master Certified Coach, with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups. I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently, finding the type of fulfillment they never knew possible. They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire. In this podcast, we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership. You're going to hear neuroscience, psychology, leadership models and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader. Every week, you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life, making change possible. Let's start the show. Hi everyone and welcome to the Fulfilled Leader. After recording last week's episode on purpose, I've been thinking a lot about big grand changes towards our desired goals and the direction that we're traveling in, and whether a big grand change is possible. Maybe it's in small changes that better help us to move in the direction that we want to be going. In this brief and focused episode, I'm sharing ideas about how we can focus on small actions to bring about big change. These thoughts partly came about via a strange route.

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I love to do jigsaw puzzles as a way of relaxing Don't judge me. It gets me off screens and mostly working online. I'm on screens all the time and so I want to give my eyes a rest, and it also gives me a chance to listen to podcasts and audiobooks, and when I'm doing them, time passes and I really enjoy it. Last weekend I knew my partner was working, so this was a jigsaw moment. Friday evening I headed into the bookshop and, as usual, chose one with a picture I really loved. On Saturday morning it quickly became clear that this was a really hard jigsaw and there was no way I was going to complete it over a weekend. I can be quite competitive about puzzles, mostly with myself. It's like a race to the finish. My natural hurry up driver kicks in and I aim to get it done fast. Not exactly a mindfulness activity, but I get a lot of joy from completing them. This one was not going to let that happen. By the end of Sunday very little was done and I actually thought about giving up and putting it back in the box. On Monday morning I sat down and managed to put in one piece whilst I was having my breakfast, and then later over coffee, I managed to put in one more piece, and it was at that moment that I decided OK, I'm not going to give up piece. And it was at that moment that I decided, okay, I'm not going to give up, I'm going to see how it would be for me to make slow, steady progress on a jigsaw and put in only a few pieces a day.

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By now you might be wondering what's the point of this story. Well, it was this experience that got me thinking about how often, when we're seeking change at work, change in our leadership, change in our working lives we're often in a hurry to achieve it. We want it to happen now and we want it to happen fast. And change often doesn't happen in this way. It happens in small, steady steps. For example, maybe you're struggling with your relationship with your boss or a team member and you'd really like it to improve. It's unlikely that this is going to happen overnight. It will take steady effort, shift in communication, learning more about what works for them, making small changes that, over time, will bring about the difference you're seeking. Small changes that, over time, will bring about the difference you're seeking. I think the same is true for finding more fulfillment at work. It's most likely to be in small changes that we do over a period of time that will bring about the change.

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Now, of course, this can lead to frustration. We often can't see if we're making any progress, and this is where learning about measuring input rather than output can make a difference. As I'm in the process of writing a book in fact, I'm nearly at the end I've been following a lot of writers and one of the biggest lessons I've learned from them is not to count outcomes. Writing a book takes years. What can help is measuring inputs, for example, writing for 25 minutes each day. We can do this with any change we're seeking in our professional lives.

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Maybe we're looking for promotion and are frustrated that it's not happening, and instead of expecting it now, we can look for small daily behaviors, habits, inputs that will make it more likely that we will be promoted, and this is ensuring that we're meeting high performance standards and managing our brand in the organization. In his book Atomic Habits, james Clear talks about this idea. He talks about 1% improvements that if we aim for a 1% improvement each time we do something over time, this adds up significantly. Martha Beck has a similar concept. She talks and writes a lot about purpose and says that if we're off course, if we're not traveling in the direction we want, we can make a one degree turn towards our desired goal, and each time we do this we move closer to our purpose to being fulfilled at work.

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In this moment of gigantic change in our society and in our working lives, it can seem counterintuitive to make small moves. There's something in the air that suggests urgency for change, but I'm not sure we should be taken in by that. I think we're better off looking for small, sustainable changes that keep us moving to where we want to be. So, after my jigsaw moment, I thought it was worth setting us together on a path to think about. What are the areas of our working lives, of our leadership, that we would like to change and that we're feeling a bit frustrated, maybe a bit stuck on, and where these things are not happening as we hope they would be, or where they're not moving as fast as we would like? What are some small, even tiny shifts that we could make today, some little things that we could do each day to bring about the change, to help us to move more closely to what it is that we're hoping to achieve or where we're hoping to be.

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I'd really love to hear how you get on with this. Thanks for listening to the Fulfilled Leader. If this episode resonated, share it with another leader or friend, and don't forget to follow the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can even rate and review. You can find more support and resources at jeanbalfourcom, or come and say hello on LinkedIn. Take care and keep leading with heart.