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My personal tips on thinking clearly

Eleanor Beaton

Your ability to be CLEAR is perhaps the single highest revenue-producing activity you can cultivate as a leader.

As you grow, your clarity needs to inspire and ground YOU, fuel your team, and channel through them to your clients. It needs to power through your clients to their results and referrals. Your clarity needs to cut through the distortion of social media and LAND with the souls on the other end of the platform.

Your clarity needs to speak to people who don’t know you…yet.

Your clarity does a TON of heavy lifting. Most people are not as clear as they could be. So for this reason, they end up doing a lot of over-work and over-complication which leaves them little leftover energy to move on to the things that truly matter.

Here are 3 mental practices I deploy everyday that help me lead and act with clarity.

1. Eliminate before you add.

A lot of overwhelm and confusion comes down to a lack of discipline and an unwillingness to sacrifice the good for the great. Yep, totally said it. Before you call the resilience police on my buns, I would encourage you to think about this:

When a leader isn’t disciplined and can’t make choices, she creates confusion not only for herself but for many other people.

Smart people generally overestimate how many things they can do well. Furthermore, because they have so much going on, they often miscalculate the few things that ACTUALLY MATTER. In general, less is more. I know you know this. Now you need to cultivate the ovaries to actually practice it.

2. Be willing to sacrifice likability for clarity.

It is very difficult to underestimate the massive social conditioning around the importance of women being perceived as warm, nice, and accommodating. I don’t have much use for “nice” but I do believe in the power of being warm and accommodating…wherever I can be.

However, I have learned that when it comes to choosing between likability (someone else’s feelings) and clarity (my own truth) I will always choose clarity. Indeed, there is never really a choice, is there?

Ironically, the very thing that fosters deep honesty and connection (clarity) is what can make leadership feel so lonely at times. What I have learned is that while people won’t always like you for your clarity, they may not always choose you for your clarity they will respect you. Being clear is being honest. Furthermore, you will respect yourself AND like yourself. #winning

3. Separate ideation, discernment, and planning.

This has been a huge one for me because ideation is one of my key strengths and great loves. But when you don’t separate ideating, discerning, and planning, and instead put them into one big, messy process…you create a lot of chaos that masquerades as “massive action.”

I have learned to practice separating the process of coming up with ideas, discerning which ones truly belong, and creating a simple plan to execute. I don’t do them in a single sitting. Each step gets space and time. Therefore each step can be done thoughtfully and with great energy. Deep thought + high energy = clarity.

These 3 things have brought tremendous clarity to me.

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PS. Clarity is the HEART of a jewel business — scaling your CASH, INFLUENCE, and AUTONOMY at the same time. If you are ready to scale, then it’s a good time to work with us in The Power + Presence + Position Business Accelerator.

 

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