Go With The Flow

What going with the flow means in practice

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Go with the flow

has been my mantra ever since I moved out of corporate corridors in 2021 to be on my own. I wanted to express myself fully through all my skills (and combinations of skills) rather than being confined by a box of responsibilities.

For me, it has meant:

• Flexibility Over Rigidity: As a solopreneur, I have reasonable plans but what has been most worthwhile is ability to pivot when circumstances change. Cultivating an openness to detours has led me to unexpected and most rewarding opportunities. Learning how to be adaptive, agile and curious has been the work of a lifetime.

  “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

• Harnessing Energy: The joy of being a solo is to maximize work that taps into my energy and passion. I cultivated courage to say no to work that drags me. Instead of resisting any setbacks or overly trying to make things work, I focus on my circle of control and bring energy in things I do - leadership coaching, facilitation and visual storytelling.

• Trusting the Journey: Uncertainty is a feature, especially when you run your own business. When we trust the journey, we can focus on our next best steps (H.T

  Dave Gray
  ) and let the journey evolve. It is about combining agency to act now with a sense of surrender to what happens as a result of it. A lot of what I offer to customers today started as small experiments that evolved and scaled. As the business grows, my challenge is to keep running small experiments while also working on serving customers.

  “Purpose may not always be the starting point of your journey. Sometimes, you start the journey and the purpose reveals itself.” - from my post Move and the way appears

• Being Fully Present
  Our presence and full attention is a gift for others, especially in a hyper-distracted world. When facilitating conversations, running workshops and creating visuals, my presence and ability to be in the moment makes all the difference. Going with the flow is about focusing on the here and now. That’s when we can synthesize what we consume, make meaning, spot opportunities and make meaningful decisions with our goals.

• Finding Joy in the Journey
  When I reflect on 3+ years of being an independent professional, I am amazed at how things add up to create a body of work that we can be proud of. I have always believed that the journey is the destination and every step along the way counts - even the missteps. For me, the mindset shift from “have to to the work” to “get to do the work” has been the most significant one.

Looking Back: 2024 in Blogging

2024 was a good year as far as creating and sharing my work was concerned. LinkedIn tells me that my posts garnered over a million impressions, thousands of reactions/shares and hundreds of comments even when my posting was infrequent at best.

Here are the posts I wrote on my blog:

• Measuring Right: Understanding Goodhart’s Law

• How to Turn Conflict Into a Constructive Negotiation

• Mindset of Leaders who are Friction Fixers

• Supercommunicators: The Art of a “Learning Conversation”

• How to be a Boldly Inclusive Leader

• Invisible Costs to Consider in Decision Making

• The Iceberg of Organizational Knowledge: How to Unlock Tacit Knowledge

• The Spotlight Effect

• Efficiency and Productivity: The Balance that Drives Success

• How to Use Digital Spaces for Personal Branding, Learning, and Business Growth

• 7 Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety

• Opening the (Johari) Window to Your Self-Awareness

• 8 Questions for Aligning Team on Strategy Execution

This newsletter reaches 2700+ people and my foray into the world of Substack has been exciting - I particularly love the community aspect around newsletters.

5 Things I Loved Reading This Week:

• Jason Fried encourages us to Sell Your By-Products

• Julie Winkle Guilioni guides on how to navigate career in today’s stormy workplace

• Toby Sinclair has a wonderful summary of Gary Hamel’s book Humanocracy

• Ken Norton says that our need to be right comes at the cost of learning and curiosity

• Mike Rohde offers tips on simple drawings with 5 basic shapes

From My Journal

That’s it for this edition. The next edition will arrive in your mailbox in 2025. Thank you for subscribing and reading.

Thank you,