One reason why leadership is important in an organisation is because it helps us to get stuff done. To improve ourselves and our teams.
Photo by Aniket Bhattacharya on Unsplash
Have you ever trained for a marathon? Or do you know someone who has?
When someone decides to do that, classically, they train for 16-weeks to get ready. That's 3 months of focussing on one goal and methodically working towards it.
I often tell my clients that 3 months is a really good amount of time to work on something new. That might a be stage towards something bigger, or it might be the end point. It's the approach I have used again and again for my own improvements over the years.
But I never really stopped to wonder why?
What is it about this amount of time that seems to work for all kinds of different activities? I used to think that it was simply something to do with my own attention span. That there was something about me that couldn't maintain consistency for longer.
Until one day I mentioned this theory of mine to a client in one of my group coaching sessions. She has a background in psychology and told me she uses the same approach with her clients. But she also had a beautiful theory as to why this works.
You see, 3 months is a season.
Perhaps there is something much deeper at play here. We are not separate from nature. We are not separate from the rest of the forces at play in the universe. We are part of the oneness from which everything is manifest.
Is it too hard to imagine that we've evolved to follow the rhythms of the seasons and that we expect and feel a change every three months? To have a different sense of our place in spring, summer, autumn and winter?
Some of my clients would happily work with this notion. Others prefer a more mechanistic approach, trusting that the process is what yields improvement.
But whatever you believe, or feel, the 3 month rule, really seems to work.
So, what are you going to improve?