Do you need a strategic thinking permission slip?

Some of the most rewarding conversations I have in my line of work are with clients who discover that they have the goods to be a strategic thinker, yet have for a myriad of reasons, lost that hoped-for belief.  

One client sticks in my memory. She was a participant on my Strategic Thinker Development Programme who had just received her Cognitive Process Profile (CPP) report. She'd been given feedback over the years that she wasn't really a strategic thinker, and she'd started to believe it. So much so that she'd resigned herself to the fact that the next level of seniority wasn't for her.  

But the assessment told us a different story. 

It showed she could manage complexity, hold multiple perspectives, and reach sound conclusions even in ambiguity. What it also showed is that when faced with a complex problem, she defaults to gathering more and more detail. She wants to understand every angle before she feels comfortable moving forward. Through our conversations she started to see that since people can't see the depth of complexity she is processing inside her head, what people see is her getting stuck in the detail.   

It made me wonder - how often do we mistake a visible habit for something else?  

Thinking is funny like that - it's invisible to others. Someone asks lots of questions and gets labelled as overly analytical. Someone stays quiet a while, and others assume they haven't reached a conclusion. When actually, they're doing the processing internally or they've already made sense of it but just don't fully trust themselves to say it out loud.  

The lovely part of our conversation came next.  

She told me she walked into work the morning after reading her report with a spring in her step. More optimistic, more energised. Feeling, she said, as if someone had finally handed her a permission slip. She laughed as she said "that ship might have sailed, but I'm swimming after it!" And the tangible evidence she noticed in herself - she told me LinkedIn had shown her an ad that very morning for a postgraduate programme. Normally, she realised, she would have scrolled straight past, subconsciously disqualifying herself for it. This time, she clicked on it. The assessment made her more capable of course, it had reminded her she always had been.  

However, capability is foundational, but it isn't the same as real world practice.  

Having the cognitive ability to think strategically is different from having the tools, language, and habits to do it consistently. That still takes learning and deliberate development, but believing you're capable changes the game. That's what allows you to step into learning opportunities with confidence, and get more out of them.  

If this resonates with you, you might ask yourself…  

• Have you accepted feedback about yourself that- deserves a second look?  

• Are people seeing your capability, or just your habits and behaviours?  

• Where might your own thinking habits be sending a different message to what you intend?  

• Could your search for certainty be stopping you from backing your own judgment?  

• Have you been telling yourself the ship of a more senior position has sailed, but there's something niggling at you that maybe it's still within swimming distance?  

• Or are you on the ship - and wondering how you got there? Or feeling a bit seasick? Maybe the demands of your real world practice have outpaced your opportunities for tangible learning and confidence-building.  

If that's you in that last point - the key is to separate out ability from skill from capacity, then work out where you need scaffolding, learning or a new set of habits- oh, and I can help with that! 

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