Focus on What Matters Most: 5 Leaders' Effective Strategies

Suleika Jouaud, Writer: Where am I conflating momentum with what's meaningful? How much of my time is serving the things I actually want versus the things that I should be doing?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges. This week's special episode asks researchers, an adventurer, an artist and a Buddhist monk how you can focus on what matters most.

Subscribe to Meet The Leader on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your favourite podcasts. And don't forget, rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum, and this is Meet the Leader.

Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist: You have to do behavioural change; change your environment and then you can change your thinking and your mental habits.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: It's summertime. Have you taken your vacation yet? And if you took that vacation, did you ever put your phone down? Could you stop scanning for emails and Slack notifications and little things with your name on them? Those things are gonna be there when you get back, I promise.

I've done it too. It's hard to stop, retrain our brains, take a moment to reflect. But those moments are critical, not just to avoiding burnout but to helping us keep a fresh perspective, to help us make better decisions. We have been so lucky this year to talk to a range of incredible experts who are perfectly poised for this critical topic: how to find time for reflection so you can refocus on what matters most.

Leaders in this episode will share research and insights and strategies, and they're all things that you can deploy to help refine your centre when things go sideways. We'll get started with Hiro Iwamoto.

Hiro Iwamoto is a blind adventurer and together with his sighted navigator and crewmate Doug Smith, they completed the first-ever non-stop crossing of the Pacific Ocean by a visually impaired person. You might remember them from last week's Meet the Leader episode, where my colleague Robin Pomeroy talked to them about that extraordinary journey and what surprised them about spending 55 days with just the ocean below them and the stars above.

They found it liberating. And the journey helped drive home to them that life's real necessities – everything they needed – was really on that boat. It's a great reminder to anyone to ask yourself, what do I really need in this moment? And do I have it already? Here's Doug and Hiro.

Doug Smith, Crewmate and Navigator: We were on a boat and you know, you didn't have the constant ding ding ding of your phone and a message coming in. You know, everything you needed was there on the boat. Someone asked me, “Like, didn't you feel lonely or scared in the middle of the ocean?” I think both of us said “no,” we felt more connected. And our course took us where, you know there was not a lot of boat traffic or any traffic.

I mean, the closest people on Earth, they weren't on Earth, they were probably in a space station, above. So I think we both found it kind of liberating to feel to be out there, to be self-sufficient, you know, to be separated from the world and not have the constant noise of news or your device dinging at you.

Robin Pomeroy, Radio Davos: It sounds glorious. I want to do it now.

Doug Smith, Crewmate and Navigator: Yeah, of course, you know, there were times where you have big storms and you know, things happen, things break and they need to get repaired but that was expected, so it wasn’t ...

Hiro Iwamoto, Adventurer and Motivational Speaker: So step-by-step, right, when something happens, definitely on the sailing out on the Pacific but step-by-step how to figure out a good time to have a dialogue with yourself and with the universe – excellent you know and feeling why this world has a war polarization or climate crisis, you know. In this, on the middle of the Pacific.

I feel this Earth is one thing, right? Right. Yeah. So feeling very well. So instead of those, you know, difficult times, excellent times, you know, what I remember the most.

Robin Pomeroy, Radio Davos: That's, you talked about the space station maybe being closer to you than humans on Earth. You seem to have had an experience, both of you, similar to what astronauts have when they look down on Earth and this feeling of, it's this precious place and we forget about it all too often.

Doug Smith, Crewmate and Navigator: And it felt like we were, because we were sailing in the trade winds, so you go for a long time, the sun is rising behind you in the morning, setting in the afternoons, so you are continually sailing into the sun. And you get this feeling, it's like this could have been 10,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago or 10,000 years from now; you felt like you were in some ways stepping out of time.

Hiro Iwamoto, Adventurer and Motivational Speaker: So, after landing, I was shocked when I went to the big stores and supermarket. Things are everything and too much things and how materialistic this world became. What we needed is what we put on our cell phone. That's it. Fifty-five days. We could have gone 90 days, 100 days. You know, so. These were the different ways to see what we had through the sailing of the Pacific.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and an expert on human flourishing. In fact, he's taught a course on that topic for the last 12 years at New York University. He was a guest on Meet the Leader this year, talking about human happiness and how tech distraction and fragmentation get in the way of that.

He shares with us a simple tip to help you take back control of your day and of your mornings – one that starts with your devices. I'll let him explain.

Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist: What habits can you develop with your phone to increase your chances of flourishing? One thing that I've learned from teaching undergraduates and MBA students who are in their late 20s is that almost all young people and a lot of older people, the very first thing they do when they wake up in the morning is check their phone for notifications.

They don't get out of bed, they don't go to the bathroom, they don't make coffee; it's the phone. And what's the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night? Same thing; it's the phone. And what do they do in between? For a lot of them, mostly it's the phone. That is not a life that is a life with relationships. That means you are never fully present in human interactions.

So one of the things that I strongly encourage all of my students to do and I encourage all adults to do: make a list of the first five things you do after you open your eyes. And look at it and say, is that really what I want? And find ways to change it. Make a list of the last five things you do before you close your eyes and look at it: is that what you want?

And what everyone finds is when they do that, when they give themselves space to wake up and to set the day and to choose what they want to happen that day, set your intentions, you have a much better day. If you don't do that, you open your eyes, you look at your phone and your phone will now control your thinking, your cognition, your thoughts, your priorities and your actions for the rest of the day.

You'll constantly be interrupted, you'll never have deep work and you won't really amount to anything. So, willpower is overmatched; willpower is not enough. You can't just say, I'm gonna look at my phone last. You can just say I'm going to be present in my social, no, you cannot, that's not enough.

The phones, the apps are designed by people who studied behaviourism; they studied gambling and gaming addiction, they used techniques from Las Vegas in designing these apps and they are too strong for our willpower. As Angela Duckworth writes in the book Grit, you have to do behavioural change, change your environment and then you can change your thinking and your mental habits.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: At Davos this year, cellist Yo-Yo Ma curated an inspirational conversation on how leaders can live in balance with the planet. It's a pretty incredible session and it's one that stopped me cold when it played in our staff office in January during the Annual Meeting. You can watch it on your own. I'll have a link in the show notes.

But there was a moment in the session where Yo-yo Ma asked Aulani Wilhelm, the CEO of non-profit Nia Tero, an organization that supports Indigenous peoples and their guardianship of lands and waters, all about the idea of ancestors and being a steward of our environments and the impact we have on others.

It's an enlightening chat that can help you think about urgency differently. And ask yourself, how can I be an ancestor? How can I think about the long term? Here's Aulani.

Yo-Yo Ma, Cellist: Your father is Swiss. He's from Staffelbach, a town with no railroad. And your mother is native Hawaiian. And Aulani has devoted her life to advocate for the well-being and to spread the wisdoms of Indigenous peoples and that is one out of 20 people on our planet. One out of 20. So, that's a big job.

How do you think of time, of big time, of generational time, of the time that... How do think about that time when we have to live in the moment in a very unstable and fast-changing world? How do you negotiate the two?

Aulani Wilhelm, Nia Tero: I am Native Hawaiian and I was fortunate to be raised primarily in the homeland of my mother and in her culture. And in that culture, we learn very young that we're descended from nature, that our oldest kin are non-human relations, that we are the younger siblings. Of what we now refer to as the natural world but it's who we are, we are nature.

But my father is Swiss and he is from Staffelbach in the canton Aargau and it's really wonderful because I have those ancestors as well. And the funny thing is, is even though my parents came from literally halfway around the world, they both came from extraordinarily humble means.

They actually both came from farming families and fishing families in my mom's case. And the only thing they ever argued about was time. If we weren't 10 minutes early, we were late for my dad. And if we weren't one hour late, we were early for my mom. And the role my brother and I always had to play was straddling these worlds, right?

Actually trying to figure out how to stretch and navigate time so that we'd have peace in our family and we could actually get anywhere at some point and kind of understand the nuances of that.

And so literally in me is like this kind of holding of time and what I learned from my Hawaiian family is that we sort of say, oh, it's okay. Like, relax, calm down, ancestors will stretch time. Like you will have the time you need to be able to do what's at hand, right? And that, for me, is like that poetic way of that tension between the urgent and the important or something having to do it in today, right now, this one thing has to be done but you have to be mindful of where we're going in the future.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Shoukei Matsumoto is a Buddhist monk from Japan and the author of several books, including Work Like a Monk, How to Connect, Lead and Grow in a Noisy World. Shoukei uses ancient wisdom to help people find meaning in the modern world. He also talked about thinking like an ancestor and how it can shift your perspective to better understand the long term. I'll let him explain.

Shoukei Matsumoto, Buddhist Monk: So if you want to be a good ancestor of yesterday's you, you need to have agency. If you give up your autonomy on how you manage your attention, you cannot do anything, right? You will be just swiped away by an overwhelming wave of the attention economy and politics, right.

To become a good ancestor, it is really important to, first, number one, you need to be the owner of your own attention. To be an owner of your attention, you need to be grounded in the first place. So before you start speaking, stay calm and start listening mindfully to your own voice.

Then, two, others' voices but remember, this present moment is the point where every course of the future, every course in the past, is unfolded; start appreciating the present. So this is a very important starting point, whatever you do.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: To take us home, we have Suleika Jouad. She is a memoirist and bestselling author of The Book of Alchemy. That's a special guide to journaling with prompts and essays that help people take time to reflect on moments and questions that they wouldn't otherwise. She's also a three-time cancer survivor.

Journaling helped her through many tough moments, including living with that disease. Here's Suleika on journaling and how this creative process helped her.

Suleika Jouaud, Writer: I believe that a creative practice is beneficial for everyone. You don't have to be a professional writer or a musician or poet to benefit from its power. But when you think about it, creativity is the undernetting of everything that we do. Cooking is creative. Negotiating a deal requires creativity. Making a sacrifice and having an argument with your spouse requires creativity.

And so exercising that muscle of creativity in a context that isn't for public consumption, taking a moment each day to sit down, to write or doodle or make a list and find your way back to yourself, that to me is the starting point of every good idea. Every first draft of an important conversation and it is the bedrock of not just my work and my ability to keep enduring and surviving but more than that, to keep living, to live well, to live intentionally, to live meaningfully, to live a life that doesn't feel like drowning in uncertainty. But instead is a life of curiosity, of asking questions, of reflecting and taking stock.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I also asked her how, in a world where we're so comfortable prompting AI and search engines, why we should stand and ask ourselves some questions in the process. Here's Suleika's answer.

Suleika Jouaud, Writer: We live in a culture that is obsessed with, as the journalist David Brooks put it, our resume virtues, the things that make us attractive in the common marketplace. We're less focused on the eulogy virtues, on cultivating the traits that we're often remembered for long after we're gone. Were you brave? Were you humble? Were you kind?

And I think it's so easy in this modern day to tumble through your life, to be focused on doing as opposed to being, without actually taking a moment to reflect on what it is that you're thinking, what it's that you are feeling and experiencing. And so to me, even one minute, even a sentence, is valuable.

It's, to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, a way of finding a still point in the spinning world. But I found that may seem counterintuitive, is that when I shift away from being productive, when I begin my day with a to-feel list rather than a to-do list, which is one of the prompts from The Book of Alchemy that I return to every day, it changes my mindset as I approach the rest of my day.

It sets the tone for everything. And we are giving prompts all the time, often in the context of AI. But to prompt the self is to take a moment to slow things just enough that you can ask yourself, what actually matters to me today? Are my priorities really my priorities?

What would make this day meaningful as opposed to productive? How much of my time is serving the things I actually want versus the things that I should be doing?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Lastly, I asked her what questions she's asking herself these days.

Suleika Jouaud, Writer: Where am I conflating momentum with what's meaningful? It's so easy to confuse busyness with a sense of progress. And as someone who is admittedly pretty type A, when I'm doing a lot, it feels like forward motion. But the ability sometimes to pause, to take a moment to actually reflect about what I'm doing and why and where it's taking me sometimes can be the most productive, unproductive use of time.

And so as we're here at Davos and having questions and conversations, specifically, for example, about AI and there is this race to innovate and very real questions about the implications of that race for humankind, for our workforce, for our artists, I think that the focus on meaning over momentum and specifically defining the why of the momentum and the why of what's meaningful is something that I know I could benefit from and that I believe others could too.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Those were the top tips on how to focus on what matters most. Thanks so much to these leaders and thanks so much for listening. Do you know someone who could use a couple more strategies to reflect and focus? Send them this episode. They'll be grateful. We have a full conversation.

We have full podcast conversations with many of the leaders in this episode – leaders like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Wharton professor Adam Grant, writer Salika Jouaud and adventurer Hiro Iwamoto in the show notes.

Find a transcript of this episode as well as transcripts from my colleague’s podcast Radio Davos at wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me with Taz Kelleher as editor, Juan Turan and Edward Bailey as studio engineers in Davos and Gareth Nolan driving studio production. That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.