LJM Associates Ltd

  Peter Drucker said that we should, “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”  We all need to recharge our personal batteries, but do we do it enough? How often do you retreat?  Retreating in its spiritual or religious sense is about taking time away from everyday life and reflecting and seeking to find answers to the issues or problems that we face.  Retreat, or quiet reflection, as a process helps us with our personal lives, but can also help us in our working lives too. Quiet reflection can give us perspective, clarity, give us space to learn and grow and also help us to be more self-aware. When we have days on the production line, wall-to-wall Teams Meetings, rushing between activities and meetings when do we give ourselves time to reflect? Meetings can be very good to air views and opinions and reach a consensus, but a trap that many organisations fall into is to end up having a meeting to d...

  In leadership, noise is constant, everyone's opinions, their calls for urgency, and expectations all compete for your attention. As I have said in previous blog posts it is easy to mistake activity for action, and to forget that clarity emerges from intentional quiet moments.  Creating space to think, whether stepping away from meetings, pausing before decisions, or simply disconnecting from digital noise for a while allows leaders to take stock. In those quiet moments, assumptions, biases become clear, ideas emerge, patterns become visible, priorities can be determined. In those quiet moments, decisions feel less reactive and more aligned with purpose and delivery.   Strong leaders don’t just filter the noise and focus on what is most important, they learn to question their own thinking, their own worldviews. Clarity isn’t about having all the answers, its about recognising the landscape and finding a pathway through it. In a world that rewards activity, speed an...

  In the Oxford Farming Conference Report that I authored and presented at the beginning of the month I posed four key questions - What do you want to achieve? What are you going to keep doing? What are you going to stop doing? What can you do instead? Questions we can ask ourselves in many contexts and situations... how would you answer these questions? What actions arise for you from these questions?

  Are you feeling stressed after wall to wall meetings and commitments, then check out this three minute reflection with the sound of the dawn chorus.