The hacks you’ll see here come from blending lessons from my own 55 years of social change leadership, my recent learnings as a consultant and coach, and stuff I now read and write that may help you develop as a mindful leader. 

Skill up to scale up!

In these challenging times of Climate Emergency, we need to scale up our influence and impact. That won’t happen if we don’t up our skills as communicators, leaders and doers. 

This week’s overall theme is about priming skills that will give you a chance to have your ideas noticed, respected, and taken up.

Grab a drink and take two minutes to read this and start planning to up your skills so you become more productive and effective. I prioritize this because skill level is one of the few things we have total control over. Skills give us the ability to respond to the chaos and crises around us.

Sociable Media

• Focus your presentation on practical and long-term ways of solving the problems faced by the group you’re talking with.
• Don’t just send out messages. Engage with people as they are. Relate to them as people, not as a messenger on behalf of a cause.

Blue Ocean

Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne developed this smart strategy for underdogs. Don’t go to the shallow and well-stocked shoreline. That’s where the sharks feast. The ocean is red with the blood of competitors torn to pieces.

Go instead to the wide blue ocean where the pickings are thinner but there are no huge predators, Blue Ocean thinkers say. 

I would say Twitter (where I have 102000 followers) and Facebook (where I have the maximum 5000 followers) are the red ocean. That’s where the well-resourced competitors are. 

Barry Martin advised me to go on Quora, which has a low profile but hundreds of thousands of people hungry for advice on food, health and fitness topics. A small fry, Quora has 200 million regular users. 

In 2018, Quora named me a Top writer, a title no-one else has ever given me. And I have the blue ocean pretty well to myself, responding to questions about food and health. I use them as brainteasers to wake myself up in the morning. I often post my answers on Twitter and Linkedin.

I have 6600 readers a month, and 274,000 readers in all. Not exactly a bit player.

Here’s a recent item I wrote about comfort foods, one in a string of items I’ve posted to promote people-centered food policy.

See you there!

Mindful Leader
 

This is the food sector version of the thought leader. 

Back in the 1990s, when I was a regular columnist for NOW Magazine, co-owner Alice Klein had her version of a blue ocean strategy for the alternative paper with 400,000 loyal readers. She didn’t want me to compete with the dailies on news scoops, she told me. She wanted me to win with “understanding scoops.” 

Being a thought or mindful leader carries a lot of freight these days. I don’t get covered in the news when I come to speak somewhere. But I often do a thoughtful interview with a thoughtful interviewer who  gives the event a nice plug, which makes the meeting organizers feel good.

I think my interview with Dr. Sylvia Richardson on Latin Waves has some understanding scoops from both of us. The theme of the half-hour interview is that food is a “disruptive innovation” that governments can’t cope with because it needs to be approached from a “whole of government, whole of society” understanding.

This interview ran in Vancouver for two weeks before the September 20 workshop I led, and the link was included in promotional material for the workshop. People come out for understanding scoops. 

I’ll tell you about the workshop in next week’s newsletter.

Request for Action