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Have you been forwarded the DARE High Performance newsletter? You can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

This Week’s DARE at a Glance:

Thought Of The Week: A leader can choose emotions for the whole organisation.

Choosing your story and your emotions: In times of challenge, which story do you prefer? And which story would you prefer your people to buy into?

Book of the Week: ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martel.

My Week: London, Munich, Lisbon, Marbella and sports day!

Thought of the Week:

“You can choose your emotions of change.

A leader can choose those emotions for the whole organisation.”

Choose the Better Story.

“So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story…?”

So climaxes of the book recommended to me in 2001. Beside a pool in Tunisia that year, the book gave me the key to an upcoming presentation I was dreading.

The book was ‘Life of Pi’; the presentation: ‘Taming Tigers’.

Choose the Better Emotion.

You are not required to experience denial, anger or depression because something is changing. That’s an old story. And not the better story, if you face change.

Leaders should not hand this script to their organisations.

A better story is that navigating change is just part of your job, like navigating MS products. Perhaps change is easier, if we’re being honest?

When delivering the required Result demands a new Decision and Action: a new system, behaviour, or tactic, there is no need for grief. No need for anger or denial.

Just: “What’s required of me now to perform – to deliver my Result?”

Choose Your Story: Choose Your Emotions.

Emotions are not passive passengers. We invite them aboard.

Emotions are not ‘hardwired’. They are learned responses to what we have learned to consider as scary /a loss/ anger-inducing, etc.

They are driven by our filtered context and by our personal interpretation – and then our prediction of what is likely to happen (based on our personal context and interpretation).

If you choose the story to be loss, you will build emotions of grief, resistance and fear.

If you choose the story to be purpose, building resilience and security for the future, progress, growth and evolution - then your biochemistry (emotions) will be led to make you feel determination, excitement, and pride.

And of course: moments of anxiety, fear and doubt. Of Course! Uncertainty makes the Tiger roar. That’s adulthood. That’s why we need to be open, to be vulnerable, to have friends on the road.

Leaders: Choose a Change Story Carefully – It Will Dictate the Emotions of Your People.

How the leader frames the transformation defines the emotions experienced by the people.

Emotions create Decisions, Actions, Results and even the willingness to Evaluate.

When I am working behind closed doors to architect transformation with a CXO, we are considering this very carefully together and using all available data to help us plot the passage ahead.

What is the story? How can we equip our people to tell it to each other, to customers, to suppliers, to their teams?

Leaders need to choose their own better story: and tell it loudly.

After all: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” says Prince Hamlet.

The leader frames the thinking of many: choose the better story.

Book Jim To Speak.

What Story Will You Choose This Week?

Will you wait to ‘process your feelings’ — or will you write your own story, with new, chosen emotions, that serve your mission and those you lead?

You are the author of your internal world. Your team is watching. Your audience is listening. But your Tiger is also snarling – it always growls at change!

DARE: to Choose your better story.

Book Of The Week.

‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martel.

A shipwrecked boy on a lifeboat. He has all he needs to survive stored on board. Along with a Bengal Tiger.

Of course, he knows he will die. He is terrified. He abandons the lifeboat for a small raft tied behind. There he waits, without water, food or shelter, to discover whether the sun or the sharks will kill him first.

How can there be a different story to choose?

The most empowering book I know when it comes to understanding that we are not victims of our emotions, we are their creators, is Lisa Feldman Barrett’s extraordinary ‘How Emotions Are Made’ recommended in my Newsletter of 5 April 2025.

My Week.

Sunday  - at the heart of many communities is the pharmacy. Providing essential services, advice and reassurance with love and care. Alphega Pharmicies invited me to join their pharmacy owners on Sunday. It was a tremendous experience sharing DARE with them.

To Munich for an early start on Monday delivering the Keynote and MasterClass to open a program for senior team leaders on leading transformation and performance.

Lisbon on Tuesday to work with global energy traders as they navigate AI, Net Zero and the dawning ‘Age of Electricity’ - all disrupting one of our most critical markets.

In Marbella on Wednesday Medtronic launched Healthcast: wearable technology to support patients in hospital – measuring vital signs and predicting any trouble ahead to begin treatment before symptoms arrive.

Scarily, these measures are currently applied haphazardly or not at all (from personal experience) by nurses, and never subjected to predictive analysis. (Jim check this sentence, I had to add words)

Sports Day on Thursday. Congrats to my daughter on a year of training. Athletics is her passion (we’re off to see her hero Keely Hodgkinson race in the Diamond League on 19 July!). She got to show off her hard work in great style on the track. Definitely better than a Latin class!

To London on Friday to work with M&G Investments’ Southern African team and their clients looking at delivering – and leading – disruption and high-performance.

A weekend of friends and family has been hard-earned. I will enjoy mine – I hope you enjoy yours!

Write your story 🖋️

Jim