Hi, my name is Cath Bishop. I'm an Olympic rowing medalist,
a former diplomat, now working in leadership development,
and author of the book, “The Long Win: The Search for a Better Way to Succeed.”
These are my biggest lessons.
My first lesson is to define success on your own terms.
Too often, people define success around things that other people want;
around external results, or trophies or targets.
It's important for us to think for ourselves what really matters.
What has lasting value, when the results and the spreadsheets and the trophies have been won?
What is it that's going to be important to you at that point?
Make sure you define success around that.
My second lesson is to develop a constant learning mindset, whether things are going well,
or less well, we can always learn.
As an Olympic athlete, we would review and learn after every race, whether we won or
whether we lost, because all we wanted to do was to keep improving, keep finding ways to go faster.
It helps us to be resilient. It helps us in performance. It helps us as leaders.
We never have all the answers, and in this fast-paced world of change,
all we can do is to keep learning.
It's a lifelong journey of learning that we are all on.
My third lesson is to prioritize relationships in everything that you do, we cannot succeed alone.
So let's invest in relationships, first and foremost.
Not as something that comes at the end of the day after we've done all of the tasks we have to do,
but as the way that we do all of those tasks, through each interaction,
every meeting we have, every conversation, we have the opportunity to get to know someone,
to get to know their perspective, and to learn from them.
As a diplomat, our whole business was about negotiating,
influencing, persuading and working through relationships.
Actually, in business, in everything that we do,
we need to work to collaborate in order to explore what's possible.
We need to make sure that our priority is relationships.
Put them first, and then we will be able to explore our potential.
My fourth lesson is to avoid searching for magic formulas and to create your own.
We often have this desire to seek out a magic formula, some list,
something that's going to tell us how to achieve perfection.
But actually, it's for us to create what's right
for our family, for our teams, for our organizations, for the groups we're involved with.
Let's avoid to trying to cookie cut and put a template
onto something and actually search to find what's right, alongside those working with us.
My fifth lesson is to stay curious; to challenge the way that you think,
your mindset, the assumptions that you bring to the decisions, to the choices,
to the conversations you have every day.
Find out your biases. Challenge those assumptions that you're making along the way,
so that you can keep developing your view of the world.
Seek out others who have different views from you, and listen to them.
That's the only way that we can create an environment in which we can really
find who we are, but also allow those alongside us to find out who they are too.