Podcast EP 113 | "Think Time" is the Only Way to Become More Strategic

In order to become more strate­gic and more effec­tive, lead­ers should aim for more think time. But mak­ing it hap­pen is hard. So we need to find more time for think­ing, ver­sus just tac­ti­cal­ly working.

Because if you don’t have enough think­ing time, you end up with your head in the day-to-day prob­lems, which leads to short term, urgent issues being resolved, but the longer-term impor­tant things not get­ting impor­tant attention.

The point is — if you want to be a strate­gic leader, you’ve got to have think­ing time and you’ve got to know how much val­ue that brings to you.

In this episode of the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast, Kevin Lawrence and Brad Giles dis­cuss six things to ensure you can opti­mize your think­ing time.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast. Where every­thing we talk about is about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. I’m Kevin Lawrence. We’re actu­al­ly 113 episodes as of today, with my co host, Brad Giles, Down Under in Perth, Aus­tralia, Brad, how are you today?

Brad Giles 00:41

Love­ly, thank you doing very well, how are you? Good as always?

Kevin Lawrence 00:45

Yeah, absolute­ly. And by the way, before we get into the show today, if you haven’t sub­scribed, please hit that sub­scribe but­ton. And if you kin­da like what you hear, hap­py for you to give us a rat­ing as well. So Brad, what are we dig­ging into today? What is the top­ic of the day?

Brad Giles 01:03

Today we’re talk­ing about think time, that is tak­ing the time pur­pose­ful­ly, to think to step out of the day to day, all the busy-ness and to be able to think and we call it think time, the only way to real­ly be strategic.

Kevin Lawrence 01:22

Think time, take the time to think, it’s very sim­ple. And often for a lot of peo­ple hard to do. And we’ve seen a big dif­fer­ence in the CEOs that we work with actu­al­ly had a real­ly inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with one of the CEOs that I worked with about this, and he came back with a bril­liant answer, which we’ll talk about in a bit. All right. So let’s get into it. And what’s your wheel word of the day? Brad, what’s your word?

Brad Giles 01:49

It’s know your cus­tomers. It’s a phrase, not a word. But a few weeks ago, we had an elec­tion in Aus­tralia, the gov­ern­ment was vot­ed out. And with­out get­ting into it. Every­one, a lot of peo­ple were real­ly shocked. And the anal­o­gy, the anal­o­gy for me was Do you know your cus­tomers? Because you should­n’t be shocked when things hap­pen? Like that gov­ern­ment that was vot­ed out. They should­n’t be shocked at the at at the reac­tion of the elec­torate. And there’s been end­less arti­cles writ­ten about why and how did it hap­pen and so forth. But you should as a leader, you should nev­er be in that sit­u­a­tion. Now, your cus­tomers, what about yours?

Kevin Lawrence 02:32

Awe­some antic­i­pa­tion. Antic­i­pa­tion. And it’s in a sim­i­lar per­spec­tive, actu­al­ly, just quick­ly, on a break, you got a call from my son telling us about a new piece of leg­is­la­tion that our gov­ern­ment is try­ing to jam through. And you can tell that they have been wait­ing to jam this piece of leg­is­la­tion through until some relief, some­thing bad hap­pened in the world that would be a cat­a­lyst and got a lot of pub­lic sup­port. I mean, kudos to the gov­ern­ment. They got this stuff all ready to rock and they’re just wait­ing for the oppor­tune time. They’re antic­i­pat­ing just the right moment to drop it. Drop the mic, change the laws, and change the coun­try for­ev­er, bet­ter or worse, depend­ing on your opin­ion. So know your cus­tomers, and antic­i­pate their behav­iors. So you can influ­ence them the way you want to. All right, so let’s jump in today think time. I mean, this is a top­ic that we’re very pas­sion­ate on. I’ll share our sto­ry. So this CEO who was awe­some CEO, in a coun­try in the south­ern hemi­sphere, I will say, and we’re hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion, and I call that about being a strate­gic CEO, I think there’s many dif­fer­ent types. There’s tac­ti­cal, boss, CEOs, there’s oper­a­tional CEOs, and then there’s real strate­gic CEOs. And I call strate­gic CEOs, big see CEOs, and tac­ti­cal ones, lit­tle see CEOs, and it’s not well, it’s it depends on your stage of busi­ness and where you’re at, but tru­ly to be a CEO of a busi­ness that’s going to sus­tain and endure, you need a fair amount of big see on the big C CEO and that’s a lot of con­tem­pla­tion, and so on being a strate­gic, real strate­gic CEO look­ing out at the future of where you’re going, and you’re going to be ver­sus where you are in the fires of the day. And so the CEO we came up with the ques­tion is how do I be a bet­ter strate­gic CEO? So he talked to lots of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. And when he came back and I’ve got it writ­ten on my wall because it was so com­pli­cat­ed. Let me grab it. Let me grab it. It’s not just CEOs, it’s lead­ers too. And here it is. And Kev­in’s beau­ti­ful writ­ing isn’t reversed. Think time equals a strate­gic leader. So think time is the num­ber one vari­able that he came back with from his research, and from what we’ve seen in our work with CEOs is the real dri­ver of being a true strate­gic Big C, or strate­gic CEO. So that’s it’s obvi­ous­ly crit­i­cal. And and it’s just damn hard. Like, it’s real­ly hard because of all the dai­ly fires, the dai­ly dra­ma, The 75 cent prob­lems all come up, and they keep your real busy and keep you from your high val­ue strate­gic thing time.

Brad Giles 05:30

I love Stephen Cov­ey Sev­en Habits of High­ly Effec­tive Peo­ple. And in that he has the time man­age­ment matrix. And most peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in busi­ness, get drawn towards the things that are impor­tant and urgent. And the job to be done for a CEO is to tra­verse that and spend most of your time in the area, which is things that are impor­tant, but not urgent. And part of that is this thing time that we’re talk­ing about.

Kevin Lawrence 06:05

So maybe that’s the answer would just say to your­self, impor­tant, not urgent, like 10 times a day, and maybe you’ll mag­i­cal­ly do it.

Brad Giles 06:14

But if that’s Kev­in’s advice, not mine there.

Kevin Lawrence 06:17

Well, if that does­n’t work, we got a whole bunch of oth­er good things. And like Brad and I nor­mal­ly do, what do we got here, we got six real good things you can do to be a more strate­gic CEO or leader, and real­ly mas­ter mas­ter­ing of your think time. In par­tic­u­lar, and the main thing is that, if you don’t do enough of the thing time, he gets sucked into the day to day. And it’s it’s damn inter­est­ing. There’s dra­ma, there’s prob­lems, there’s upset cus­tomers, under­per­form­ing employ­ees, all that kind of stuff. And you just get sucked in if you’re not care­ful. I mean, I look at a strate­gic CEO is like eyes up, eyes up look­ing at the future. And if you’re not capa­ble, the envi­ron­ment will pull you back down to the ground as before, you’re look­ing at your toes, like what’s hap­pen­ing in the next 30 sec­onds. And obvi­ous­ly, you can’t do your best work there. That’s not your job.

Brad Giles 07:15

I remem­ber when I had a larg­er busi­ness, I’d walk into the office back from the meet­ing. And they’d be like, 17, peo­ple would look back over their work­sta­tion and see that I’m back. And they’d be like, Oh, he’s back, I can grab him. And I don’t know, what­ev­er the prob­lem was, I man­aged to work that out. But yeah, you can get dragged into the minu­ti­ae all the time.

Kevin Lawrence 07:41

Yeah. And even in our firm, and again, we’re a small bou­tique firm. But in our firm, I don’t have a lot of that, because most of the team is very strong and inde­pen­dent. I mean, we have an obses­sion with only hir­ing A play­ers in our firm. But my chal­lenge is, I am also very busy. I’m going here, I’m going there. And I’ve got lots of inter­ests out­side of work. And, you know, teenage kids and I have got so many things going on, just mak­ing the time to think is hard­er. In my case, even though it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly my team pulling me so much. It’s me, usu­al­ly is the biggest cul­prit. But no mat­ter what the whole idea here is think time is very, very rich, valu­able time and a crit­i­cal part of our rules.

Brad Giles 08:27

I want to frame it this way, in terms of our bod­ies. In terms of our bod­ies, we need to sleep every day. Again, we need to recharge, recu­per­ate, and recov­er. So think­ing for the CEO, exec and lead­ers, it’s like con­scious sleep. So it recharges your mind it gets you to be able to think in dif­fer­ent ways. And to be able to spend the time yeah, in that impor­tant and not urgent area. So think about it like con­scious sleep.

Kevin Lawrence 09:04

It’s ther­a­peu­tic. And it’s real­ly doing your job of lead­ing the firm and think­ing about where you’re going. And if you want to con­tin­ue to grow, it’s, it’s required. So you got six points. And, you know, some­times I like sev­en, but six is good for today. So the biggest thing with your think time is, is to real­ly pick the top­ic, like what, what is the ques­tion that you want to call the com­pelling ques­tion that you’re try­ing to get the answer to, and ide­al­ly, it’s one of your high­est val­ue oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s the thing that’s going to make a dif­fer­ence to your busi­ness, you know, whether it’s a mil­lion or mil­lions or 10s of mil­lions, like a real­ly big, you know, oppor­tu­ni­ty that could real­ly have a mas­sive pos­i­tive impact and scale your busi­ness. And, and I mean, obvi­ous­ly we have to deal with tough prob­lems and process prob­lems. But I would also say is that Be care­ful of stick­ing to prob­lems too long, because you know, you’re going to be star­ing at your shoes ver­sus look­ing at the hori­zon. Yeah, it’s impor­tant to be think­ing about the things that make a mas­sive difference.

Brad Giles 10:16

And that might just come to mind that might be there. This is the thing that’s on my mind. But actu­al­ly spend­ing a moment to think what is it that I want to use this valu­able time for does mat­ter? And I guess the sec­ond point is it some peo­ple won’t want to do that some peo­ple, they will be just like, I just want to clear my mind, and then see what sort of flows into my mind from there. And that’s okay. If you want to start freestyle, by the point being, either con­scious­ly pick a top­ic or know that you’re not con­scious­ly going to pick a topic.

Kevin Lawrence 10:52

Yeah, both works, depend­ing. So for exam­ple, I did a bunch of this on Sat­ur­day morn­ing. And I like my pref­er­ence is to sit and go freestyle and allow myself to go and I often do a lot of this through writ­ing, is to write one of my process is writ­ing, weath­ers col­lab­o­ra­tion. But as writ­ing as much as I want, and flush­ing out all kinds of things. My, my, my din­ing table was cov­ered in stuff that I had writ­ten on, because I did a bunch of it on paper this time instead of dig­i­tal­ly. But then I always go back to my goals and pick some­thing off my goals. Soon, I’m going to solve three or four lit­tle things. But then I go back to my goals and fair, what can I do to make a big impact on my goals, because that’s the that’s the stuff that mat­ters most again, how­ev­er you do it, I often, some­times I can do it in a few min­utes, or, or a big chunk of hours, which we’ll talk about next, which is num­ber two. So num­ber one, pick the top­ic, or decide that you’re gonna go freestyle to set the time. And this is this is real­ly the clinch­er here where, for most peo­ple, they don’t find a way to real­ly make the time and stick to it, they might plan for it. And, you know, Bill Gates was famous for his think weeks, which became two weeks where he goes away for a week, every year and do this. And I know a num­ber of peo­ple that use that strat­e­gy. Some peo­ple do it quar­ter­ly, some month­ly, some­body, every­one’s got rhythms. But it’s inter­est­ing, just like artists, it actu­al­ly is a dis­ci­pline. There’s a great book, a mem­ber, the name of it, it’s all it might be how artists work, I think is the book. And as fast as you think of these artists of these cre­ative, free flow­ing thing that work on inspi­ra­tion. far­thest from the truth, all the artists you’ve heard about writ­ers, painters, sculp­tors, poets, hold them have one thing in com­mon, freak­ish, dai­ly grind, dis­ci­pline, like must write 1000 words today, must paint for hours today. Now, they might go intox­i­cate them­selves and do all kinds of weird things to their minds, which many of them did. But it was all a in cred­i­ble dis­ci­pline, noth­ing at all was left to a whim.

Brad Giles 13:06

Yeah, yeah. And you got to pro­tect that like it. There is a com­pe­ti­tion every day for your cal­en­dar, there is a lot of peo­ple inside and out­side the busi­ness who always want your time. And so hav­ing the abil­i­ty to pro­tect it and say, this is a no go zone, unless the build­ing is on fire type of thing is what mat­ters. I mean, for me, when I got myself an EA a while ago, I said to her, the first thing is, every day in the morn­ing, I’m going to exer­cise and that’s that sacred time, like we can’t breach that. You know, or put it this way, break in case of emer­gency. Like, we’ve got to pro­tect that. That’s where I do my thinking.

Kevin Lawrence 13:55

Yeah, and some peo­ple have that around exer­cise and not think­ing some peo­ple think that not so the point of it is you’ve got to find a way to do it. And that you know, and one of the pieces there is account­abil­i­ty. How can you set up some account­abil­i­ty on that, we’ll talk more about that lat­er. So num­ber two, find a time but it needs to be sched­uled, it’s not like­ly to hap­pen on a whim. Most things that are impor­tant don’t hap­pen on a whim. A third know what you need like I ref­er­enced how I write a lot to think that is my Puri­tan will too and I like to col­lab­o­rate. Some peo­ple they’re think­ing requires learn­ing like they go seek out knowl­edge. Every­one’s got dif­fer­ent ways, but there’s a way that your brain works and comes up with the solu­tions that you need or the insight or the clar­i­ty so know what you real­ly need to be suc­cess­ful. So if it’s con­tem­plat­ing like as a big part of mine, you know, then think about well, what do we have to do? How do I need to set myself up like you touched on exer­cise For me to do con­tem­pla­tion, I need to exer­cise first, I get ground­ed, my body calms down, my mind set­tles and I do bril­liant think­ing. And ide­al­ly for me in the morning.

Brad Giles 15:12

We know that Bill Gates used to go away for a full week. And he would take a stack of books, and he would get peo­ple with­in the busi­ness to write reports on cer­tain sub­jects. He’d go away to the coun­try­side, in a lit­tle cab­in, just by him­self for the whole week, and he would read all the books and do all of that. Now, that worked for him, that may not work for you.

Kevin Lawrence 15:33

I could­n’t do that I would not go sit by myself. And read, I would­n’t say nev­er. But again, every­one’s got it, it does­n’t real­ly mat­ter what it is, fig­ure out what works.

Brad Giles 15:42

He fig­ured what works for him. And that’s and that’s, that’s good. That’s good. Yeah, so. So for some peo­ple, it’s going to be learn­ing or part of a learn­ing event. So there’s, there’s obvi­ous­ly get­aways or retreats or learn­ing events that you can go to. We used to go to some sev­er­al years ago. And so that could it could form a part of that it could become a part of some­thing else. And then if that is your case, that you want to learn, as well as the think­ing depend­ing on the rhythm, if it’s dai­ly, week­ly, quar­ter­ly, annu­al­ly, you know, pick your sub­jects care­ful­ly based on the trends, obser­va­tions, that con­cerns the oppor­tu­ni­ties that you’re see­ing in the busi­ness. Mov­ing on to num­ber four, set the envi­ron­ment, do not dis­turb the worst thing you can do when you want to think is have a con­stant beep in the back ground, which is your emails com­ing in, or your SMS or what­ev­er that might be? Some peo­ple like music or med­i­tat­ing, and I men­tioned run­ning. But it’s a dis­ci­plined around know­ing this is where I do my best thinking.

Kevin Lawrence 16:59

Yeah. And it’s again, it’s not rock­et sci­ence. But how do you set up that envi­ron­ment to work for you? So obvi­ous­ly can’t get dis­tract­ed, dis­tract­ed? Some­times, like, I often will like to col­lab­o­rate with peo­ple, I’ll want to sit and work with some­body else on it. It’s like, you know, Brad and I, we come up with some awe­some stuff col­lab­o­rat­ing on his pod­cast, which is mul­ti­ple times bet­ter than it would be on my own. And I don’t know if that’s true for you, but I’m sure true for me. Yeah. And then the oth­er piece, the envi­ron­ment is the account­abil­i­ty, like you know, whether it’s your EA, your fam­i­ly mem­ber or col­league, you know, some­times I’ve been in envi­ron­ments, this goes back to the old days in col­lege and your study, bud­dy, you might have an active study group, and you might just sit there and read the damn stuff. But how do you set up an envi­ron­ment that is a cat­a­lyst for you to do your best? It was inter­est­ing. I think I men­tioned this on a pre­vi­ous show. But I was up at the race­track and ran into a guy I’d giv­en a book to and he talked about lick­ing your toads. And his solu­tion was he did­n’t eat in the morn­ing until he licked his totes. So how could you set up a self dis­ci­pline to cal­i­brate that you don’t do some­thing or you wait for some­thing until you do your most impor­tant thing. So what­ev­er it is, set the envi­ron­ment, set your­self up to win. And, you know, some peo­ple might need to orga­nize their office first, or who knows what or, you know, vac­u­um or take out the garbage. Every­one’s got their dif­fer­ent things. So So that’s num­ber five is just some inter­est­ing things that we’ve seen peo­ple do like holy. So when I inter­viewed CEOs for scal­ing up, I heard all kinds of things. You know, some peo­ple had us a rhythm on Sun­day morn­ings, some peo­ple would go for a walk or a run, or a bike ride, there was a cou­ple guys that would do a brain­storm­ing on a bike ride. That was their solu­tion. You know, rid­ing is some­thing that I’ve talked about. Some peo­ple would be there, EO or YPO, or what­ev­er the forum they’re in, that was a real cat­a­lyst for them to get acti­vate ideas. Once CEO inter­viewed had one of the best ones, and I res­onat­ed with us the most, he would go and attend a two day con­fer­ence and one of those, you know, 14 speak­ers over two days. Yeah. And he did his best work, because he did­n’t pay atten­tion to the speak­ers. He tuned in when it was rel­e­vant. And he just worked on his stuff the rest of the time. And, that works for me. Because there’s noise around me, which enables me to focus bet­ter because of how my brain works. And that was his thing that was his best. And this guy, you know, built the busi­ness over very, you know, not an incred­i­bly long time sold it for half a mil­lion dol­lars, have a bil­lion cer­tain dol­lars. But he would just be at the con­fer­ence. And all that stuff in the back­ground is you know, stand­ing think­ing, going to meet their men­tor. Anoth­er guy talked about how he would go and meet his men­tor on his yacht, like twice a year. And while he was trav­el­ing, to go in Meet his men­tor. It forced him to pre­pare to make damn good use of the men­tor’s time. Anoth­er CEO, I know does what calls 24 calls and might be 14, when they have a ques­tion. They lit­er­al­ly just call a whole bunch of dif­fer­ent peo­ple to help them think it through peo­ple that might have had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences, long flights, those peo­ple I know, they’ll book flights to Van­cou­ver to Toron­to and back, Van­cou­ver to Tokyo and back. Just cost effec­tive busi­ness class flights.

Brad Giles 20:33

And then the prob­lem with long flights is that I think we’ve all been there. And what I mean is, we’ve all thought, oh, great, I’m gonna get a lot of work done on this flight. But you know, we can be bet­ter than that. And that bet­ter than that means we can be more dis­ci­plined in our approach, you should­n’t need to get on a flight to pro­duce work, you should be able to find your abil­i­ty to step out of your envi­ron­ment, and cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where you can do good work.

Kevin Lawrence 21:08

But that isn’t an envi­ron­ment. I know, I’m on the oth­er side. Like, I think it’s bril­liant. Like if you’ve got high val­ue crit­i­cal work, I mean, I love 14 hour flights through like the past, I get so much done. And because I have a hard time some­times get­ting it done in oth­er places. So I need either I need a dead­line or an envi­ron­ment like that. So I don’t know. I think it’s awe­some. And but you might by nature be a more dis­ci­plined human, Mr. Jobs?

Brad Giles 21:37

Look, I would­n’t go that far. I like the next one that you’re gonna say, which is about talk­ing to your dog? Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 21:47

Yeah. So one of the guys I inter­viewed, he says, he goes for a walk. And he talks his prob­lems through and his ideas through with his dog, when he says it’s, it works. As he’s just talk­ing about, obvi­ous­ly, the dog does­n’t answer, or at least he did­n’t admit that the dog answered. But the point of it is, it does­n’t mat­ter what the heck you do, as long as it works, and just be open to dif­fer­ent things that gets your mind is that cre­ative think­ing space, where you’re com­ing up with great stuff?

Brad Giles 22:15

Yeah, I think like my per­spec­tive is that and we may get a bit too deep, too quick here. But my per­spec­tive is that we make deci­sions in our sub­con­scious, and not our con­scious, okay, so the more that we can curate an envi­ron­ment where the sub­con­scious can process, then the bet­ter the deci­sions that will make. So if you are always in our high­ly demand­ing envi­ron­ment, putting out fires with your team, or, or try­ing to solve rapid fire, you were real­ly just react­ing to the sit­u­a­tion as it sits, when you can step out of that. And let your sub­con­scious do its mag­ic. Through, you know, the exam­ples we’ve pro­vid­ed, exer­cise, walk­ing con­fer­ences, what­ev­er it is, that’s when you can real­ly do some seri­ous cog­ni­tive pro­cess­ing to make some great progress. I agree.

Kevin Lawrence 23:15

And many of these things are ways of acti­vat­ing that. I believe, like, for me, when I write, it goes, like It shocks me when I write what comes out. It’s so sim­ple and so clear. But it because it gets me into a cer­tain state where it’s where I’m access­ing and acti­vat­ing dif­fer­ent things. Then in the day to day, fire­fight­ing busy­ness and tru­ly, the one sound ego­tis­ti­cal. I feel like I’m like three times as smart when I’m writ­ing and I get into that state. What it real­ly means is I’m a third as smart normally.

Brad Giles 23:50

Well, that’s the flow state.

Kevin Lawrence 23:52

It is it absolute­ly is. So the final thing is like, Okay, that’s all won­der­ful now how to get the val­ue from it. So what­ev­er you’re doing, and I’ve seen lots of CEOs or lead­ers have lit­tle notepads to write key things down in or on their phone, or some have mem­o­ries where they just remem­ber that stuff. But some­how it needs the high­est val­ue stuff needs to be actioned. And you know, to quote Jim Collins, you said your first ques­tion should always be a who ques­tion. When it’s time to acti­vate it, who is the WHO that will help you to get it done. And whether it’s evolv­ing the idea or just full on test­ing or imple­ment­ing it you?

Brad Giles 24:36

The rea­son that you need to do it is to get val­ue from it. And so what is the way that you will get val­ue from it? You’ve got to be con­scious about that deci­sion as well to fig­ure out what works, but once you fig­ure out what works like rinse and repeat, keep putting it into your cal­en­dar and then there may be dif­fer­ent time­frames. For exam­ple, every The day you might have 30 min­utes every week, you might have an hour or two. Every quar­ter, you might have a day and every year you might have, you know, a week or a mul­ti­ple days. There’s some­thing that’ll work for you. But over­all, I guess the point is that that suc­cess comes from think­ing was that the quote that you see gave you kept?

Kevin Lawrence 25:21

It was think time equals a strate­gic leader. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was very close. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just think you and I should actu­al­ly book our annu­al things on we get the reg­u­lar title stuff. We talked about get­ting togeth­er and doing it. That’s a whole sidebar.

Brad Giles 25:38

Yeah, that’s prob­a­bly some­thing good to talk about off air.

Kevin Lawrence 25:41

Yeah, exact­ly. We will. We’re gonna get into it right now. And it just sure was. So the point, the point of it is, if we go back and review our points, I’ll do the first cou­ple here. The main point is if your route you need think time to tru­ly be strate­gic, and the most effec­tive ver­sion of your­self as a CEO, or a leader, or even as a par­ent, or what­ev­er it hap­pens, a part­ner. So the idea is, you got to find a way to cre­ate the time so pick the top­ic, make the time and then pro­tect it fierce­ly, and then know what you need out of it? And is it con­tem­plat­ing a learn­ing or brain­storm­ing? And then Brad, you want to cov­er off the oth­er ones? Yeah.

Brad Giles 26:23

So once you’ve set the envi­ron­ment, you want to under­stand, like what’s going to work for you, for a lot of peo­ple it’s exer­cise. It could be meet­ing your men­tor, it could be con­fer­ences, some peo­ple who are at a dif­fer­ent lev­el might like long flights, maybe you could do bet­ter than that. And then make sure that you’re get­ting val­ue from it, make sure that it’s work­ing. But over­all, the point is, if you want to be a strate­gic leader, you’ve got to have think time, you’ve got to know that the impor­tance of think­ing time and how much val­ue that brings to you. So with that good chat today — thanks for lis­ten­ing. As Kevin said ear­li­er, if you’ve enjoyed the episode, please sub­scribe and hit that like but­ton or Review but­ton if you can. This has been the growth whis­per­ers I’m Brad Giles in Perth, Aus­tralia. Kevin Lawrence is in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da. You can find myself at evo­lu­tion part­ners dot Com and my newslet­ter and you can find Kevin and his newslet­ter at Lawrence and co​.com. Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. Look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week.