3 Mindset Shifts to Help You Achieve More Without Overworking in 2025 as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

What if your biggest achievements this year weren’t just about your actions, but the way you think?

In this episode, we dive into how shifting your mindset can unlock breakthroughs in leadership, productivity, and personal growth. Whether you’re reflecting on your wins from the past year or setting goals for the future, this episode equips you with tools to think like the leader you aspire to be.

By listening, you’ll discover:

• How adopting the mindset of your future role can help you act and grow into it today.
• Why breaking unproductive patterns is key to achieving new levels of success.
• A question to ask yourself when preparing for future goals and reflecting on past ones

Don’t miss this chance to transform the way you think about growth and leadership—press play now and start building the mindset to achieve your 2025 goals!

WHAT IS YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE? QUIZ

Want to know how to lead better? It starts by understanding your leadership style. To find out yours, take my free quiz “What Is Your Leadership Style” - you’ll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.  Just click on the link fill out your quiz and click submit.

TRANSCRIPT:

Three of my biggest lessons in 2024 and today's episode.

Welcome to The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast, the podcast, helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout, and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace.

Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And if you're on holiday now, I hope you're enjoying. And in this episode, you're going to discover a unique way of looking at your achievements for 2024. And what helped you gain them, three of my biggest lessons for 2024 and a question that will help you reflect on your biggest lessons.

And I think that these types of exercises are always helpful, whether you are at the end of 2025, or even you could do on a monthly basis. It's good to stop and reflect and pause and learn from how far we've come. And think about how we intentionally want to move forward.

A lot of times we just go from month to month, year to year, and we don't always think about what are the things that are really helping us achieve what we want and what are not. So a few of my achievements that I'm more proud of for 2024. I was launching a new course called "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader". It's been very successful.

I've been able to help multiple leaders save four hours or more a week on their time and also learn how to empower their teams. So it's really a win, win, and it's so fun to see the impact that my students are having because of this course. And the other big achievement was this podcast and closing the old one at 300 episodes aid for aid workers leadership podcast,

and now transitioning to this one because I knew I needed a fresh start, a lot to say, and so much had changed since I started doing all of this, that I thought it was necessary. I also trained over a hundred people in what was initially the coach approach leadership style course, but now has become the new course "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader". And I launched a new course with an organization that I am helping to create a coaching culture and it was a huge hit, a huge success. They're seeing their leaders really, Empower their teams to take more responsibility. They're seeing their leaders become more empathetic and, just have more trusting relationships with their teams.

And it's just a really, really exciting time. So those are probably the major achievements of 2024 for me. And I encourage you to think about what are your major achievements for 2024? But I also like to think about in order to achieve these things who I had to be. How did my identity change? And what did I have to do and think and feel differently? And one of the things that I teach in the newest course "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader" is cognitive behavior theory. And in cognitive behavior theory, we learn that it is our thoughts or our mindset that creates our feelings, our actions, and our results. And therefore everything ties back to our perspective, our mindset, our beliefs. Everything starts with the way we think about something.

And from there we feel a certain way. We act from that feeling and then we get a certain result. So that means any result that you have, including your achievements for 2024, were achieved because of the way you are thinking. Which therefore led to a certain emotion and action and that result. So that's why I chose for my reflection to look at what were some of the more helpful thoughts?

And this is what my three lessons learned are for 2024, I'm going to share what I think are three of the most helpful ways of thinking that helps me achieve what I did. So the first one is asking myself, what would I CEO do? Now, I know you're not a CEO. I know your situation's a little different from mine, but I'm going to explain how it can relate to you. But just to say that for me, because now I have my own business. I am essentially a CEO.

And even though I don't always feel that way, that is my goal is to step into that role and to become a CEO that can lead a small company. So when I think about who I want to be, it's a CEO. I want to be more like a CEO. And so asking myself, "what would a CEO do" helps me to think if I was a CEO, I would do this."

for example, one thing that's really helped me is to think if I'm having, a, a problem come up in my business, like for example, I'm reaching out to someone and they're not responding rather than taking that and having a story around how they're too busy or they don't like me, or maybe they just are ignoring my emails or whatever. I turn it into a process like as a CEO. My process is I try three times and if they don't respond after three times, then I stop. So, rather than putting all this emotion and guesswork behind what are they thinking and why aren't they responding to me?

"I decide, okay, this is my process. Three times I reach out if they haven't reached out or they haven't responded after that, then fine." So, how does this help you? Well, I think in your case, maybe you could think about what is the position you hope to achieve, for example, Head of Programs or country representative or a program manager or a deputy country manager, whatever it is. And think about what would they do in a certain situation or if you have a problem, come up, for example, someone in the government who is not responding to your meeting invites? Maybe rather than making all a story about why that is and what it means for your relationship and whatever you can just decide " I'm going to send them three emails after if they don't respond to that I'll send them a letter. And if they don't respond to that, I'll send someone over in person." this is the process we go through when communication is not being responded to. And so it becomes less of " let me guess what to do next" and all this emotion behind it and more of a thought like, "okay, as a head of programs that I hope to be, or a country representative or whatever this is the way that they would do this. I would start with this process. Then I go to this process. Then I go to that process. It takes all the emotion and the guesswork behind it out. And then you just following your process.

And so to me that was so helpful because a lot of times I was like, "Ooh, should I respond? Should I not? I don't know. Maybe I'm bothering them." And I'm using this particular example of communication, but it could be many other things as well. It's helped me in many, many other areas. So thinking about your process rather than looking at something us like somebody isn't responding or, or they're not reacting the way that I want them to.

And therefore it means this just decide, "okay when this happens, this is what I do". Just like I would, if I was, Head of programs or a country representative or the regional director for my organization, whatever this way of thinking of what would a CEO do, or what would a blank do? Will allow you to start to think and act like that role and therefore you will start becoming that role. And I feel like that helped me a lot over this year. As a CEO, I am doing this and that helped me, take a lot of the guesswork and emotion out of making decisions.

The second thought I want to share with you all is if you do the same thing You will get the same result.

And I know this sounds really obvious and it's a lesson that I tend to have to learn over and over and over in different areas. And this particular instant it has to do with every time I launch my course, at least over the last year, I would reach out to the same group of people. And so I would always get the same result.

Like about the same number of people would sign up, about the same number of people would respond. But I wasn't growing that list. And so I was expecting that over time I would gain more and more people in the course. I think I was thinking that just by just, just naturally it would grow that way, but because I was doing the same thing over and over again, which was just reaching out to the same list over and over, it actually was just creating the same result. And so I wonder if there's any area in your work that you might be doing this? Maybe it has to do with, when you're writing a proposal. Maybe you keep writing essentially the same or proposal to different donors and you keep getting rejected. Or maybe you are engaging with a colleague in the same way every time you see them, you feel some kind of strong negative emotion. And that influences the way we act. Right? Like I said, your actions will come from your feelings. And so maybe that creates a certain way of interacting with them. That's a pattern for you. But taking a step back and looking at those patterns and, in this case. In terms of achieving what I wanted

I had to break that pattern. Like, instead of doing the same thing I had to decide, okay, let me try something different. Let me broaden my reach. And it looks like for 2025, I will be able to broaden my reach. I have an exciting announcement that's coming soon. But I think that will help me to create a bigger result. And because I was just trying the same thing over and over again, I was just creating the same result over and over again. And it sounds so obvious, but it is definitely something that I've had to learn.

And the third thought that was really important for me in 2025 is the way that you got there is the way you will be there. And so, for example, if you're late to meetings now, Then, if you don't change anything and the only thing that changes is that you gain responsibility,

for example, maybe you get promoted, maybe you get another direct report, whatever. And nothing else changes. You're just going to probably keep doing the same thing. Right? But at a bigger scale, If you are unorganized or you're not good at time management and you start taking on more responsibility it's just going to get worse and worse.

And if you hustle, in other words, you work really, really hard and long hours, in order to get promoted or to achieve something, once you achieve that thing, you're not going to have overcome that hustle or the ability to organize your time or whatever it is.

So being aware of the habits that you have, which are not helping you, or will not help you as you gain more responsibility. Fix those things now, before you go to the next level. So for me, It's been putting some of these processes in place. For example, every time we have a launch for the course, we have a certain amount of emails and every time I go back through my emails and I pull them out and I have to look for them and I spend time doing that. So of course, if we keep growing, if I don't change anything, I'm just going to keep doing the same thing.

Right? And there's going to be the same result. Like me spending an hour looking for emails. But instead of doing that, I realized, okay, I need to pull all of this together to put in one place and fix it now so that as I grow, as I gain more responsibility, that that system, or that process will be there. So that it will make things easier for me and for the people I work with.

So I'm sure that you probably have something like that, whether it's time management or, Learning how to do something more efficiently or working long hours or having a habit of perfectionism, all those things you're going to carry with you as you grow, unless you start changing your behavior now. And that's why it really pays to change your behavior first. Before you gain more responsibility and you carry those things with you. So I encourage you to think about that as well.

So we start with looking at our thoughts, what are the thoughts that are helping us, what are not? And then let's see what you want to keep and what you want to change.

Based on all of this, the question you can ask yourself moving forward when you're looking at your own achievements is: "what beliefs or thoughts helps me to grow this year?" what beliefs or thoughts helped me to grow this year?

So I just shared three that helped me to grow. And thinking about this question can really help you to. Be more intentional about continuing to create or to think those thoughts. So once again, my thoughts were: what would a CEO do? Number two, if you do the same thing, you'll get the same result. And then number three, if you hustle to get there, you will stay in the hustle when you arrived there.

Okay. So that's it. Those are the lessons learned and I hope that's helpful for you.

And I hope you have a wonderful new year and holiday season and until then keep evolving bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do? Or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is the first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz "what is your leadership style?" You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will thank you for it!