Autopilot – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

The strategies that run our lives without our having chosen them

Some things you realize you’ve known all along. "When I work out in the morning, I get more done all day." "When I don’t get enough sleep, I snap at people." Nobody taught us these. We picked them up through repetition. They’re small personal laws of cause and effect: when I do this, that happens. We almost never write them down, yet they drive a good share of our results.

Some we’re clear on and use deliberately. When I prep for a meeting the night before, I walk in calm. When I keep my word, I feel better about myself. When I write down what I want to get done that week, I make more progress. Those are success strategies: lessons that, written in the present tense and stated positively, become a guide. They come straight from experience, from looking honestly at the gap between what I wanted and what I got.

Most of them, though, run on autopilot. We never give them a second thought. When I check my phone the moment I wake up, I start the day reacting. When I walk into a tough conversation hungry, I lose patience. When I say yes to keep the peace, I end the week resentful. When something goes wrong, I shut down and don’t ask for help. None of us would write these in a notebook, yet they play out like clockwork. They’re strategies like any other. We just never chose them.

Autopilot has its place. It saves energy and spares us from deciding every little thing. The trouble starts when it makes the calls that matter: how we treat people, how we handle pressure, where our time goes. You can’t change what you can’t see, and what you don’t change keeps repeating.

Making these strategies conscious is simpler than it sounds. Start with your results, the wins and the misses. When something worked, ask what you did beforehand and what you did differently. When it didn’t, ask what got in the way and which principle would have changed the outcome had you followed it. Then write it as cause and effect, in the first person and the present tense: "When I get ahead of my calendar, I choose better priorities." Putting it on paper changes something. A vague pattern becomes a choice you can make. Over time you build your own list of what works for you, and that list is worth more than any borrowed formula.

I see the same thing in my work as a coach partnering with leaders and teams. Teams have their own autopilot strategies. When the boss is in the room, nobody puts forward an idea. When something urgent comes up, the important work gets shelved. When there’s a mistake, we hunt for someone to blame first and the cause second. Nobody signed off on these rules, yet everyone follows them. Some work without anyone naming them, too: when we end every meeting with clear agreements, the week runs smoothly. A team that puts these patterns on the table can decide which to keep and which to change. Leaders carry a special responsibility here, because their habits quickly become the team’s.

In the end, it all comes back to purpose. Choosing a strategy means asking whether a given cause moves me toward where I want to go. If what I’m after is to serve, to take care of my family or to build a team that grows, I can’t leave those calls to autopilot. Owning my results starts with being aware of what produces them. I don’t get to choose every effect, but I can choose many of the causes.

Here are a few questions for this week. Which strategy do you know works for you that you’ve stopped using? Which "when I do this, that happens" keeps showing up in your life without your ever choosing it? And on your team, which unwritten rule is everyone following without having decided on it?

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. I didn’t come up with this way of writing cause and effect. I learned it at my coaching school, Success Unlimited Network, where it’s part of a much bigger game. Here’s a simple exercise: every night this week, write one cause and effect sentence about something that happened that day. By next Sunday you’ll have seven clues about how you operate.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

Linkedin