Leadership Lessons From Nature

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The late renowned Canadian artist and my good friend, Murray Phillips, used to spend a third of his time living in the woods and painting nature. He once said, “there are no straight lines in nature.”

Nature is perfect in its imperfection. It does not struggle against the whole universe by struggling against this moment. Its acceptance is total and complete.

We can learn a lot about ourselves when we take the time to commune with nature and witness the intelligence within every living thing.

When I sit silently and watch a sunset, or listen to the sound of the ocean or a stream, or hang out with the horses – when I take the time to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n to the speed of life, I recognize beauty everywhere and find myself surrounded by pure potentiality and unbounded creativity.

Murray gifted me a sketch pad and artist’s pen, and encouraged me to take time to draw something every day. Like a journal, I never show anyone my drawings. “Artists don’t necessarily produce ‘art.’ Murray used to say. Being an artist is, instead, the way you see the world. Being an artist is about having the eyes to see things more clearly. Artistic living means seeing life more slowly. It means seeing beyond the obvious.”

Leadership starts with connecting with ourselves. Appreciating our humanity and imperfection. Letting go of the expectation of straight lines, formulas and flavors of the month management fads. People want from their leaders what they want from themselves – to be real.

Depositing Into The Trust Account

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I learned years ago from my mentor, Steve Covey, about the emotional bank account.

We all know what a financial bank account is. We make deposits into it and build up a reserve from which we can make withdrawals when we need to. An Emotional Bank Account is a metaphor describing the amount of trust built up in a relationship. If we invest in a relationship, we are bound from time to time, either knowingly or unknowingly, to make withdrawals.

The key is to be sure that you always have something in the account to withdraw from. Always be sure your deposits are more than your withdrawals.

Here’s some example of deposits:

  • Courtesy and Kindness
  • Honoring your agreements
  • Showing appreciation and recognition (in ways that are meaningful to the recipient)
  • Apologizing
  • Humility, being open to learn from others
  • Truly listening, with empathy, for their concerns, their desires, and what matters to them
  • Taking responsibility for your actions
  • Taking people for coffee

Here’s some examples of making withdrawals:

  • Discourtesy and disrespect
  • Ignoring the people in your life and the mistakes you make in your relationships
  • A lack of openness to listen or to get feedback
  • Arrogance, being closed to learning
  • Being blind to the impact your actions are having on others or the mistakes you make
  • Abuse of power
  • Blaming, complaining, and gossiping
  • Taking people for granted

I’d love to hear about how you make deposits or withdrawals into the trust account in the relationships in your life.

5 signs that you are not showing up as your authentic self.

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My purpose is to help people connect with their true nature and express it consciously in their life and work. It is my belief that we are naturally creative, compassionate, calm, committed, and capable. If you don’t experience these qualities, there’s nothing wrong with you; you are simply disconnected from your true nature.

Indicators that you’re not showing up as your authentic self:

  1. Overaccommodation. (Pleasing, permissive or indulgent.) While generosity is an obvious strength, when you’re nice all the time, you can bury a lot of feelings. Resentments, depression, irritation, impatience, irritability, insecurity, and psychosomatic illnesses can result from suppressed emotions.
  2. Disengagement. (Blaming, complaining, resisting, shutting down, passive resistance, gossiping, quit and stay.) This occurs when lacking the courage to bring yourself whole-heartedly to your work or relationships.
  3. Transaction tyranny. (Allowing the urgent demands of others to crowd out what matters most.) A close relative to overaccommodation, transaction tyranny means saying yes to everyone and everything, losing yourself in the demands of your inbox, and forgetting to attend to your most important contribution. No one wants written on their headstone, “They got all their emails returned.”
  4. Dishonesty. (Unwilling to face the truth about their life.) Unhappy with their life and hating their job, they unload their misery on people around them. Dishonesty isn’t just about stealing, lying, or fraud. It’s also about being dishonest with yourself.
  5. “Bad” Tired. (Inauthentic exhaustion.) There are two kinds of tired: “good” tired, and “bad” tired. Good tired comes from working hard and getting fulfillment from your contribution. “Bad” tired means you are depleted from taking care of the needs of others at the expense of your true self. You never fully recover from “bad” tired until you live in closer alignment with your true nature – a place that fills you rather than depletes you.

For those interested in discovering your authentic leadership, we still have a few seats available at our academy. I hope you will join us. Check us out at: https://lnkd.in/gMi2euzp

Kids, Smart Phones, and Mental Health

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If you are a parent or caregiver of a child, you will, in one way or another, deal with issues of devices, technology, and the internet. For years I have been concerned about the impact of technology on mental health, particularly on young people and it’s time for me to speak up.

To hear what researchers now know about the dangers of giving a smartphone to a child before they’re ready, I recommend Cal Newport’s podcast https://lnkd.in/gVx2SdpD

Cal is an MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University who writes about the intersections of technology, work, and the quest to find depth in an increasingly distracted world. This podcast provides a thorough history of the research on technology and kids, including how it started, evolved, adjusted to criticism, and, over the last few years, ultimately coalesced around a rough consensus.

A few interesting observations that Cal uncovered:

  • 2012 was a tipping point for technology and mental health. Since then, we have seen a significant rise in depression and anxiety among young people. 2012 was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
  • Researchers, after wrestling with the issue now for more than ten years, generally agree it is not safe to give a child unsupervised access to the internet until they are at least 16.
  • Forget about technology monitoring your child’s internet use. Kids are smart enough to find a way around security apps.
  • If you want your child to use a phone to communicate with you, give them a phone with no access to the internet.

Like Cal, I’m convinced that our culture and subsequent legislation will eventually adapt to the now undisputed research.

We don’t allow children to gamble or buy cigarettes or alcohol. Why do we allow them to have unsupervised access to the internet? Ten years from now, there won’t be much debate about what’s appropriate when it comes to kids and these technologies. Until then, however, we’re navigating this territory on our own, so the more we know, the better off we’ll be.

If you want to learn more about my approach to child raising, I hope you’ll join me in this month’s Complimentary Webinar on raising accountable kids. Everyone who attends the webinar will receive a complimentary pdf of “Raising Accountable Children .”https://lnkd.in/d37Prt4a

Are you “performing” or “expressing”?

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After being on the road the past two weeks, I’m reminded that I have some incredible clients and when I’m working with them, I inevitably learn as much as I teach.

One of my insights this past few days was the difference between “performing” and “expressing.”

One audience I was very familiar with. I had been in front of this organization many times, and the group of leaders who knew me well were introducing me to a new division of the company. They built me up to those who hadn’t heard me before and told everyone to expect “amazing things” from my presentation.

With my ego bolstered, I stood up on stage, proudly determined I was going to exceed expectations and went into a “performance” mode for my presentation. I did well, delivered a good message, and inspired the audience.

But I’m not sure I had the same kind of impact there that I did the next day with an entirely difference audience. In that presentation I acknowledged (within myself) my nervousness and fear of failure, that otherwise would have been covered up with false pride, went into my heart, and “expressed” my message – with what I felt was a deeper connection, impact, and authentic power.

I find it interesting that we call feedback in the workplace a “performance” review. What if we called it an “expression” review? What if we focused more on expression and less on performance? What if we concentrated as much on our “to be” list as we do on our “to do” list? While performance has a place, what if we realized that our most powerful impact comes from our presence, not our performance?

A Tribute To My Mother

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I found this quote in my mother’s journal: “Every parent, no matter how hard they try, will be both a blessing and a curse to their children. My hope is that my children will appreciate the blessing, if not immediately, then later in life, and perhaps more importantly, my hope is that they take the curse and, like an oyster irritated by a grain of sand, over time, use it as a catalyst to build layers of character and understanding—thus producing a pearl.”

I appreciate the blessings. As for the curses, the pearls take a little more time.

Here are some things I learned from my mother:

  1. We are meaning-making organisms. What I learned from my mother is based on my own perception – often independent of what she intended to teach me.
  2. Growth lies outside your comfort zone. Take risks and trust yourself in the midst of the unknown.
  3. Value learning. Read and study good books. Wisdom – as distinct from knowledge – is irreplaceable.
  4. Dive deeply into the experience of living. The deeper we dive the more beauty we find.
  5. Embrace uncertainty. Change and uncertainty are essential ingredients of life. By embracing uncertainty, you find security.
  6. Embracing grief opens the door to joy. My mother learned this through many losses in her life, including the death of two husbands and a still-born baby.
  7. All blame is a waste of time. Maturity doesn’t come with age. It comes with the acceptance of responsibility.
  8. Check your rage at the door. Acted out anger doesn’t build safety, trust, or connection.
  9. Don’t ask what the world can give you. Ask, instead, what you can give the world.
  10. Make your gratitude bigger than your circumstances.