Four things to remember when leadership feels hard.

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Four things to remember when leadership feels hard.

Leading – whether in your family, your team, community, or company – is like life: it’s hard at times.

When you decide to step up and stand for something, you open yourself up to be attacked, dismissed, criticized, silenced, and sometimes even assassinated. It is not uncommon to bear the scars from your efforts.

Leaders represent change, and with change comes loss, fear, confusion, and anger. And those brave enough to go against the crowd risk backlash. Change can make people cruel: empathy, compassion, and grace are often sacrificed when craving order. Irresponsible scapegoating of the authority figure is certainly unfair, but it comes with the territory.

Leaders are also always letting someone down. Somebody’s bound to be disappointed in decisions that are made, and stepping into leadership means shouldering the agony and aspirations of a community.

So… when leadership feels hard, here’s a few things to remember:

  1. Remember that hard comes with leadership. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would be leading. Once you understand and accept that leadership is hard, then it is no longer hard, because it no longer matters. You are on a more important mission than being comfortable.
  2. Ask yourself, “Is this a good hard or a bad hard?” Good hard means you are pursuing a worthy cause and accepting that obstacles are a predictable prerequisite. Good hard means your heart is open and you feel the pain of the people you serve. Bad hard means you have lost contact with yourself, others, and the vision.
  3. Preserve a sense of purpose. When you cannot find the inspiration and when discouragement and despair emerge (that only later are recognized as seeds of creativity) you just have to keep walking. It doesn’t have to be fast or spectaluar, but just keep stumbling forward toward the cause that you believe in.
  4. Find a life practice. To sustain your energy, every leader requires a daily practice – a habit that connects with and taps into the power of the life force that runs through us. A life practice is anything that you do over an extended period of time that consistently and reliably deepens the connection to your experience and expression of being alive.

What do you keep in mind when leadership feels hard?

Making Authenticity Real – A Leadership Checklist

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A lot of research ( e.g. Harvard Business Review and Leadership & Organization Development Journal) shows that employees’ perception of authentic leadership is the strongest predictor of job satisfaction and can have a positive impact on work-related attitudes. Most employees believe authenticity in the workplace leads to better relationships with colleagues, higher levels of trust, greater productivity, and a more positive working environment. Much of the research contains detailed definitions and lists of attributes of authentic leaders, but how do you really know if you are leading authentically?

Here is a leadership checklist to test if you are leading authentically.

  1. Are you committed enough about your leadership to ask these questions? If you are interested in asking and reflecting on these questions, you are already on the authentic journey. Authenticity isn’t a destination; it’s an inquiring and honest method of travel.
  2. Do you care? Do you care about the people around you and what matters to them? Do you care about your work? Do you care about your own growth? Do you care enough about your team to help them find their gifts? And do you care enough to put the success of the team ahead of your own career advancement?
  3. Are you open to feedback? Are you open to know how your behavior impacts those around you? To learn about your blind spots and become more self-aware? Are you committed to learn to be graceful in receiving criticism? Are you willing to get past defending yourself and pretending you have it all together?
  4. Are you honest? We understand the importance of not stealing from your organization or lying to your employees. But there is another kind of honesty: self-honesty – accepting that you aren’t perfect. Honesty is understanding your strengths and weaknesses and ensuring people on your team are needed and valued by helping to fill the gaps.
  5. Do you keep your promises? Authentic people are accountable. We call people who think they are authentic but who can’t be counted on flakes. Flakes can’t be trusted. So don’t be a flake. Earn trust by being trustworthy.
  6. Do you enjoy your life? Do you enjoy waking up in the morning and coming to work – at least most days? One way to measure good leadership is that good leaders enjoy themselves. Authenticity means you’re living a life that belongs to you, which means you’re enjoying it. And if you are enjoying it, there’s a good chance people around you are enjoying working with you and finding some fulfillment in their work.

What drives your life? A Phone or a Compass?

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It’s been said that the average person will spend up to five years of their life looking at their phone. To me, the phone represents the mountain of success we are climbing. It’s about being driven by the world’s expectations. It’s about appointments, schedules, goals, productivity, and achievements. It’s about comparing ourselves to others, developing a reputation, impression management, keeping score, and measuring up. It’s about defining ourselves by how the world defines us.

And then something unexpected happens to knock us off the mountain. We fall into the valley: a cancer scare, a struggle with addiction, the loss of a loved one, a pandemic, a bankruptcy, a divorce, some life-altering tragedy that was not part of the well-laid-out plan. You suddenly find yourself in a dark trench without the cell service of what the world expects from us. No device can take us out of this kind of terrain. It takes, instead, a surrendering to the great difficulty, allowing the pain, confusion, uncertainty, fear, and insecurity to break us open, so that a stronger, wiser, kinder, and more real person can emerge.

In this unknown territory of darkness, instead of a device, we reach for a compass, an inner guide that initiates a life journey guided by values, purpose, contribution, service, and meaning.

I know the authentic journey is not this clear cut and delineated. It’s more messy. But it’s worth pausing and asking where we are on our path to success and meaning.

What are you focused on? What is driving your life? While being driven by what the world expects and measuring up to the standards of the culture is a necessary stage, the authentic journey (what I call in my book by the same title, The Other Everest) asks us to deepen our lives, to find an inner guide beyond what a device can offer us.

Success, after all, isn’t just about height; it’s also about depth.

What is your development plan for 2023?

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As you map out your personal and leadership development plan for the coming year, it’s important to understand the difference between horizontal growth and vertical growth, between learning about leadership and true leadership development.

We live in a world of horizontal growth, a world filled with sixty second sound bites, 300-word posts (case in point), five-minute YouTube videos, twenty-minute TED talks, and audio books we listen to on the way to the office. These can be inspiring and insightful as we move “horizontally” from one insight to the next.

However, vertical growth – true leadership development – is different. Vertical growth comes from digging deeply into the layers of our character and getting to the core of who we are as a person. Vertical growth is ongoing, deep, and results in sustained self-awareness. Our culture isn’t used to digging deeply. When things get uncomfortable, we move to the next headline, the next fad, the next shiny object, or the next perspective to reinforce our viewpoint. Don’t mistake listening to an inspiring podcast with doing the deep work. Both have value and both are necessary on your authentic journey. But they are different.

You might have a plan for books to read, podcasts to listen to, or YouTube channels to subscribe to, but what will be your plan for vertical growth this year?

If you are committed to deeper vertical growth this year, check out our SAGE Forums: https://davidirvine.com/sage-forums/

Can Arrogance Be Mistaken For Confidence?

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While arrogance and confidence appear similar on the surface, there is a definitive line that divides the two. Confidence is an intrinsic value, involving inner trust, assurance, and faith in one’s ability to deal with the situation in front them. Arrogance, on the other hand, is a false sense of superiority over others that comes from an unacknowledged lack of confidence. At its extreme, arrogance can be seen as an ego-maniac with an inferiority complex. We’ve all met them. Maybe we’ve seen one in the mirror. I know I have. And when you give this person a leadership title where they can use their positional power to show everyone how insecure they are, it never ends well.

When you are truly confident, you don’t have a need to appear superior over others.

Arrogance is a coping strategy, a learned response to feel safe and powerful when you are lacking confidence. Insecurity, self-doubt, and fear are all part of being human. But when it’s not safe to acknowledge these parts of ourselves, we learn to cope in a variety of ways. One coping strategy is to cover up our insecurity with arrogance. Another is to withdraw and quit. The authentic way is to develop the self-awareness and courage to acknowledge to ourselves when we are feeling a lack of confidence and make appropriate choices to walk bravely through what we are facing. The authentic way ultimately leads to confidence and trust – both in ourselves and in those around us.

How do you view the difference between arrogance and confidence?

I come from a lineage of hand-standers.

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I come from a lineage of hand-standers. My grandfather could still do a headstand when he was 93. My father was a Canadian national gymnast in the 1940s. He used to walk around on his hands when he was 50. I didn’t think there was anything particularly unusual about this until my friends came over. They thought it was pretty cool.

I’ve continued the practice and my handstand picture was taken last year on my sixty-fifth birthday .

But it’s not the handstands that are important. It’s the impact. It’s the inspiration. Like any achievement, it’s the person you become to get there. It’s also about the connection. After coming home from the hospital recovering from Meningitis at the age of four, Dad took me to the gym, put me on the parallel bars and the ropes and the rings and the tumbling mat and worked with me to rebuild my strength. “Don’t pray for the world to get easier,” he would say. “Pray, instead, for you to get stronger.”

I remember the strength of his shoulders and quads and forearms and heart, lifting me gently up on those bars and patiently working with me as I learned forward and backward rolls. We’d get up early and do 5BX Workouts together all through my elementary school years.

Dad and I also spent time together driving thirty minutes to and from church every week. I don’t remember much of what I learned in church, but what I do remember is the conversations with him in the car on the way there and back. He taught me how to drive on those trips. I remember listening to Earl Nightingale with him on Sunday morning radio. We’d talk about what we learned and how he inspired us both to be better human beings.

Leaders create ripples in time that extend to generations yet unborn. Not just impact in the here and now, but in the here and forever.

What are you doing today to impact the life of someone in the next generation? You may not see the fruit of your labor, but keep planting the seeds.