Tag Archive for: authenticity

Four things to remember when leadership feels hard.

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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?

I grew up when the work ethic was so strong that talking to others and enjoying yourself at work meant you were wasting time.

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Friendships in the workplace were seen as distractions.

But recent Gallup data indicates that having a best friend at work actually improves employee performance and motivation and is strongly linked to business outcomes, including profitability, safety, inventory control and retention. Employees who have a best friend at work are significantly more likely to engage customers and internal partners and get more done in less time.

Good leaders not only encourage friendships among employees, but also help facilitate them.

Here are three ways leaders can foster friendships in their organization – i.e. build friendful cultures.

  1. Make friendship a company value. Make friendships at work a priority. Be explicit. Be intentional. Talk about what it’s important and what it means to you. Ask what it means to others and respect each others’ expectations and degree of openess. For some, being “friendly” with each other will be enough. Emphasize that friendships have to happen “organically.” They can’t be forced.
  2. Establish rituals. Create regular team learning and team building events – experiences that foster collaboration and friendships. Our team went fly fishing on the Bow River last fall – an amazing experience. A client has a bucket list bulletin board in their coffee room. Everyone in the company is encouraged to have a bucket list, and every time they accomplish something on their list, they post a picture of it on the board and tell the story at the next team meeting.
  3. Practice Heartfulness. Heartfulness means knowing what you love and being supported and encouraged to go for it. Schedule a regular time to share each other’s stories. Heartfulness means ensuring that everyone knows that they belong. Make time to ask: What do you love? What do you care about? How does your work here help you take care of what you care about? How can we support you to do that better? What is your WHY and how can we support you to realize it? I’m at my best when…

In the past we would just tell people to do their job and expect that it got done. Those days are gone, thankfully.

People expect much more from their leaders today and that is a good thing.

Just as we need to expect more from ourselves in what we bring to the cultures we work in.

Tending a friendful culture isn’t just good for people and for relationships. It’s good for business.

The Call To Citizenship

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In the very early months of WWII, my father excitedly rushed to enlist at the first opportunity. However, upon the discovery of his poor eyesight, he was declined. Unable to go to war, he returned to his work as a youth leader on the inner streets in Calgary. Forty-five years later, if asked about being unable to serve his country in the war efforts, he would tear up, still too upset to talk it.

Dad’s understanding of citizenship went beyond the conventional, limited definition concerning the act of voting and upholding the constitution and laws of a country. Whether he was scolding me for self-centeredness, picking up trash when we walked through a park, or volunteering to help the homeless in our community, my father understood citizenship from the scope of one’s civic duty to their community, whether a city block, a nation, or the world.

Here’s a few strategies to respond to the call to citizenship. What are yours?

  1. Roll up your sleeves. The world is filled with opportunities to be kind and useful. Rising above self-serving desires to contribute isn’t just good for the community, it’s good for your well-being.
  2. Spend below your means. Don’t spend money you don’t have on things you don’t need to impress people you don’t know. Overspending to impress is not a path to citizenship.
  3. Embrace the grind. Citizenship, and the character that comes with it, are not achieved by having things too easy. Pain, difficulties, and challenges are a part of a good life.
  4. Take the long view. Citizenship is not about immediate gratification. Citizens are geared toward making this world better in a generation or two – not just today. Citizenship means planting trees that will bear fruit you will never eat and cast shade you will never enjoy.

Let’s make a career of humanity … and you will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country and a finer world to live in. – Martin Luther King Jr.

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 was your annunciation moment?

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According to author David Brooks, an annunciation moment is when something sparks your interest, or casts a spell, or arouses a desire that somehow prefigures much of what follows in one’s life.

For many who have found their vocation, there is a defining “annunciation” moment that sets an early direction for their life’s work. In the midst of a vast and noisy world, something inside is quieted and they hear a voice that sparks a desire to explore something and live within it.

The poet, John O’Donohue, expressed these moments as “beautiful places where we felt immediately at home.”

It is embodied in the times when you felt most fulfilled, when you were doing something that felt instinctively effortless, when you felt “immediately at home.”

Two experiences come to my mind. One was listening to Earl Nightingale on the radio while driving to church with my father in our 1964 red Plymouth Valiant station wagon. I was thirteen years old but it became clear to me then that I would be one day be teaching and writing and communicating my ideas to the world.

Around this same time we lived across the road from a family with a volatile, angry, alcoholic father. We could hear the late-night yelling and banging and breaking. Their son would come over and spend time with me the next day. Nothing was said about it. We’d ride horses, explore the caves and the forest together. Although we didn’t talk about it, something inside me knew, before I could even articulate it, that I would one day support people who are dealing with trauma, tragedy, and misfortune in their lives.

What were your annunciation moments?

How to Create a Growth Plan for 2023: EQ, Authenticity, and the Power of Self-Awareness

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A great deal of research suggests that emotional intelligence (EQ) – the ability to identify and regulate one’s emotions and empathize with the emotions of others – is vital to success at work and in life. A high EQ helps you build healthy teams, reduce stress, increase engagement and motivation, achieve higher productivity, foster psychological safety, defuse conflict, and improve job satisfaction.
One of the four pillars of emotional intelligence is self-awareness – having a comprehensive grasp of who you are as a person and a leader, and how you show up in the world. The more you understand yourself, the better you can connect with others. Self-aware leaders know their strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots, and how to work with them. They are comfortable with themselves and genuine. They have a better understanding of emotions and how they affect behaviour and can recognise those emotions in others.
So… where does self-awareness come from? How do you develop it? Can you create a plan to become more self-aware?
The following suggestions will assist you in designing your own authentic leadership development plan for the new year by incorporating the five components of self-awareness.
  1. Purpose and Vision. Leadership is a consuming activity. A sense of purpose, along with a clearly articulated vision of what you want your life and your leadership to be like in the next five years, will enable to you to stay passionate so you can inspire those under your care.
  2. Insights. Learning is key to self-awareness and growth. What insights do you need this year to build your personal capacity toward your purpose and vision? What books will you read? What courses will you take? What teachers will you seek out?
  3. Self-Reflection. Connecting to others begins with listening to oneself. And listening to yourself requires a place where you can hear yourself think. When you spend so much of your life attending to the demands of others, you can lose yourself by failing to distinguish between your authentic voice and other voices that clamor for your attention.
  4. Feedback. While a habit of personal reflection can bring an element of growth and self-understanding, it will only take you so far. You ultimately can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created the problems. We all have blind spots. We need feedback from others to see what we can’t see.
  5. Employing a guide. Authenticity is a lonely journey, but it can’t be done alone. The lone-warrior model of leadership is, in the words of Ron Heifetz, “heroic suicide.” Guides – those who can take us into the unfamiliar territory of our own development, can come in the form of therapists, coaches, confidants, recovery programs, and peer-mentoring groups.
As you continue your authentic leadership journey into 2023, incorporating some strategies to increase your EQ will undoubtedly heighten the success of your growth plan. What strategies will you try?