“You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.”
–Sam Rayburn
I coach a U15 club volleyball team; our first Power League tournament was this past weekend. In preparation for the event, I reminded the girls that one of the toughest challenges in leadership is often the ability to step back and play a support role when required. It takes a strong leader to be able to stay focused and fully engaged even when not being called upon to participate in a way that uses her best skills. There are 12 girls on my team, and 6 spots on the court. Because it is a competitive but young (freshman,) club team, my commitment to the girls and their parents during tournaments is to somehow find the balance between winning matches and giving each girl enough time on the court to feel a sense of participation and be able to test her skills. This means bench time at some point even for some of our strongest players.
As I thought through all of this, I remembered one of the toughest support roles I played when I was about that age. I was in my high school drama club, cast as Margot Frank (Anne’s older sister) in The Diary of Anne Frank. (Remember Margot? That’s what I thought.) The biggest challenge was that the speaking role for this part was very small, but I had to be on stage the entire play, paying attention to the others, staying in character, and ready for my lines when they happened. My drama coach (who was also my volleyball coach) knew it was hard for me to stay in character without the spotlight and action. (Melodrama and geeky stuff are my specialties, remember?) I still remember him acknowledging that he knew it was hard for me to have such a quiet role, encouraging me to stay with it, and convincing me that this role was more difficult and challenging because of its silence. Looking back, I don’t know that I played my role especially well, but I do know that the entire cast was in tears at the end of the play when the Gestapo came to get them, and Anne’s father said, “For years we have lived in fear, now we can live in hope.” I will always remember the feeling of receiving a standing ovation from the crowd, even though my role was minor.
In my leadership and team building sessions with intact teams we often ask the team leader to step back and allow his / her team to determine the course of action for each experiential leadership initiative. Most leaders --no matter whether they are the VP or the line supervisor-- tell us this is an extremely challenging task. Yet the best way a leader can grow his / her team is to allow them to make decisions, steer the course, support them, and allow them to learn from their inevitable mistakes. “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” –James Joyce.
I do not claim to be an expert leader; I definitely make mistakes. But I hope that my coaching, support, and willingness to learn from my own mistakes continue to create in me the leader that I hope to become.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Resilience & Intuitive Learning
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
--Confucius
I watched the animated movie The Incredibles with a friend last week. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the film, of course. I watched it multiple times with my extended family when it released in 2004. Both of my oldest nephews, who were four at the time, became Dash, for at least a year. To complete this transformation, my sister created costumes for both families, including one for my dad, who transformed into “Grandpa Incredible.”
This time as I watched the movie, I found myself viewing it through my leadership lens. I still enjoyed the humor, applauded Mr. Incredible’s need to work in a field that best used his talents rather than wasting away in a cubicle in the insurance company, and of course cheered when the Incredibles kicked some serious bad-guy butt. But it was the omnidroid that caught my attention --the intelligent destructive robot designed to adjust rapidly to its own failure, quickly learn new behaviors, and through this rapid learning, defeat all superheroes.
This type of rapid learning and resilience, although displayed in The Incredibles in a villainous robot designed by Syndrome, is exactly what today’s leaders need to grow and thrive. With rapid advances in technology and consumer knowledge, constant change and increasingly stressful conditions, it is getting more and more difficult for leaders in all sectors to rely on experience alone.
Resilience, defined by Merriam-Webster, is “the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” This article in Psychiatric News, discloses that graduating from the school of hard knocks may be more than just a cliché. The article discusses the brain circuitry underlying resilience, and states, “Successfully coping with a stressful situation can prime one for dealing with subsequent stressful situations that are not controllable. The brain circuitry that underlies this transfer of resiliency includes the prefrontal cortex and brainstem.” The good news is that other research shows that our brain has the capability for resilience and increased intuitive learning even without suffering from too many hard knocks –by reprogramming connections between the pre-frontal cortex and areas in the “reptilian brain”.
Studies increasingly show that regular meditation is one way to increase the capacity for both intuitive learning and resiliency. Regular practice of experiential emotional intelligence techniques can also help re-program old pathways that may cause emotional hijacking which gets in the way of intuition and learning.
Resilient people are more likely to be willing to risk failure, adjust to change, stand up for their beliefs, and persevere through obstacles. Intuition enables you to tap into wisdom that goes beyond your own experience. Don’t those sound like qualities everyone could use?
For more information about increasing your levels of resilience, for techniques that can combat emotional hijacking, or to learn how to increase intuition and wisdom, contact me or view my website.
--Confucius
I watched the animated movie The Incredibles with a friend last week. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the film, of course. I watched it multiple times with my extended family when it released in 2004. Both of my oldest nephews, who were four at the time, became Dash, for at least a year. To complete this transformation, my sister created costumes for both families, including one for my dad, who transformed into “Grandpa Incredible.”
This time as I watched the movie, I found myself viewing it through my leadership lens. I still enjoyed the humor, applauded Mr. Incredible’s need to work in a field that best used his talents rather than wasting away in a cubicle in the insurance company, and of course cheered when the Incredibles kicked some serious bad-guy butt. But it was the omnidroid that caught my attention --the intelligent destructive robot designed to adjust rapidly to its own failure, quickly learn new behaviors, and through this rapid learning, defeat all superheroes.
This type of rapid learning and resilience, although displayed in The Incredibles in a villainous robot designed by Syndrome, is exactly what today’s leaders need to grow and thrive. With rapid advances in technology and consumer knowledge, constant change and increasingly stressful conditions, it is getting more and more difficult for leaders in all sectors to rely on experience alone.
Resilience, defined by Merriam-Webster, is “the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” This article in Psychiatric News, discloses that graduating from the school of hard knocks may be more than just a cliché. The article discusses the brain circuitry underlying resilience, and states, “Successfully coping with a stressful situation can prime one for dealing with subsequent stressful situations that are not controllable. The brain circuitry that underlies this transfer of resiliency includes the prefrontal cortex and brainstem.” The good news is that other research shows that our brain has the capability for resilience and increased intuitive learning even without suffering from too many hard knocks –by reprogramming connections between the pre-frontal cortex and areas in the “reptilian brain”.
Studies increasingly show that regular meditation is one way to increase the capacity for both intuitive learning and resiliency. Regular practice of experiential emotional intelligence techniques can also help re-program old pathways that may cause emotional hijacking which gets in the way of intuition and learning.
Resilient people are more likely to be willing to risk failure, adjust to change, stand up for their beliefs, and persevere through obstacles. Intuition enables you to tap into wisdom that goes beyond your own experience. Don’t those sound like qualities everyone could use?
For more information about increasing your levels of resilience, for techniques that can combat emotional hijacking, or to learn how to increase intuition and wisdom, contact me or view my website.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Don't Make Assumptions
“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” –Henry Winkler
When I taught Emotional Intelligence courses with Teams and Leaders, my favorite part of our two-day seminar tapped into my latent acting skills. (My specialties are melodrama, and anything that allows me to bring out my geeky side.)
The lesson began this way: I stood at the front of the room, and stated, “I have been with Teams and Leaders for some time now, and of all the things I have learned, this one lesson has been most meaningful to me….” Then I paused, put my hands to my face, bowed my head slightly, and was silent. After a length of time, which was inevitably uncomfortable for everyone in the room, I would look up, turn to the white board, and ask, “Ok, what just happened?”
Depending on how good my acting skills were that day, the classroom would respond by saying variations of, “you were about to cry,” “you were overcome by emotion,” “you forgot what you were going to say” or “you got all melodramatic on us”. Occasionally, some of the answers were complete detailed anecdotes about my behavior that a particular person –or the entire class—projected onto me.
Once we had a good sized list from the class written on the board, I asked, “Of all these things, which of them are actual facts?” In most classes, as in most of our lives, it took some time before the class was willing to let go of the idea that the list of their interpretations was NOT already fact. But once they caught on, they began stating the actual truths about what they saw and heard. “You were silent.” “You put your hands to your face.” “You bowed your head.”
We go through our entire lives interpreting the things we experience with our five senses, making assumptions based on prior experiences or future projections. Unfortunately, because the world is so complex, (and because one different choice today can lead to a new outcome tomorrow) this doesn’t always serve us well.
As an example, I confess that I had myself an unexpected good cry a couple weeks ago based on something I saw and the assumptions I made. I woke up the next morning, still sad, but remembered the lesson and decided to take the risk and ask the person about what I’d seen. The truth was very different than my imagined scenario, and I had to laugh at myself for tripping over my own favorite life lesson.
The lesson, stated, is easy: make no assumptions. However, it is a difficult lesson to master. We all tend to treat history, experience, concepts and ideas as facts, instead of realizing that we have no idea what another person is thinking, experiencing or believing until we ask them.
As Don Miguel Ruiz states in his book The Four Agreements, “all the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally… if others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don’t tell us something we make assumptions to fill our need to know … if we hear something and we don’t understand, we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions.”
My request to you is muster up the courage to ask hard questions. Find a voice to ask for what you want instead of assuming that the other person will know. Check in with the person you are making assumptions about to find out their truth about the situation. You might not get the answer you hope for, but by having the courage to ask, you free yourself from much drama and sadness, and can move more easily into a life of freedom. Make this a habit, and you have the power to transform your life.
When I taught Emotional Intelligence courses with Teams and Leaders, my favorite part of our two-day seminar tapped into my latent acting skills. (My specialties are melodrama, and anything that allows me to bring out my geeky side.)
The lesson began this way: I stood at the front of the room, and stated, “I have been with Teams and Leaders for some time now, and of all the things I have learned, this one lesson has been most meaningful to me….” Then I paused, put my hands to my face, bowed my head slightly, and was silent. After a length of time, which was inevitably uncomfortable for everyone in the room, I would look up, turn to the white board, and ask, “Ok, what just happened?”
Depending on how good my acting skills were that day, the classroom would respond by saying variations of, “you were about to cry,” “you were overcome by emotion,” “you forgot what you were going to say” or “you got all melodramatic on us”. Occasionally, some of the answers were complete detailed anecdotes about my behavior that a particular person –or the entire class—projected onto me.
Once we had a good sized list from the class written on the board, I asked, “Of all these things, which of them are actual facts?” In most classes, as in most of our lives, it took some time before the class was willing to let go of the idea that the list of their interpretations was NOT already fact. But once they caught on, they began stating the actual truths about what they saw and heard. “You were silent.” “You put your hands to your face.” “You bowed your head.”
We go through our entire lives interpreting the things we experience with our five senses, making assumptions based on prior experiences or future projections. Unfortunately, because the world is so complex, (and because one different choice today can lead to a new outcome tomorrow) this doesn’t always serve us well.
As an example, I confess that I had myself an unexpected good cry a couple weeks ago based on something I saw and the assumptions I made. I woke up the next morning, still sad, but remembered the lesson and decided to take the risk and ask the person about what I’d seen. The truth was very different than my imagined scenario, and I had to laugh at myself for tripping over my own favorite life lesson.
The lesson, stated, is easy: make no assumptions. However, it is a difficult lesson to master. We all tend to treat history, experience, concepts and ideas as facts, instead of realizing that we have no idea what another person is thinking, experiencing or believing until we ask them.
As Don Miguel Ruiz states in his book The Four Agreements, “all the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally… if others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don’t tell us something we make assumptions to fill our need to know … if we hear something and we don’t understand, we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions.”
My request to you is muster up the courage to ask hard questions. Find a voice to ask for what you want instead of assuming that the other person will know. Check in with the person you are making assumptions about to find out their truth about the situation. You might not get the answer you hope for, but by having the courage to ask, you free yourself from much drama and sadness, and can move more easily into a life of freedom. Make this a habit, and you have the power to transform your life.
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