Leadership for today

I wanted to get some feedback from more people and the many people who have given me feedback on past blog posts, I thank you, but ask you to click the button to the right to be a follower of our blog. As I want this to be a place where when you have concerns or looking for logical and practical content to make your life more successful.

One of my many projects in the works is the book that hopefully will be out early next year, but it is so far titled (unless the editors nix it:-) is 'Seven Facets of Essential Leadership' and I want to get you some tastes of what this book will bring to you and hopefully be a resource to you, your family and your colleges.

--from chapter 4 'Emotional wellness'

'We all have emotions, some of us wear them on our sleeve and some of us bury them thinking that the showing of emotions will somehow make us appear weak or vulnerable. Let me just break the ice and say all those emotions flowing from you are a gift, not a curse. They are there to give you a signal to what is happening in the world around you, when you can not consciously grasp what is happening. When you walk into a situation and you feel the hair stand up on the back of your head and your get that eerie feeling like something isn't right and you want to run away, well unless this is your wedding day, and even if it is, that should give you the feedback that something just isn't right. You should act like a soldier, don't stand up to get shot at, back up to some safe place so you can regroup and make a better more logical choice.

There is a physiological response to most situations and will drive our emotions, but they are not fool-proof. We can have inappropriate reactions to a situations. We laugh when someone tells us they are dying of cancer or cry when we are given a compliment. These are from two sources: 1. we have the physiological response, but we interpret it, stifle it and a reaction is a mixed up combination of normal reaction & last minute shooting from the hip and comes out all wrong. 2. We have wrongly learned how this emotion should be expressed. We have all met people who do things that blow us away, in how wrong this reaction may be. This is why we need to have someone help us to expose our blind spots and help us to be self-aware, but also how to learn the most appropriate response.

Let me ask you this question: If you had a blind spot, would you know what is there? Of course you wouldn't, that's why it is a blind spot. Just like running up next to side of the semi-trailer and being shocked when it merges right on top of you. You knew you were there, but the truck driver looked for traffic, but you were in his blind spot, and was totally unaware that you even existed. That is how our life is like, we have blind spots in our life, but we haven't empowered a trusted person to help us see where our blind spots are. One author, Noah St. John calls this person a 'Loving Mirror' they see our faults, help us to identify them, but doesn't love us any less because we have flaws. I have learned a technique, which I used to think that was personality specific, but as I have taught this to others, I have found that it works for almost anybody, but you have to be willing for this to be used back on you, and be willing to change. Let me give you a situation where I recently used this:

I had to go downtown to a government building and as I was getting ready to go in, the lady behind me came in with the largest metal coffee travel mug I've ever seen. The security guy politely told the woman that she wasn't allowed to bring that drink into the building. You would have thought she was told, she was unable to keep her children or her kidneys and just started flipping out on the guy. She was spewing about her rights, her dehydration, her offensiveness to him and the poor job he was doing, just giving the guy an earful of crap. (He did have a gun, and little note to self, don't flip out and insult people who openly carry guns and skilled in how to use them, they may just hit their target, I digress) I stopped and turned around to see the show and kind of moved sort of to the side of the guard just enough to get into this woman's eye line, and posed a question: 'What are doing? What is that, that thing you are doing?(with pointing in kind of odd circles & an inquisitive look in my eye) Does 'that', that thing you are doing does that work? I mean, anytime you do 'that' do you get what you want? (Then we all stood in silence for a second, while she pondered the question.) I don't know about you, but if that drink isn't allowed in here, I'm not sure 'that thing you were doing' is going to get the city to change it's policy, so what if we left it outside, is that so bad?' She looked at me with a moment of intensity, then dropped her gaze then turned around said, thank you then put her massive mug outside the door then came back in and apologized to the man with gun.

She was totally unaware of her surroundings or that what she was doing was so inappropriate for the situation and how foolish she looked. I never have seen this woman again, but hopefully at least once, I had enough compassion for her to expose her folly in a way that was not confrontive or adding fuel to the fire. She probably pondered in her mind how many times have I done this and I was never enlightened to this blind spot in my personality.

PARENT MOMENT: Help, Gracefully to expose your kids to the blind spots in their life. As long as you approach it with love and compassion and not accusations and humiliation, you can help you kids to learn to correct their mis-learning of how to handle their reactions. Teach them to replay a situation and look at all the different possible reactions and help them to find the right one. In doing this you may find blind spots of your own, so be willing to improve as well. It is a strong parent who will admit thier faults to their kids, but even greater is the parent who will be willing to change and let their kids help them too in the process.

I have used this techniques on my own son, who was having a hard time relinquishing the role of 'baby in the family' and felt that if he threw a fit of crying he could still get his way like he did when he was 2. I went through the 'what is 'that' you are doing? I said, 'Anywhere in your life does that work or get you what you want when you do 'that?'' Of course my son has my quick whit and said, when he had to back down, 'It works on mom' We all had a good laugh.

Be willing to help yourself, your co-workers, and especially your family to find the blind spots, and be willing to help each other work out solutions and change. you do have the power to change, sometimes we are too lazy or unwilling to improve. Don't be that person, be the better person you have been called to be, you will reap the benefits!'

I hope you enjoyed this short excerpt and will try to put some more clips on the blog over the next year so you can help yourself and others grow and hopefully 'wet your whistle' for the book's release.

Until next time...