Making Time to Replenish Your Energy Reserves

The more courageous you become the more essential it is to make time to replenish your mental, physical, emotional and spiritual energy. To be courageous uses enormous amounts of energy and as I have experienced over the last week it is critical to make the time to replenish and just be "present" with yourself - engage in a conversation with yourself to check out how you are going and what you are feeling. Yesterday I went for a 90 minute walk around the lake and just spent time with our beloved dog who does not require too much conversational attention and myself - soaking up the serenity and enjoying a fast pace!

 
You also need trusted life partners, friends and colleagues who are prepared to listen, to reflect back what they are seeing and hearing, to challenge what is happening and maybe help you see the situation differently.........and these kinds of conversations do much to replenish the energy banks. Take a few moments to reflect on what you do to regularly replenish your energy sources.

Courageous leaders encourage conflict

Facilitating a workshop yesterday my participants helped me make some powerful connections. Many organisations identify the importance of collaboration and innovation to their culture and the necessary behaviours for their business. Through conversations to explore conflict we came to realise yesterday that to truly bring individuals together within a team and an organisation where they are prepared to engage honestly and share their needs, emotions and concerns so we create true collaboration and ignite innovation then CONFLICT IS ESSENTIAL. Without conflict you cannot possibly have collaboration and innovation. And it is interesting to recognise that those same organisations who look to create collaboration and innovation do not overtly welcome and seek conflict. Therefore you have to question whether they truly do have collaboration and innovation.

We also came to realise yesterday that many teams think they are collaborating but really they are compromising - mostly because we do not encourage the conflict, we do not make it clear that we need it - and that it is only by unleashing this conflict that we can throw away the concept of my way and your way and create a new way - "our way" - which is true collaboration. The underlying mindset of many people is that someone has to win and someone has to lose - and this is not the mindset people need to collaborate.

So to all courageous leaders out there or to those who aspire to be more courageous in the way they lead - then get out there with your people and encourage conflict. And know that it is the way you resolve it that is critical to the long term sustainability of collaboration and innovation.

Courageous leaders take responsibility for their emotions

What an amazing week or so I have had and some incredibly powerful personal learning. I have come to recognise the importance of courageous leaders taking responsibility for their emotions. Because what many of us are confronted with everyday in the workplace is the "games people play" with emotions! Presently we are seeing many workplaces ruled by fear and insecurity. I have read several articles in respected daily newspapers claiming the return of the tyrannical boss who rules by fear and demands control and respect through aggressive behaviour. And a very dear colleague of mine shared with me a simple and yet profound framework for how these emotions play out:

PERPETRATOR...........VICTIM..............RESCUER

Think about your everyday life and start to watch how you play out your emotions under one of these guises. And it does not have to be this way if you decide to take responsibility for your emotions and use them constructively.

Faciltiating a recent leading change workshop allowed me to challenge the group of participants with this framework - and especially during times of change it is easy sometimes to play the victim - and blame those awful perpetrators for the way you are feeling!!!!!

Start to notice how you play your emotions out and look for the times you OWN your emotions and assert them constructively - and reward yourself for taking such responsibility! Courageous leaders certainly take responsibility for their emotions - try it out for one full day and see how you go - no blame and no taking on the role of perpetrator, victim or rescuer!

Courageous leaders negotiate differently!

I had an incredible experience last week facilitating business negotiation skills workshops for a client. When first asked to undertake this project I declined because I believed that I did not negotiate and cringed at the use of the word. Courageous leaders do not negotiate...........this was the inner chatter in my head and yet upon reflection and challenge I realised that courageous leaders DO negotiate and so did I - just on different terms to that of the stereotype I had in my head about what constituted an effective negotiatior! My upbringing in business had lead me to believe that an effective negotiator was aggressive, kept information and needs close to their chest, played manipulative games and walked out with the knowledge they had WON and the other person had lost! And this was not what I did and it was not what I ever wanted to do!This experience has allowed me to recognise that I am a great negotiator but that I do it with my style and now I am proud to refer to this as the courageous negotiator. The courageous negotiator is transparent, gives information freely and with the intent of finding the best outcome for all parties because they believe so strongly that it is win-win or no deal. I also now know that my style is very much based on the wonderful movie called "Pay It Forward" and counter to what many effective negotiators believe I make widespread use of generosity. This has created great outcomes for me and for others involved in the negotiation. So for me I am eternally thankful to this client as I have now totally reframed myself and are proud to say that I AM a negotiator - a courageous negotiator!!!

Courage to be YOU

In developing the content for my book I was reflecting on some new thinking and would like to share it with you..............I see the constant tension leaders need to manage between financial, brand and people sustainability - the constant push and pull between the short term and the long term; the external and the internal. And this tension permeates every decision leaders make, each behaviour leaders choose and every promise they make to any stakeholder. To harness the creative force that can lie behind this tension takes uncompromising courage from any leader. The Courageous Leaders Model clearly advocates how individuals can redeploy into a position where their courage allows them to harness this tension and unleash something truly creative.
How realistic does this feel. Can courage enable you to manage your way through the ever present tension in your daily lives? Is it sufficient if you have developed your self mastery to an extent that means you are clear on the kind of leader you want to be and now you just need the courage to "be" that leader?

Tough economic conditions catalyse the downward spiral of fear for leaders OR can it ignite the upward spiral of courage and hope

FEAR: is driving much of our behaviour right now as we do not know what to expect next. We are living in incredibly uncertain times. Our teenage daughter came home a few nights ago and said her history teacher had told them we were heading for a depression and she wanted to know what we could expect this to be like!!!! I received an e-mail from a "funky thinker" colleague who said stop reading the papers and read about the future 10 years from now and start to explore how you will fit into this - forget the doom and gloom of the here and now!!!! I sat with an executive team as they spoke of the risk aversion and the fear driving their choices in leadership behaviour - they have returned to the command and control style of leadership - where you control, protect and comply. Leaders demand things are done their way and the costs they think need to be cut are cut. And so they have catalysed people into the downward spiral of fear. There is an alternative to this approach - there is the Upward Spiral of Courage.
COURAGE: I witnessed a nation starting to embrace the Upward Spiral of Courage after Obama's speech last night - he provided hope and is showing the courage to change! Leaders in corporate Australia can do the same - approach the problems and the issues with interest, creativity and integrity. Facilitate others thinking so they can come to work and enjoy themselves, develop themselves and approach problems with creativity rather than constraint and fear. We have a generation of people who have not experienced such financial hardships before - imagine the ideas they might have if we only facilitate rather than constrain and close them down by telling them their ideas won't work!!!!
Fear is an unproductive and uncertain place to live in; while courage is where we feel energised and we believe and we have hope!!!!!
Join us on the Upward Spiral of Courage and leave the donward spiral of fear behind!!!!!!

We need far more courageous leaders

I walked away from a client meeting today filled with the overwhelming conviction that we need far more courageous existing leaders and until we have them, we need to realise that behavioural change within organisations is always going to be a mere ‘tinkering at the edges’.
We need existing leaders to step into a place of complete vulnerability where they are prepared to be challenged and most definitely prepared to change. And in my experiences to date I have far too little evidence of this happening. The even more frightening thing is that the more research I do on fear, the more I wonder how we can truly encourage more existing leaders to work constructively with their fear and jump into this place of complete vulnerability – where they do not have control and they do not have the solutions.
In these turbulent economic times we are seeing more and more existing leaders clinging to the Downward Spiral of Fear (link to previous newsletter) to protect, to comply, to regulate and to control. What we really need are leaders who are prepared to climb the Upward Spiral of Courage – to embrace vulnerability, to want their thinking challenged and to come to issues with creativity and an abundance mentality! We so desperately need our existing leaders to be courageous!!!!