Giving what you get
May 24th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I have always been a goal setter and vision holder. My friends tell me I am a manifester. If I want something, I write it down and it appears. I doesn’t however always stay. The other day a friend took me through an exercise that shocked me into a new level of understanding and recognition. Instead of looking at what I wanted she made me focus of who I needed to be to be worthy of what I wanted to attract. For example, if I wanted a new job, not only did I need to write down the exact specifications of the job I wanted (something I knew only well how to do) but also – who I had to be to attract and keep such a job). Not only what I wanted to get but what I was prepared to give. We might all want a loving, kind, generous, attractive partner – are we loving, kind, generous and as attractive as we can be? I have been so excited about discovering this new way of looking at things. It isn’t that I wasn’t interested in self improvement I was – I just didn’t think to match what I wanted to get with who I needed to be to attract and keep it. Asking for what we want is one thing, taking responsibility to maintain and cherish what we attract is something altogether else. Just imagine if our political leaders not only had policies and promises but pledged to behave in appropriate ways to maintain these. How would it be if our politicians looked at their own conduct, their own integrity and their own behaviour rather than criticising the opposition? How might the world be improved if business leaders looked at their own behaviour and growth not for what they could get but for what they might give in order to maintain a better world?
The path of brilliance
May 22nd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Returning home after attending a charity dinner – I commented to my friend that my fellow guests had an air of privilege and a confidence that sprang from it. I had found this a little unsettling. I grew up in a small city where bright boys and girls went to the local selective high school – not a school accessed because of your parent’s wealth. After the “right education” one is expected to marry the right person and follow a traditional path to success. My life’s journey has been very different – I married all the wrong people – regularly. I muddled through life – getting divorced, tending sick children, building my own global company, watching it falter and starting again. I wrote books, toured the globe speaking and working with leaders. I was always just a little too different, a bit too questioning of the status quo to really fit into the elite. The complacency of those who followed a more conventional path to the top was not to be mine. My success, such as it was, came as much from failure as from getting it right. It was my failures that deepened my spiritual questing, that opened my heart and forged my character. I hovered on the outskirts of the elite – making people uncomfortable by thinking outside the box, the very skill for which I was so highly paid. My friend, a highly creative woman mused:- “I call the silver spoon route the way of mediocrity – brilliance comes from the outsiders, from those whose life experience has forced them to see things differently”. I knew she was trying to make me feel better but she did have a point. So many writers, poets, designers, artists and musicians have walked on the wild side – their insights as outsiders have made us think and have changed our world. Entrepreneurs are rarely from the ‘right side of the tracks’ although their children usually enjoy the comfortable life of the privileged. It makes sense of course, those who have derived the most benefit from social status, power and privilege are unlikely to question the very foundation of that which facilitates their ease of living. I remember some years ago after a financial windfall going shopping at a top department store. I was spending up big. The attendants became very concerned about my welfare, “Was madam tired?” “Did madam want a seat?” “Was madam hot? Did she want a fan?” “Was madam hungry? Did she want them to fetch her a complementary meal? Could they get madam some water?” I have shopped in that store a hundred times before I had never had this kind of treatment. Then it occurred to me that the very rich grow up thinking being treated like this is normal. How do you go from that place to understanding how it is for those who struggle to feed their families? How do you begin to understand what it is like for the majority of the world? If you have no concept of reality for most people how do you make wise leadership decisions? If you are closeted in the padded cell of affluence, power and status – how do you rise to the path of brilliance?
When the poor teach us how to lead
May 21st, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I recently attended a dinner for the Hunger Project. A wonderful organisation that has trained 400,000 female leaders in undeveloped countries. These women are trained not by expats driving around in expensive 4 wheel drives but by other women – just like themselves who have been empowered to lead. When the poorest of the poor women are empowered things happen – villages get supplies of water and electricity, schools are built and parents are encouraged (lured) to send their children to school. Village life improves, education improves and the future gets better.
We were told of one very low caste woman in India who had been rejected by her husband making her the lowest of the low in the social pecking order. Due to a mandate by the Indian government that 30% of council members should be female, this woman found herself on the local council. When she attended her first council meeting she was bodily picked up by her fellow councillors and thrown into the street. They then threw after her the seat she had sat in and the table she had leaned on. So she set herself up outside the meeting room in the street and participated from there. 3 years later she was responsible for having water and electricity brought in to the village. She had nothing to lose, her heart was filled with compassion for her fellow suffers and once empowered by a belief that she could make a difference nothing got in her way. I told this story today to a leader of a large multi-national who felt he couldn’t get a desired change in his corporate board. “Why” I asked “can you with so much power think you can achieve so little when this woman with apparently no power cold achieve so much?” “It’s a matter of will he told me”. This is true. When we have nothing to lose and we care deeply for others our will to achieve positive change is ferocious. When we are comfortable and privileged we fit in and accept the status quo. The Law f the Retarded Lead states “The dominant species is always the slowest to change” – this is so because those in positions of dominant fear what might be lost more than they desire what might be gained.
Self Leadership
May 15th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Leadership we are told is about getting things done through other people. Leaders either stand out the front to inspire and direct, or they lead from behind lighting fires within their people and using consensus and group dynamics to get people to take responsibility for themselves, their growth, their actions and their outcomes. Clever leaders are able to do both.Most of us prefer to be led from the front. We like to know where we are going, where we fit and what our part is in reaching a predetermined goal.
We like strong, preferably tall, male leaders who can give us firm direction, gently adjust us when we are on the wrong track and reward us with positive feedback and remuneration when we get it right.
I other words most of us want to be children being led by a strong, authoritative father. Powerful, tall, male leaders make us feel secure and safe. We like someone who seems to know the lie of the land and who appears to have the wisdom to know what needs to be done, when and by whom.
The problem is in times of rapid discontinuous change this is a furphy. Even the most insightful leader doesn’t know what is going to happen next. Even when leaders have a strong vision, the world changes around them and their vision has to be adjusted.
In large complex organisations, top down leaders just can’t spread themselves thinly enough to meet everybody’s desire to be noticed, encouraged and corrected.
Today we need self-leadership, we need people throughout every organisation who are comfortable with not knowing and with constant change.
Rapid discontinuous change in a complex world demands that each and every one of us takes responsibility for finding our own way forward in relationship to those around us.
This means that we each have to take responsibility for ourselves, our growth, our direction and our outcomes – and we have to do this while relating to a changing sea of people.
We are being called to co create with our clients, with our staff and with our peers, often with fuzzy leadership. This is a big call – one that many of us resist.
However, those who take the challenge feel more alive and more empowered, and their relationships and organisations soar to new heights. Growing up, it turns our, is an exciting adventure.
Don’t dismiss a radical review of capitalism
May 15th, 2012 § 1 Comment
Charles Eisenstein in his book Sacred Capitalism argues that, because we have an economic system based on money our labour, relationships, emotions and even our spirits have become commoditised. For example, he suggests that if we as members of a community engage in a working bee for the local school, we value each other and the gifts of time and effort we offer. However, if we are paid for the same labour, we are no longer seen as generous persons donating their time and effort. Instead we are seen as guns for hire and treated with less respect. Our labour having been exchanged for money has become something that can be bought and sold and in that transaction our humanity is lost and our goodwill overlooked. Eisenstein goes on to argue that the entire economic basis of our society needs to be restructured. He tells us that the money economy – due to the process of interest bearing debt – has led individuals, communities and whole nations into servitude to money lenders. His remedy is pervasive; a shift to an economy where you cannot make money from the accumulation of capital or by owning what he calls community “commons” e.g. land and land rights, or mineral and water rights. Eisenstein’s formula for change is colossal and includes negative interest (the banks would pay you when you borrow money), the elimination of rent on land and anything underneath it and the return to community-based economies. These shifts would lead to a massive redistribution of wealth from the wealthy to the mass of the population. Eisenstein’s writings are keenly sought by those spearheading the Occupy movement around the world. He has cleverly woven together the concerns of those who want to regain a sense of purpose and worth in their work, a sense of community in their lives and a sense of economic justice. The occupy movement as rallied hundreds of thousands of (mostly young) people to step forward and demand a new deal. Their slogan “We are the 99%” is a catch cry to those who feel disadvantaged by the current economic system It would be foolish to disregard or dismiss this movement out of hand. Eisenstein’s work is worth scanning – not because it is the answer but because so many people are using it to validate their sense of injustice and resentment.
Managing from the Middle
May 14th, 2012 § 5 Comments
I recently received an email from a reader who had contacted me some years before when he was a middle manager in a project that was being very badly managed. The reader noted “That Project is now gaining Global notoriety as an example of how to inefficiently spend $25B. The few key players in high positions who failed to provide adequate leadership or management have nearly all been sacked, both from the Client and Contractor groups, although there seems to be a “career survivor” who survived the purge. Sometimes those people actually get promoted as a way of removing them from the disaster zone, or because they have earned their stripes, mafia style, by demonstrations of extremely poor behaviour!” H The reader was contacting me again because the advice I had given him at the time – although” of limited use given the situation” was more than he had received at a subsequent workshop where frustration of being badly led “came up from people who were stuck in the middle as I had been. People who can see (often it doesn’t take a rocket scientist!) how things could drastically improve to achieve the stated outcomes but who cannot sell that message upwards”. The advice that I had given which had helped this reader at the time – was the 50% rule which states. “We are all responsible for 50% of every relationship we are in – our 50%. When our relationships don’t work we can only ever change 50%. The problem is we seek to change the 50% over which we have no control and therefore no chance of changing. The other person’s. We know that relationships are systems. Systems theory tells us that you change one part of a system; you change that system plus every system to which that system is connected. Thus if we change the part of the relationship system over which we have total control – OUR 50% we can change the relationship. We may not be able to change the other person but we can change the relationships. Chaos theory tells us that a small change can led to a huge outcome. The analogy often used is that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can lead to a tornado on the other side of the globe. Teaching from nuclear physics tells us that in relationships it is often the space between the particles that matter most. So the change we might need to make to change our relationships might be small and not visible to the eye.” It could just be a change of attitude on our part. I have seen the 50% rule applied by people in all sorts of situations. It can have a massive impact. For example if we feel like a victim in a situation and we decide that we do in fact have power over how we feel and act and over outcomes within our sphere of influence it can be amazing how a situation changes around us, how people begin to treat us with more respect and even to seek out our advice.
Daring to be diferent
May 14th, 2012 § 2 Comments
Grey, black and drab are the new corporate colours. Well, they were always there, but now they are getting drabber. I was recently talking to an executive recruiter who was wearing a dark suit with blue pin stripes.”My suit is too out there for business these days” he said adding that “corporate dress is getting more sombre”. How sad. As people get more and more scared they become more and more conservative. This is echoed in their apparel, their behaviour and their decision making. I was discussing with the same recruiter the possibility of boards employing CEOs who could skilfully navigate rapid discontinuous change. Such CEOs are out of the box thinkers, who feel comfortable being uncomfortable. What became clear is that CEOs who don’t rock the boat are preferable to boards. As uncertainty goes up, so does fear. As fear levels rise, so does our tendency to go into freeze (do nothing, make no decisions), fight (become aggressive) and flight (just go through the motions).When the whole business community is in fear, nobody feels safe. When we don’t feel safe, our brains have little access to logical thought and relationship capacity. So we do to ground.We try to become invisible – to look like, behave like and talk like everybody else. That’s fine as long as everybody else is headed in the right direction. But in times of rapid change the right direction changes so very, very fast. In the world when governments, business and whole industries fall overnight, which way is the right way? When we are in fear we will usually keep doing what we have always done. However in a rapidly changing world this is exactly what we shouldn’t do. We need diversity of ideas, skills, insights and capacity so that we as corporate, government and community groups can adapt with ease and speed. It takes all sorts of plants of all sorts of colours to make up an ecosystem. Resilient and change hardy organisations need diversity, not sameness. We need people who are prepared to think outside the box, speak up and look different. If we are all in indistinguishable black/grey outfits muttering the same platitudes, we are lining ourselves up for disaster when the next big disruption to our industry, business or the world economy hits. What a wonderful sight it would be to walk in to an office and see people dressed in brightly coloured clothes, having robust debates- feeling safe to be themselves and display their individual difference through word, action and the way they dress. What might we learn from each other? How might we grow as individuals, communities and organisations?
Poverty
May 9th, 2012 § 10 Comments
I recently had the opportunity of facilitating a workshop for people working with the poorest of the poor. The questions being asked repeatedly were: – “What is poverty?” and “How should we work respectfully with the most disadvantaged and marginalised of people?” Clearly poverty can mean lack of access to essentials such as food, water and housing. It can include lack of access to justice, protection and self determination. It can also include spiritual poverty – lack of meaning, lack of connection and lack of community. When I have visited very poor communities – such as Soweto – what has struck me is that while the economically poor live rough by our standards they have a lot to teach us about joy, community and faith. This is a great blessing for those providing aid because it opens up the possibility of give and take. While we can help the poor financially we can also learn from them on other levels. This opens up opportunities for respectful and dignified interaction between the economically rich and the economically poor and a very different philosophy than traditional ”charity’ – which has often created more problems than it solved. In Australia the phenomenon of the “stolen generation” comes to mind. Caring, well meaning people made a decision that aboriginal children were suffering. To alleviate this and to give them a better chance in life – the children were removed from their families, denied access to their land, their religion and their language. This model of charity came from an – at the time unconscious – paternalism and arrogance that the middle class white way of life was superior to traditional aboriginal lifestyle. The way of imposing this cultural judgment is still being felt by aborigines generations later. I wonder what would have happened if – instead of removing aboriginal children from their tribes – we had worked along the aborigines respecting their traditional culture and learning from it. How might everybody involved have been enriched? How might our land have been improved? How might our combined spiritual health have been increased? We will never know. What we can do is think past our own cultural arrogance and look for ways that we can learn and grow with the economically disadvantaged while sharing with them the essentials of life that we enjoy so abundantly.
Soulful Loss
April 14th, 2012 § 2 Comments
So many of us want life to be fun, easy, exciting and full of happiness.
The irony is that life feels easier, more enjoyable and more interesting when we stop seeking selfish pleasure and invest in contributing to the well being of others. When we lose things we love, have worked hard to achieve or on which we base a large part of our self-image, we will naturally fall into grief. Once we get through the denial, grief feels terrible – it is emotionally painful. We get angry, depressed and can even feel as though we are going slightly mad. Our world can lose is natural sense of order and we can become disoriented.
At such times it is difficult to look after our own basic needs let alone think about anyone else. However once the initial shock has worn off it is exactly by helping others and contributing to the greater whole that we start to heal and feel better. A key part of the all 12 step programmes and most peer support groups is helping someone else. In helping others we get to work through our own issues in relationship – and away from egoic self-pity. Soul building happens when we stop blaming others, circumstances and history for those things in our lives, our society and ourselves that we don’t like and get on with the heroic task of making our lives, our relationship and our world work. When we do this with awareness, making conscious choices, feeling our feelings and continuously learning about ourselves, life and humanity the soul is constantly enriched regardless of whether we win or lose, have times that are difficult or easy, or find ourselves in comfortable or uncomfortable situations. Soul building involves a choice to be emotionally and physically present in the real world, working in constructive ways to improve to just our own wellbeing, but also that of the people and the environment around us.
When losing everything means finding our soul
April 12th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Globally people are losing. They are losing their jobs, their businesses, their relationships, their parents, their health and the lives of those they love. An earth quake in Indonesia, a Tsunami in Japan, tornados in the USA and blizzards in Europe. Sometimes we appear to lose everything all at once. Perhaps we lose our job and our partner walks out on us – laden with the stress and grief we get sick. I heard recently of a highly successful woman who went to hospital after a car accident. To relieve her pain she was given morphine – to which she became addicted. Once home she had a second car accident this time killing another motorist. As a result she lost her job, her husband, her house and her children – all in the space of a few months. I have suffered three periods of cataclysmic loss in my life. Each time I have railed against my situation. Each time I have then thrown myself into personal and spiritual development and come out stronger, wiser and, in time, more successful in a worldly sense. Would I voluntarily have undergone the pain for the reward? No way. Am I glad that I have ended up more open hearted, wiser, soul enriched and more joyous? You bet I am. In the short term most of us will see times of hardship as – well – hard. The trick is to use them to our benefit. In my next post this is what we will explore.
