Sacred Path Coaching » Leadership

Stepping up to the plate

Lynn — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 15:51:27 +0000

When I think of the term, “stepping up to the plate”, I think of a baseball player stepping up the home plate facing the pitcher with his/her bat upon their shoulder ready to hit the very fast and pitifully small ball heading toward their face. If you guessed that I am scared of small hard objects heading towards my face while simultaneously not having the confidence in the coordination needed from my brain, eyes, hands, arms, body and legs…you would be right! It’s a great analogy nevertheless, especially for those of us who are scared to step up to the plate, it take courage and trust (and perhaps a bit of innocent ignorance too). This phrase is usually spouted when someone wants to talk about leadership and/or taking responsibility. I’d like to take it a step further and ask you to consider replacing stepping up to the plate with stepping up for your life. Take a moment and think about where you are right now in your life as you are reading this blog. How do you feel inside? Are you stressed out? Anxious? Sad? Happy? Joyful? Are there any little things that you’ve not handled or taken care of (as simple as paying a bill or as big as balancing your budget) that fly around your mind in a continuous swarm? If you are a leader in a company, how does each day unfold for you? How do you feel about your day as you look back over it later that evening? Do you take time to look forward, pause, or reflect? My father sent me a great article from the Academy of Management Learning & Education called, “Developing Sustainable Leaders through Coaching and Compassion”. This article integrates recent findings on affective neuroscience and biology with well-documented research on leadership and stress. They argue that leader sustainability is adversely affected by the psychological and physiological effects of chronic power stress associated with the performance of the leadership role. They further contend that when leaders experience compassion through coaching the development of others, they experience psycho physiological effects that restore the body’s natural healing and growth processes thus enhancing their sustainability. Lots of words to basically say that being in a leadership role is usually very stressful and taxing to your mind, body and soul. And when you experience compassion for yourself and/or you see your team receiving compassion, this helps you to loosen those ties, and slip on a more comfy pair of shoes so to speak. Compassion gives you room to breathe so that you can do this leadership thing that you do so well, longer and better.

I don’t mean to be creating images of airy-fairy long-haired peaceful people with flowers in hands running barefoot through your offices (although, in some cases that could be warranted…) but what I am suggesting is to take the time to talk with someone that you can trust and allow yourself the space to get your thoughts out of your head and into the space in front of you, so that you can give your body, your mind and your soul the space needed to keep going.The tricky thing for all of us whether we’re leaders or stay at home moms (or pops!) is to find a person or an activity that we can trust enough to let ourselves just be.

I have a Coach that I have been working with since early spring of 2001. Over the years we’ve honed our communication to a fine diamond prism which allows me to laser my thoughts and ideas to her very quickly. When I moved from Coaching part-time to coaching full time this year, I was very grateful to have a Coach to help keep me on track with my ideas and desires for what I can offer people without letting normal fears and the stress of having left a steady paycheck overwhelm me.

It always helps me to get out of myself and share with another person my ideas, my feelings, and my dreams. I’ve realized that, for me, writing out the thoughts in my head or talking about them with a trusted person (such as my Coach), allows me to see what magnificence is inside of me (who knew!!). It’s as if some of my thoughts are very dense zip-files of information that I have no idea what all is inside there until I get it out and share it with others. When we remain imprisoned in our minds and hearts and ramrod ourselves through our days, I believe we invite stress and physical illness right on into our bodies and minds because we aren’t giving a chance for the seeds of our brilliance to germinate and unfold.

In a book entitled, “Not Fade Away: a short life well-lived” by Laurence Shames and Peter Barton, Peter shares his experience with having been a true mover and shaker of his generation and then his experience of learning to love the simplest things in life when he discovered he had cancer. The book very gently takes us through his dying and his awareness-of-life process.

My hope for you today is that you will look at your life, today, right now, and begin finding ways to really fully live your life and enjoy yourself. Happiness and feeling loved and understood as well as loving and understanding are truly the best medicine for what you want to do in your life.

Get going, there’s a world waiting for you out there!

Do Something That Takes You Out of Your Comfort Zone

Lynn — Thu, 25 May 2006 17:20:27 +0000

I admit it. I am a huge hedonist who would much rather have the benefits of hard work, without the hard work, the toned body, without the toning and the developed mind and spirit, without the concentration and focus. I’ve learned to clear out all the people, places, things, and activities that have dragged me down in one way or another and have replaced them with people who energize me, places and things I enjoy and activities that motivate me into action such as yoga class (because I feel so good afterwards) and scuba diving (because of the sites I see and because it is fun). However, lately, I’ve noticed that I am sliding on a daily exercise program and so I want to nip that in the bud.

So, I finally took a tennis lesson from a friend who happens to be a tennis pro. I was really hesitant because a.) I have a belief that I have poor eye/hand coordination, b.) I don’t feel as in-shape as I’d like too and c.) am I ready to invest the time, energy and money into practicing, as well as playing tennis well?

Inspite of my reluctance, I enjoyed the lesson very much. I’m very grateful that my instructor is very patient and repetitive (ready, pivot, step, swing, follow-through). I need lots of repetition for my brain (and my body) to “get it”. I realized today after I took this lesson that I was stepping out of my comfort zone. I believe that stepping out of our comfort zones is a good thing for us to do because it “wakes us up” from being hypnotized by our daily routine. In Dr. Judith Orloff’s book, “Positive Energy” in Chapter 6 (The Sixth Prescription: Open Yourself To the Flow of Inspiration and Creativity” she says that “If you’re low on inspiration, take a good look at a daffodil or a turbulent sea. Watch the wind making love to scraggly oaks. Feel thunder rumble. Or get a contact joy from animals. All this transports you out of yourself”. I also believe that when we do something that takes us out of our comfort zone, that it naturally transports us out of “ourself” (i.e. ego) so that we can become open to inspiriation, creativity and ideas that can move us forward possibly in a direction that had never occurred to use before.

What is one thing that you are willing to commit to doing that is out of your “comfort zone” (and when I say out of your comfort zone, I don’t mean something that isn’t safe, I just mean out of your daily grind, whatever that is for you) that you can do today or possibly even over the weekend. For many of us in the United States we have a three day holiday for Memorial Day. What a great opportunity for you to explore doing something new! Try it and then let me hear from you and what you discovered about yourself.

Calling All Leaders

Lynn — Thu, 11 May 2006 01:22:17 +0000

So, I’m curious. What descriptors do you use to describe a leader? And also, what personality traits do you feel are important for a leader to have? And while we’re at it, who in your own world (work, home, play) do you consider a “leader” and why? How are they a leader? Why do you follow their lead? Are you a leader as well? If so, what are your leader-qualities?

Last night I was privileged to see Deepak Chopra speak to a rather small group of technology experts in Austin, Texas. He spoke about the “Soul of Leadership”. Deepak is an M.D., a Quantum Physicist, a philosopher, a theologian and a spiritualist. He began his hour and a half talk with an introduction to his life, how he grew up, his experience when he first came to the U.S. and so on through his connecting with neurobiologists and scientists as they explored how the human body at the cellular level works.

Believe me, listening to the first half hour of Deepak as he explains the exploration of consciousness was to my brain, much like how I experienced watching “What the Bleep Do We Know?” for the first time. I knew there was probably no possible way that my brain was going to be able to take in and synthesize what I was being told all in one fell swoop. So I sat back and enjoyed Deepak’s talk instead.

What he did talk alot about was the discontinuance (I need to go to his website to see if this is really a word he used or me just creating a word that sounds similar!) of the cells when they communicate. They go off and on and off and on and it is in the “off” time that they believe is where consciousness is found.

There we are as an audience, bound from one mind blowing explanation to the next and so when he ended up tying it all into leadership; well, let me say that I cannot tell you how we arrived there.

I can tell you though that I was left with the following:

1.) we are all connected

2.) we can either go to hell in a handbasket, alltogether or;

3.) make some global shifts in consciousness for the better

And all of these major changes can and most likely, will occur within the next 10 -1 5 years. So then the tie-in with leadership was the quality of the leaders that are needed as we go into the future. We really are being called as a species to get it that we need to grow up and mature in our way of treating each other as well as our planet. We need to find ways to work together for our survival.

One of the examples that Deepak gave was that technologically speaking, we are within 10 years of having the technology at our disposal to be able to reprogram an hand held computer device that could bring down a plane, or reprogram a computer system or bring down the telephones or shut down electrical plants. Without the maturity and WISDOM in place to understand how we impact things and how they impact us, where are we?

What if all the old rules that we grew up understanding such as choosing to go to war with a country that wronged us, imparting embargoes on countries, setting up border crossings, what if all of these did not fit us anymore as we go into this next phase of our development as humans?

And so what is your responsibility as a leader?

I believe first and foremost it is the leader’s responsibility to recognize and understand any needs and wants that they may have that have either gotten in the way of them being able to be fully present or could get in the way of them being fully present and get those suckers met. First get that if you don’t take responsibility for yourselves, no one else is going too.

Secondly, I am attracted to leaders who are willing to be real and human. Who understand that they are right here down on this planet like the rest of us, trying to find their way through life and maybe, just maybe, they’ve been given the gift to recognize more of their own gifts than most of us see in ourselves.

Thirdly, the leader for the next shift in mankind needs to be a collaborator. Needs to be someone who sees the unique gifts in other people and causes people to recognize their gifts so that they can use them to help humankind for the better.

I believe that everything in life has an answer. And the answers are all around us from the micro through to the macro. We keep seeing it over and over and over again.

My prayer for this Earth right now is that enough of us “wake up” to what we are here to do as spiritual human beings, that we see the road blocks, traps, hazards from time after historical time that we can recognize them NOW and not be doomed to repeat them.

I believe all of us can be leaders. But this kind of “leader” is not the leader of old. This kind of a leader is someone who is willing to stand up on their own two feet and walk ahead and take responsibility for the space they occupy on this Earth and ask, “What can I do now?” “How can I be of service?”