Lead Forward! Win the Race with Wolves: Ten Powerful Steps & Bonus Links
© Irene Becker, Just Coach It-The 3Q Edge™| Reach-Resonance-Results
I am committed to helping smart people and organizations lead & communicate forward smarter, faster and happier because I believe in our power to use the challenges we face to build the 3Q strengths that transform challenges into solutions that help us LEAD forward in our lives, our work, our organizations…our world.
“The best way to predict your future is to create it.” Abraham Lincoln
Living, learning and leading forward means winning the race with five hungry wolves that are chasing the best and brightest among us:
- Wolf 1. Financial (job, career, corporate challenges) that can keep in stasis, on hyperdrive, or travelling in reverse
- Wolf 2. Communication breakdowns that crush or destroy our individual and collective potential
- Wolf 3. Personal challenges that impede our true potential and erode confidence, engagement, empowerment
- Wolf 4. Interpersonal conflict that destroys the personal relationships we need to succeed
- Wolf 5. Health crisis; either mental or physical that has us stuck
Sadly too many of us are losing the race. Clearly, it is time to turn this around! Will you be a success statistic or a stress statistic? Here are facts YOU need to know U.S. corporations spend in excess of $10 billion dollars a year on “executive” and $300 billion a year on “general workplace” stress related physical, emotional ailments, illnesses, addictions, absenteeism, discord, dis-engagement, presenteeism. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization forecasts that stress will be the major cause of disability by the year 2020. The U.S. divorce rate has skyrocketed to 70% of marriages. European and Canadian marriages have a 50% divorce rate. The challenges that we face individually and collectively are written on the windows of our lives, our communities, our workplaces, our governments and our world. Learning to manage stress is critical, but it is no longer enough. We need to learn to use the challenges, changes, stressors, even failures we face to optimize and catalyze our individual and collective potential. Pie in the sky? Think again. Sharing my story, the genesis of my 3Q work.
YES, we can win the race with wolves; yes we can live, learn and lead forward….one person, one organization, one community at a time. Each shift forward will take us from ME to WE, from a focus on our individuality to a new balance between independence and interdependence that drives our best selves, best work, best organizations…and ultimately our best world. Success is a 3Q equation, with three powerful components that draw strength/success from each other. It is an alignment of enhanced IQ (intelligence)-EQ (emotional mastery) and SQ (values alignment/positive purpose or spiritual quotient. These are my favorite steps because they are steps you can take and use in small ways. Small consistent steps that create a BIG difference in your life, your work, your people, your organization…your world.
1. Refuse to be a victim or a victimizer. Victims cannot recognize their own power; victimizers feel truly powerless and can only get empowered by abusing others. Our ability to be a victim or victimizer is the easiest course of action, the default pattern that arises when we are confronted by fear, stress or challenges. Resetting this default pattern is doable for most people. We all slip into the victim or victimizer role at times, because it is perhaps an automatic default, a need or desire to have someone give us all the answers, or to quell our own fear about not being able to by in total control of our lives. Realizing me are slipping, and make a thought course correction that allows us to become free of the victim or victimizer role is transformational.
2. Turn failure, challenges and stressors around by making everything a learning and growing experience. Change your headspace, think counter-intuitively because success is often born of failure or challenges. Develop an attitude for gratitude, not only for what you have but for the very challenges you face. Human history tells us that our greatest inventions were the results of our greatest challenges. Personal history tells us that more often than not our greatest learning, our most important personal evolution occurs when we have faced an incredible struggle or challenge and come out the other side with our head, heart and values intact. Cultivate the art of failing forward! Model failing forward, use it to transform failures into positive learning experiences.
3. You are your thoughts. Use them carefully to live, learn and lead forward. Get provocative with your thoughts by turning them around! Refocus, repurpose. See challenges and strength with NEW eyes. Learn how to R-E-A-C-H™ (Redirect focus-Empower Confidence-Optimize Potential-Harvest Results) Understand that your world is your thoughts; your consciousness creates your world. Most of us have the ability to control our thoughts, to develop our minds and give orders to our brain that help us live, communicate and lead forward smarter, faster and happier. Neuroscience is teaching us that neuroplasticity; the ability to rewrite our brains is real. Neurogenesis has been located in the hippocampus and we are at the cusp of discovering new ways of tapping into the incredible ability of our minds to help our brains optimize their potential.
4. Drown out the noise and refocus on what is truly important. What is your end game? What do you really want from your life, your relationships, your job/your career? Dig deeper in order to get clarity on YOUR purpose. Find it, embrace it and use it to lead forward. We each have a unique purpose that drives our best thoughts, best actions and best outcomes. Every purpose is important to our individual and collective success and happiness. Take time to reflect upon what you really want. I believe that what we all truly want is love and a sense that we have something important to contribute. Find out what love really means to you, and remember that your true purpose is a purpose that is founded in sustainability, in the ability to do something that creates value for yourself and others. The value you contribute can be as simple a smile and empathy for others that contribute to a happy home or workplace or as complex and challenging as leading an organization or country. What remains critical is finding your true purpose and recognizing it in your daily thoughts and actions.
5. Get happier and more fulfilled by taking your ego out of the equation and getting rid of toxic inputs, environments and people. By ego, I mean that sense of having to be validated by external things and people. Servant leaders serve the greatest good, and leave footprints that will be followed by others are not driven by ego, but by greatest good. If you are a servant leader, lead forward by finding new ways to inspire and engage the best in others. If you are not a servant leader, find a leader whose work resonates with your heart and fill your thoughts with the thoughts of an actual or historical leader whose words speak to your highest power and greatest good. Start focusing on the words of people whose highest values and words resonate with your truest purpose, your highest values. Focus forward, and you will start to discover and get rid of toxicity in your thoughts, environment and relationships.
6. Develop a community of purpose. In a social world, in the new age of innovation success is achieved through and with the collaboration of others. Whether you want to do well at your job, build your career, department, business unit, organization, community or country you are impotent without the collaboration of those you can trust and those who share your values and objectives. On a personal level we all need a community of purpose, a core group of friends and advisors in who share our values, understand and applaud our objectives and will be there to add the critical human touch, the human heart to our daily lives. We all need a community of refuge where we can tell our truth, share our wins and challenges in total candor, knowing that we will be accepted with the confidentiality and empathy we need to lead forward. On a macro level communities of purpose represent employees, constituents and stakeholders who share our values and objectives; people who will help us champion the cause and lead forward.
7. Find and trust your positive purpose because purpose = profit, and profit can only be attained through trust. Trust in self builds our ability to learn and relearn faster and better. Trust in self allows us to develop trust in other people, people who are trustworthy. When we understand our positive purpose, we are attracted and attract others who are on the same path. When we develop enhanced EQ (emotional intelligence) we build stronger social intelligence. Stronger social intelligence leads to enhance engagement, ideation, collaboration. When we develop stronger social intelligence that is aligned with our highest purpose, we build stronger SQ and start to develop relationships with people who inspire us, people whom we inspire because we share values and objectives that take us forward together, and help us leap tall mountains and small mole hills of challenge that would otherwise break our spirit or determination.
8. Build constructive discontent. Hone your ability to feel something difficult (even painful), while taking on the role of the participant observer. There is a body of research supporting the power of re-framing, but building constructive discontent is more than re-framing. Constructive discontent is also learning to use what you are feeling and thinking to become the participant observer by witnessing what you are feeling but not being held hostage by the feelings. Taking the role of the participant observer can help you step out of the immediate situation, watch the emotions, let them pass, and re-focus on your true goal or objective. Learning to be the participant observer in your life, in your relationships in your career is not only useful it is one of the most powerful tools in winning the race against wolves. It is a critical skill that can be learned, and it can change your life.
9. Recharge, refocus, re-purpose. Get mindful in as little as 3 minutes a day. Put your brain an alpha state three times a day. Busy, stressed, time starved? Well, you still have time to take a couple of minutes three times a day. Find them and use them. Here is a simple but transformational mindfulness exercise that works even for those who have tried meditation or meditative practices and failed. Caveat, using “The Pause” will help you feel better, live better, learn better and pushing yourself to do “The Pause” three times a day, to get into an alpha state will help you develop the important art of focusing your mind. Critical, helpful and transformational. Yes, small steps done consistently yield BIG results. Here are more 3 min tools
10. Embrace change, embrace your incredible ability to adapt, learn and relearn. See change with new eyes, eyes that help you reset default thinking patterns thinking. Recognize that change is not a problem; it is our greatest opportunity to adapt, learn, re-learn, evolve and lead forward. Our intrinsic or automatic response is to fear change, react to change, balk at change. So what? When we recognize that while this pattern served us well in the caves but will not take us forward today, we can embrace change with positivity. Push yourself to make a positive change in thinking, doing in a routine action every day. A small change is a big change. We cannot live, learn and lead forward without embracing change as our greatest power because surviving and thriving means adaptation; it means adapting the way we think, communicate and do (IQ-EQ) with our most important values and purpose (SQ).
Success is a new journey of collaboration where we must share skills, knowledge and ideas in order to define and redefine best strategies, best practices in alignment with our highest values. Success is creating value for others, and this value extends itself to our clients, co-workers, constituents and communities. Purpose = profit in a multiplicity of ways because the strength of our positive purpose is the bedrock of individual and collective evolution, growth and sustainability. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the reflection of personal social responsibility (PSR). It is predicated on a new and important consciousness of empathetic leadership and management; a realization that we are each our brother’s keeper and that we cannot survive and thrive without a new focus that take us from ME to WE.
Success is a 3Q equation, with three powerful components that draw strength/success from each other. It is an alignment of enhanced IQ (intelligence)-EQ (emotional mastery) and SQ (values alignment/positive purpose or spiritual quotient. EQ (emotional intelligence/mastery) is a learned skill that can be taught, coached and mentored so that we optimize the power of our emotions to drive creativity, ideation, communication, collaboration. SQ (spiritual quotient/values/positive purpose) is the bedrock of our individual and collective strength and hope.
Our ability to do good, be good and develop good habits, practices, relationships, organizations and communities is our greatest challenge and our greatest strength. The secret to success is timeless; success means creating value for others. Embrace your ability to use the changes, challenges and opportunities you face to live, learn and lead forward. Get re-inspired by what you can do, can be, can create, can contribute. Look not for what you can get, but focus on what you can learn, relearn, share and contribute every day in every way.
Turn failures and challenges into a new focus that will take you forward. Time is our greatest declining resource, learning to use our time to optimize and catalyze our potential to live, learn and lead forward is critical, and doable. Every positive step forward, every small positive, consistent step in the right direction will have a powerful impact on your life and the lives of others.
Pick a wolf that is chasing you and decide to win the race. Empower yourself, engage yourself, and inspire yourself to the apex of your potential. Live more, live better, learn and relearn faster by embracing the challenges you face as opportunities to grow, change, evolve and adapt in alignment with your most positive purpose and values.
And, if you get discouraged, remember that discouragement, and hardships are part of the human journey. They are difficult parts, they are painful parts that you can transform and use to fulfill your potential. Altruistic? Yes. Optimistic? Yes. Empathetic? Yes. I am all of the above, and have grown to this place by facing a host of changes, challenges and crises that helped me find my 3Q Edge. Today, I have dedicated my life to helping people and organizations find their 3Q Leadership Edge™ because together we can live, lead and learn forward. Together we can develop communities of living, learning and doing that surpass our wildest imaginations in breadth, depth and scope. Together we can make a difference.
Celebrate your ability to be the difference and make a difference, nothing is more important. Building a better self, better team, better business unit, better organization and a better world starts with YOU. We each have a critical role to play in our best life, best work environment and best world. A role that starts when we decide to win the race with the wolves that are chasing us, one positive purposeful step at a time. A role that is solidified when we decide to become part of the solution by living, learning and leading forward every day in every way! Yes we can!
More on winning the race with wolves? More on living, learning and leading forward? You Betcha!
The Leadership Compendium: Leading Forward in the Face of Change, Challenges, Complexity
Five Ways to Lead Forward by Championing the Challenge
What Does Leadership Really Mean?
Goodness to Greatness Leadership-Seven Steps from Me to WE
Five Ways to Take Control of Your Potential
Ten Ways to Lead Forward in the Face of Complexity & Change
The Happiness Compendium
Turning Conflict/Communication Problems Around
Building Constructive Discontent
3 Minute or less Cool Tools to Recharge-Refocus-Repurpose : Whole Brain Leadership
I am committed to helping smart people and organizations communicate & LEAD FORWARD smarter, faster and happier
because I believe in our power to use what is to create what can be in our lives, our people, our organizations…our world.
Irene Becker | Just Coach It-The 3Q Edge™ Executive Coaching, Consulting & Training with a 3Q Edge™ | Reach-Resonance-Results
Face to face and/or virtually by telephone, video conferencing or skype!
irene@justcoachit.com Twitter @justcoachit Tel: (1) 416-671-4726 Skype: beckerirene
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