Let's continue with the second post of three regarding Leadership Capacity 7: Reset.
To Reset allows us to realign with life itself, and to do so as quickly or as often as we need to. It isn’t something we need to schedule (though we may). Time is not on our side. The rate of change is moving exponentially.
What is fascinating about all of this is that to master one’s self means to master emotion, and therefore the mind. There is a very tight correlation between time and emotion. And while time can be measured in ticks on the clock, and we can measure it with atomic clock precision, time is man made. And it does not exist. Time is relative. Einstein proved this. When you reach a point of mastery in working with emotion, you begin to bend time. You can use the flexing of the relative nature of time to your advantage. I will get to that in a moment.
First, I want to pause and acknowledge that of all the seven leadership capacities, I write with the least authenticity about this one. So if you don’t buy this leadership capacity, Reset--well, I cannot blame you. I wouldn’t blame you because I cannot make these words I am writing ring true. I cannot infuse the words with the power of my own experience. All I can say is that I have a feeling for this capacity. More than that, perhaps. A yearning.
On the other hand, I do know that what the way I have produced results in the past no longer works for me. My old approaches have become incremental, and incremental neither will enable me to get to where I am headed nor does it have heart for me any longer. So the leadership capacities of Evolve and Reset are critical to me.
Why have I made the least progress in developing the capacity to Reset? I think it is because it is the loneliest capacity of all. And perhaps the most fearful.
“The sum of a man's problems come from his inability to be alone in a silent room.” Voltaire
To Reset, I imagine, brushes us right up against something that we don’t know how to take in. And I don’t know enough about that to write of it. So I will cut this short here and leave Leadership Capacity 7: Reset where I’ve brought it to now, for that is all I really know about it—it is just a feeling for me at this point and only a belief in the potential of this capacity.
Yet I do have an idea—I have just remembered a quotation that imparts to me the feeling of Reset. I'd like to share it with you, along with some closing thoughts in my next post.
(c)2008 Otis Woodard
