The Fires of the Forge

The Seven Capacities of Leadership Overview--Part 14

I can only imagine what aligning with and cooperating with life might be like. What would it be like to muster enough courage to step over my fear and turn myself over to life, to enable life to work through me?

What would it be like to become attuned enough to hear life’s whisper through the drone of my own mind and emotions, and have and hold the focused intent required to bring that whisper through the storm and land it, right here, now? How much less effort would it take than the constant struggle, and how much more could I produce, how much more could I serve, how much more powerfully could I love? How much more powerfully could I lead?

What helps me imagine that is a particular scripture. I hope that if it moves you that you will let it infect you, to run through your synapses with no need to understand what is rippling through you. Perhaps you, too, will hold a question: what it is to toil not and yet accomplish more than you can imagine? If you can be catch the feeling in this scripture, even the tiniest glimpse of the possibility in it for you, and then set out to master your self, your feelings will guide you. That’s my belief, anyway. That is where I am headed my self, I hope.

“And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Matthew 6:28-6:29

The Seven Capacities of Leadership Overview--Part 13

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

The Seven Capacities of Leadership Overview--Part 12

Now we will explore Leadership Capacity 7: Reset. I mentioned several posts ago I considered calling Leadership Capacity 7: Reset something different. Something like Renew. I didn’t and I want to tell you why.

Stephen Covey in his seminal work The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People listed as a habit, Sharpen the Saw. That sounds a lot like renewal, doesn’t it? I don’t take exception to that as a needed habit. In fact, I agree with all seven habits.

Yet I am not writing of habits here. Hopefully you’re on to that. I am writing about capacities. And while you need the habit of renewing yourself so you do sharpen your saw, the leaders at the vanguard of the new leadership will find the habit alone to be insufficient. They will need the capacity to Reset.

"So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death."
  Time by Pink Floyd

If you are going to lead into this unknown future we face, more than a good mind, controlled emotion and a collaborative spirit will be required. You will need your feelings to guide you. You will need to be able to feel your way through the dark. You will need to make split-second decisions in defining moments. You will also need to be able to pause when every fiber in your body is screaming at you to act.

In short, you must attune to life.

To attune to life, develop a quietness of life. You must know how to stop and listen to life and to your own self. That will renew you, yes. But more than that, it will allow you a pause to reflect on what has happened, what you’ve learned and what you will now do differently. You will know things that you have no reason to know and you won't even know why you know.

Few people stop to reflect and truly learn more than once or twice in a lifetime. Some never.

A warrior can do it in an instant, and therefore as many times as s/he needs to in a day, even within a battle. The sun never sets on a warrior where s/he has not learned something and therefore goes to sleep that night different.

I feel leaders will become warriors, warriors of the highest sense. Warriors, I believe, in learning to work with time learn to bend time, and in the flexing of it, they create a wrinkle in time—a moment, a day, a season—and in that wrinkle they Reset.

In our next post, we will complete that last thought.

(c)2008 Otis Woodard