The role of acceptance in change

"We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."

-- Carl Gustav Jung

This applies to our condemnation of aspects of ourselves as well as external circumstance. How many times have you heard someone condemn or curse something about themselves, pledging to change it out of a desparate need to be different, only to find that the negative energy applied to condemning one's self offsets and neutralizes all of the positive flow of energy that change could release. You may have heard the expression, "What you resist, persists." Resistance is the opposite of acceptance. Resistance attracts, in fact requires, the force which it resists, by definition. They are entangled in a dance of oppression and struggle. Remove the resistance, and the opposing force ceases to exist in its previous form and can be redirected in new ways.

Leadership as lawn care

An organization's true culture and values is reflected more in its employees' day-to-day conversations - behind closed doors, in the hallways, and at the coffee machine - than in its leadership's carefully crafted rhetoric. Sometimes leaders delude themselves into thinking they can eliminate uncomfortable and/or counterproductive noise in their organizations by either mandating it out of existence or ignoring it altogether. They might be tempted to loudly and publicly "declare it unacceptable," hoping it will just go away by decree, or they might just stick their heads in the sand (out of sight, out of mind). Either of these approaches tends to send it underground, where it often turns into elusive and widespread melodrama, the root of which becomes lost in the chaos.

Preventing this dilemma is kind of like tending to your lawn. To have a really nice lawn, you take proactive measures to promote grass growth and prevent weed growth. In business, promoting "healthy grass growth" is a
twofold process. Your cultural and leadership development is like the seeding and fertilizing, while mentoring partnerships designed to keep that learning alive is like the regular watering. You then diligently watch for weeds (uncontrolled growth of anything that is inconsistent with a healthy lawn), identify them quickly (name and deal with issues immediately, once they shows up), ensuring that they're removed quickly and at the root (getting to the root cause of issues, rather than exhausting yourself fighting surface-level symptoms); otherwise they just keep coming back and spreading. To treat your lawn for weeds after they are popping up everywhere - a sign that they are actively destroying the roots of your lawn - by either insisting that your lawn be healthy or hoping it will take care of itself, is not very effective.

If leadership is committed to employees being disciplined, focused, and passionate about their work on behalf of customers and shareholders, it is vitally important that leaders be disciplined, focused, and passionate about their leadership work on behalf of employees. Walk your talk in doing your seeding, feeding, and weeding.

Life as a prison break-out

Here's a summary of my experience of "life as a life coach" yesterday, dramatically punctuated by a visit with a scared young man who, after his court appearance tomorrow, might be going to prison for a long while:

As young children we are real and alive and filled with awe and curiosity. We try things, learning through trial and error - a perfectly natural way to learn. We make "mistakes," some of them big ones. We're told and reminded over and over again that mistakes are "bad." We get confused and believe we're being told that we're bad. People we love make mistakes, and we get confused again and think it might be because we're bad. We start to believe we're bad. We learn to fear the world. Our fear attracts more mistakes, which cause more fear. It all feeds on itself until we forget how to be real and alive. We go to work building our prison to punish ourselves. We call it our life, but it's not, it's our self-made punishment. For some of us it looks like alcoholism, for some overwork, for some unrequited love, for some it's actually a prison. We hurt people, especially the ones we love and who love us the most, in the day-to-day yardplay in the prison of our minds, until we wake up one day or meet someone like Andy Dufrense in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, who startles us awake with a line like, "Get busy living or get busy dying...". Becoming real and alive begins again when we dismantle our prison from the inside, set ourselves and our loved ones free, and walk out into the sunshine and fresh air with a huge grin on our face. No matter when it happens for you or what you must go through to get there, E., I wish that for you.

The keys to creating

Next Monday I'm helping three men and a woman get together and create some shared professional endeavor from their common dreams. These are four powerhouse human beings who I admire very much, and who have great gifts to offer the world, and who have a deep love for family and community. I thought it would serve them to dedicate these messages of encouragement and insight from some great minds and hearts. Take the time this week and over the weekend, guys, to steep yourselves in these messages in anticipation of Monday:

You are exactly what you think you are - no more, no less - and you achieve exactly what you are committed to."

-- James Allen

"The biggest factor in creating your success is you. Knowledge, information, skills and resources all play a part, to be sure. Yet success hinges mostly on your imagination, your self-image, and your will to make it happen."

-- Ralph Marston

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"

-- Robert Schuller

Dare to live.

"A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inward courage dares to live."

-- Lao-tzu

It takes a lot of courage to live your heart's dream and your soul's passion in the world. At first it feels like there's an overwhelming amount of external resistance. However, a funny thing happens when you "just do it" anyway. When others see you giving yourself permission every day, while respecting them and their choices in the process, they feel invited and liberated to explore that same freedom for themselves. You become first a beacon and then a guide. You also find that what you once thought was others' resistance to your freedom first seems to diminish in strength and then vanishes altogether in the space you've created through the living of your dream. "Just doing it" strengthens your belief that you can and secures the world's cooperation and support.

Experiencing you

A line that just fell out of my mouth (or off my fingertips) in an early morning IM chat with J.C. yesterday, and afterwards we both said, "Oh, that's good, I think I'll share it with some people.":

"There's nothing about you that is not good enough or needs fixing. There is simply the removal of artificial obstacles to your experience of you."

Leadership community-building at work

Only when a leadership community gets together in an open forum and deals with its most difficult and painful issues and conflicts, does it begin to truly know itself and its purpose. Within this healthy atmosphere, the entire community is set free to work on strategy, action plans, business goals, contracts, etc. The community will learn that, if violence within is admitted and addressed, it is far less destructive than if it is repressed. When violence is repressed among the leadership community, that violence will leak into the mainstream of the organization like a poison, after which it will be very difficult to eradicate. When the leadership does its community-building work, the deepest human connections and intentions are uncovered in a way that truly honors all, and outrageous energy is unleashed to accomplish great things.