Guest Post: Roger Fransecky, Fortune 500 CEO Coach
It’s time to remind ourselves of a truth that provides context for this roiling year of declining markets, eroding 401K’s, and the daily challenge of leading and living: our lives contain both prose and poetry. It’s time to pay attention to our simple daily rituals and patterns, the stuff that keeps us fed, folding laundry, watering the plants and washing our cars, the Prose of living. But it’s also important to rediscover, perhaps for the first time, the Poetry of our lives, the simple joys and small events with our children, our family, our friends, and the small silences of each day that remind us of the precious moments we share together. And experience ourselves.
As I counsel CEO’s and Boards, and write and teach about leadership, the same principles apply. Leading has clear Prose elements-the explicit and trainable set of skills, competencies, habits, traits, behaviors leaders must possess to get their work done and produce the results required to complete their professional responsibilities. Absent the Prose, we aren’t effective.
But leading also requires that we become more effective and affected by our colleagues and partners - how we can be more present in our own lives, tap into our emotional intelligence to discover how authentic, trustworthy and self-aware we really are. We ask the question: if you are really a leader, is anyone following you? If so, why? What makes you trusted and trustworthy?
Making these new connections can make us feel more vulnerable, but it offers a glimpse into the way we really become leaders, not managers. The Poetry is about engagement, awareness, connection. It’s about surrendering our need to always prove our Prose skills, and instead, to step into the experience…dare I say, blank space…between knowing and uncertainty. That move is like the first awkward step of a dance we’ve forgotten. But it’s essential to discover new skills and a tender level of engagement to the center of our leading. And living.
Allow me to suggest some simple first steps as you prepare to walk into your own hero’s journey. I invite you, with affection and respect, to consider these:
CHOOSE AN ORDINARY DAY to begin. In Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” Emily Webb is invited to choose one day to return to Earth to see what she left behind. Wisely, she chooses “one ordinary day” and discovers a luminous collection of simple moments…from breakfast to a conversation long forgotten, each one of which reminds her what life offers up in the gift of small moments.
TAKE TIME FOR YOURSELF
Whenever I am nudged to do this, when I have slipped into too many scheduled days, hours spent between airplanes, or in checking off numbing lists that velcro intentions and actions in the illusion that I am really moving something important along, I have to pause to ask myself: what do I really care about? What would I rather be doing? Who do I miss seeing? What would feel good now? I have to get out of my head, and enter my body…where so much wisdom rests. A walk, a warm bath, sustained silence, all remind me of the elegance of each moment. All we really have is moments. Who steals them away? What thief of time do we invite in?
DON’T FORGET TO PLAY:
In his new book, PLAY (Penguin, 2009), Psychiatrist Stuart Brown reminds us that a life absent of play invites confusion, and sometimes, the darker gift of depression. If we do not play, says Brown, especially during these times of stress, we can lose our essential equilibrium. There’s lots of ways to play, from humor and collecting, to making art, exploring or dancing. I confess this is one I have to work on as I move from grieving to re-engagement, but I am taking small steps each day to have more “fun.”
TAKE TIME TO EXPERIENCE FIRST SPRING:
In the middle of America, Spring brings wild swings in weather, from snow to 70 degree temperatures within days. Spring is all about change and tentative new growth. Winter’s debris may clutter the roadside and muck the brooks, but new green is already in sight in protected corners, green grass, the tips of crocuses and daffodils.
Amidst all of the depressing economic news, Spring reminds us that life persists. Life reproduces. It animates growth and evolves into a million new forms if we only pause to look. This miraculous periodic resurgence of life, this annual invitation to grow and change, reminds us that we are a miracle, too.
Roger Fransecky, Ph.D, is CEO of The Apogee Group, Inc.
