Behavior of the Week: Lead Mindfully
According to OPM guidelines, a successful leader “manages self,” i.e., “sets well-defined and realistic personal goals; displays a high level of initiative, effort, and commitment towards completing assignments in a timely manner; works with minimal supervision; is motivated to achieve; demonstrates responsible behavior; assesses and recognizes own strengths and weaknesses; pursues self-development.”
Given the importance of mindfulness and self-awareness in PerfectCoaches, these personal characteristics reflect a self-awareness that sets the stage for mindful leadership, the capacity to grasp a situation holistically to include the people, the problem, the goals.
Perhaps more importantly, mindful leadership involves a personal commitment to motivate others to accomplish a common goal. Our everyday experience and numerous surveys show that leadership skills are highly valued. Many, perhaps most, people are called upon to lead at some time or another.
Within PerfectCoaches, the behavioral stack for leadership rests on other more fundamental skills and habits. For example, delegation is a key leadership skill, so ask yourself if your To-do list includes delegating tasks to others. Leaders usually understand the point of view of others, and that is a general best practice.
Focused awareness of self, the views of others, and the precise nature of the situation improves leadership. Whether you make a suggestion, delegate a task, or set the pace for activity, be mindful of how you help define a goal that the group then accomplishes. One overall theme that the biographies of all great leader’s stress is the value of simply staying focused on the ultimate goal, to lead and influence the thoughts and actions of others. A Feedback question would be: Did you see the whole situation each time you made a decision today? If yes, why were you successful? If no, why not? What can you learn to improve your mindful leadership in situations like the one you encountered?
So, it would be possible to immerse oneself in the lives of specific leaders or others, and imagine having a dialog with them, even to the point that they work with you on your leadership skills in everyday situations. You could do a similar thought experiment to identify habits for “greatness in everyday life.”
Is such a thing possible? We can do advanced thought experiments to assess the possibility. Let’s consider four very different writers who provided insight concerning how to live our everyday lives:
· Dale Carnegie, an American lecturer, and writer popular in the first part of the 20th century.
· Stephen Covey, also an American, popular toward the end of the 20th Century.
· Viktor Frankel, a psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, and
· Rumi, a thirteenth-century Muslim mystic.
Imagine working with Dale Carnegie, one of the leading 20th century figures in personal development at both individual and corporate levels. His advice on working, learning, and living life is timeless and encompasses self-improvement, persuasion, salesmanship, and interpersonal skills. His courses were famous and are still offered today.
Suppose he was helping you build a “Dale Carnegie habit stack” by reading your Journal, constantly asking questions that would remind you of the principles he set forth in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People.He might ask you if you had considered these suggestions for “how to win people to your way of thinking:”
1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
2. Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say, "You're wrong."
3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically;
4. Begin in a friendly way.
5. Get the other person saying "yes, yes" immediately.
6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
8. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
10. Appeal to the nobler motives.
11. Dramatize your ideas and
12. Throw down a challenge.
In a similar way, you could use an inner dialog to master not just specific habits suggested in books, videos, and other sources, but rather entire, holistic approaches like the one offered by Dale Carnegie. Another comprehensive approach would be to master Stephen R. Covey's “seven habits of highly effective people” as discussed in the highly-acclaimed book by that title.
You could begin by going down the list one at a time, saying “Got It!” in your journal after you mastered each one. You would be building a “Stephen Covey habit stack” that would eventually include all seven habits. The habits, with some commentary in parenthesis to show their relationship to habits discussed earlier, are:
1. Be proactive (you design your own life, so make a habit of taking responsibility for it).
2. Begin with the end in mind (as in the PerfectCoaches question “Where am I going?” and the best practice “do each thing for a reason”)
3. Put first things first (do what is both important and urgent first).
4. Think win-win (outcomes that benefit everybody).
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood (mindful, empathetic listening as discussed earlier).
6. Synergize (bring multiple ideas and forces together).
7. Sharpen the saw (i.e., continuously improve mind, body, and spirit, as advocated in the PerfectCoaches “healthy living” best practices).
Like Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey built an industry around a core set of best practices, and the thought experiment of maintaining a dialog with either of them could be based on their simple success formulas.
For a more complex journey, consider two writers from two unique times of human history and different points of view: Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the twentieth century Holocaust and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, and Rumi, the thirteenth-century Islamic philosopher.
Viktor Frankel lived through and observed first-hand what was arguably the cruelest institution ever created by man, the Holocaust. Unlike the person-on-person barbarism of the Islamic State of more recent history, the Holocaust fully embraced 20th-century concepts of mass production for the mass-extermination of millions.
Frankel, a Jewish physician, was a survivor of the concentration camps. He observed that those who survived the Holocaust and its concentration camps tended to believe they could still do something important with their lives. They had hope and a vision for life outside of the boundaries of their current condition. Contemplation of the future helped move them beyond the present. These survivors believed that their lives once did, and still could, have meaning. To quote Frankel:
Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation of life…This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and will be satisfied by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.
The essence of Frankel’s viewpoint is that freedom, in many respects, belongs to an individual.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
The concept that freedom is a habit of thought can also be seen in the poetry of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balch-Rumi, better known today as Rumi.
Rumi was a Muslim theologian and mystic. Although his work has become popular in the U.S. in recent years, he is perhaps best known for the dance of the Whirling Dervishes, a physical statement of moving toward “the perfect.” According to the story, one day, as he walked through a city, he was overtaken by joy. The inner experience of joy was so strong that it moved him to spread his arms and begin spinning in circles, whirling. Thisbecame the groundwork for the dance and related Sufi meditation form that is practiced today.
Rumi poems contain what can be thought of as a mystical tolerance of diverse beliefs. Rumi’s writings also emphasize the importance of connecting one’s self with the world and understanding the consequences of both thought and action. In If though wilt be observant, he says:
If thou wilt be observant and vigilant, thou wilt see at every moment the response to thy action. Be observant if thou wouldst have a pure heart, for something is born to thee in consequence of every action.
Rumi also knew the importance of having a vision that keeps us moving forward. His poem One Who Wraps Himself reads:
Constant, slow movement teaches us to keep working,
Like a small creek that stays clear,
That doesn’t stagnate, but finds a way
Through numerous details, deliberately.
As writers, Frankl and Rumi drew on deep convictions about what human life means and, more importantly, what the world is truly about. Even the most advanced thought experiment involving Viktor Frankl or Rumi need not be mystical or complicated. On the other hand, an imagined conversation with them could be very informative and span the entire realm of philosophy:
· ethics (what is morally right?),
· aesthetics (what is beauty?),
· epistemology and logic (what is the basis of knowledge?), even
· metaphysics (what is the nature of reality?).
Yet it is also true that both can provide useful feedback to you about how to live each day fully and mindfully. As Rumi says, your journey “stays clear” by constantly moving forward, “finding a way through numerous details, deliberately.”