As I’ve written previously in Leadership 101 and Why Most Corporations Homogenize Remarkable People, great leadership is more about trust than it is about charisma. Too often these days, leaders are chosen for their alpha tendencies and star appeal rather than their competence, vision and ability to motivate a team. Throughout my experience, I’ve observed five unspoken rules top leaders follow to earn trust—and draw great performances from their teams. In each and every case, they:
Start with a vision—Great leaders have to know where the company is heading. People trust their judgment and their ability to see through the politics and have a sense of the right course. Employees gain trust that their leader knows what the company is going to look like and they are energized by the picture he or she is painting.
Speak with actions rather than words – Quite simply, this means the best leaders practice what they preach. Employees have to believe they really know what they’re doing and that they’re capable. Leaders must be truly competent and willing to roll up their sleeves to do what needs to be done. If they do, they earn trust.
Hear the good, the bad and the ugly—Great leaders don’t shoot the messenger or encourage sugar coating—they listen to the people who’ll talk straight about a situation. They want people to be comfortable bringing bad news. At the same time, they encourage people to follow each problem with a thoughtful discussion of opportunities.
Have the “get it” factor—People must trust that a leader understands them. In other words, not only do they get “it,” but they get “them.” Leaders understand what it’s really like to work in the current environment and they have people’s interests at heart. The best leaders are not always liked by everyone, but they are respected.
Keep a backbone rather than assign blame—Leaders have to be comfortable making tough decisions. There’s a lot of weight on their shoulders, but some of it can be shared because they know how to pick an excellent team. Top leaders know how to take responsibility and do. If something goes wrong under their watch, they look in the mirror and accept the blame rather than pointing their finger at everyone else.
As far too many of us have observed, there are a lot of charismatic people in senior positions who are not great leaders. They may be good on their feet, but they lack judgment and competence. They may be decisive, but they lack vision and insight. A true leader brings out the best in people and leads by example. They’re rare and always manage to stand out from the crowd, but that’s because, first and foremost, they’re willing to stand in it.
“What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” —Napolean Hill
JK Rowling is one of my all-time favorites. I find her to be very down-to-earth and inspirational, and have written about her before in Failing Your Way to Success. Just recently, I was watching her interview with Oprah and was struck by a comment she made about when she was writing the first Harry Potter book. The conversation went like this:
Rowling: [After writing The Sorcerer's Stone] I had this moment where I suddenly thought – It was like another voice speaking to me and the voice said “the difficult thing is going to get published. If it gets published it will be huge.”
Winfrey: Wow.
Rowling: And that is exactly what it was.
Winfrey: So there was some hint that – the voice had said to you –
Rowling: Well, the thing is you’ve got to believe, haven’t you?
Winfrey: Yes.
Rowling: You know – I was not the world’s most secure person. I wasn’t someone with an enormous amount of – in fact, I’d say I was someone with not much self-belief at all and yet in this one thing in my life I believed. That was the one thing in my life. I felt ‘I can tell a story’.
In Professional Destiny, I’ve written about the importance of having a vision and about having “fearless faith.” Another way of saying this is that in order to achieve you must have 1) a burning desire, and 2) 100% belief that you can do, or have, what you desire. Belief is where many of us fall short. Usually it’s why things don’t happen, even when we want them. We have to believe that it will happen even if we don’t see the evidence right in front of us. At any given point, we only see a fraction of the possibilities, but there can be something great looming just off our radar screen. In fact, most great things come as surprises. As I wrote in my book, “you don’t get to know how it gets done. You don’t get to know what is going to happen either. ‘How’ or ‘what’ are not the questions—you just need to know that you are going to do it.”
Rowling said that story telling was the one thing she absolutely believed she could do and look what happened… she became the first self-made billionaire author with over 450 million copies of her books sold. It’s a great reminder that the combination of conceiving and believing truly leads to achieving.
To watch the full 40 minute JK Rowling interview with Oprah, click here.
Professional Destiny is about finding purpose and meaning in our profession. It’s about realizing a deeper level of satisfaction in what we do. It’s about not accepting status quo, or allowing ourselves to become complacent.
In other words, we don’t get to numb out.
Just recently I saw this TEDx talk by Brene Brown about the importance of vulnerability and its link to connection, purpose and meaning. I found it fascinating. And although we come at it from different angles, I saw the similarities between the quest to become whole-hearted as she discusses, and the quest to discover purpose and meaning in what we do.
In my book Professional Destiny, I wrote: ”Many people confide in me that at some point in their careers, they feel as if they’ve come to a fork in the road. They have reached a level of success and confidence and now they need to make a choice between pursuing an unknown road toward fulfillment, or choosing the familiar path that feels secure. One client so aptly put it, ‘I know I can go work for company XYZ and make six figures if I want a mind-numbing job, but I don’t. Now what do I do?’ It’s a challenging choice. On the one hand, if you decide to bite the bullet and pursue a deep yearning that you have, you are often venturing into the unknown—especially if it’s very different from the career you’ve known. You are venturing into unfamiliar territory and you can expect to feel significant anxiety over this. If, on the other hand, you settle and choose not to take that next step forward, you can expect to feel a deep-seated sense of disappointment followed by a sense of lethargy and possibly a low-level or high-level depression. Many people try to mask these feelings by keeping themselves ‘numbed’ through alcohol, prescription drugs or anything that takes their focus away from the fact that they are ignoring a message from their soul. Others simply try to keep frantically busy and convince themselves that they are so important, that they don’t have time to notice the uneasiness from within.”
Brene adds another twist from her research and perspective on those who live whole-heartedly. She says in this excerpt from her talk: “We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability. I think there’s evidence—and it’s not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it’s a huge cause—we are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. The problem is—and I learned this from the research—that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can’t say, here’s the bad stuff. Here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment, I don’t want to feel these. I’m going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. I don’t want to feel these… you can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.”
So you can’t choose to numb the hard stuff—the uncertainty, the fear, the risks, the vulnerability—and expect to find a deep level of satisfaction and true creative expression in your life. In other words you’re not living your Professional Destiny and you’re not living wholeheartedly. Thanks Brene Brown for adding this perspective.
The following is an article I recently wrote for More.com. It’s about our insatiable desire beyond stability for “things”—and how this can stifle our quest to reinvent ourselves.
“There are two kinds of hunger—the hunger for food and the hunger for more. I’ve been taught to look past what I have to what I don’t have. I have a car, but I’m always noticing the car I’d rather have. I have 12 shirts, but I’m always noticing the 13th shirt that I want to buy. We’re suffering from a profound lack of relationship with enough—we are about what we don’t have.” —Dan Karslake, Documentary filmmaker of Every Three Seconds, an upcoming film about ending world hunger
No doubt about it, there’s great beauty in having enough. It gives us the freedom to reinvent ourselves. If we’re living at a survival level and spending most of our time worrying about paying our bills and meeting basic needs, it’s quite hard to focus on finding our purpose and pursuing our life’s work. As Abraham Maslow pointed out in his famous Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, we must first satisfy our needs for survival and safety before we can address the higher level of self actualization.
Yet how many of us actually know what “enough” is? If there were mile posts on our journey, that marked “survival,” “basic comfort” and “excess,” would we even know when we past each point? Probably not. As this excerpt from my book, Professional Destiny, discusses the cost of “more” can be quite high.
“A trap that we are all susceptible to, especially in the Western world, is that we overlook the concept of having enough. We come to never fully enjoy what we have because we are always thinking about what we don’t yet have (a nicer home or car, more possessions, a bigger company, more money, finer art). This sense of wanting more is an insatiable hunger. It is poison to our soul and kills new, creative possibilities because it locks us into a pattern. It might make our life more comfortable but it doesn’t bring us true fulfillment, which only comes when we feel like we are making a difference in a genuine, meaningful way.
You can be financially successful, a respected leader in your profession, be admired for your status, have beautiful possessions and a lovely family—but still feel a nagging sense of emptiness.
I find that most people who have made it in their career and have achieved success have just about everything they want materially, but do not feel fulfilled. They want to venture out and make a difference, but are immobilized by fear and the need to have a familiar sense of security, stability and enough…
Security often means that they do not take risks or allow themselves to be open to new possibilities. Many have lost the concept of having ‘enough’ and cannot accept the idea of making less money for a while, even if it makes them happier. They cannot escape the money trap and therefore are not free. Because of the overwhelming need for survival, even beyond the point of enough, we ignore our deepest yearnings and continue in a job that is not fulfilling—or even worse, a job that is sapping our lifeblood and essence. We think we are making a living, but in reality our spirit is slowly dying.”
Maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at the hidden—and not so hidden—costs of our addiction to more and how it hinders our ability to reinvent ourselves. If we’re able to recognize when enough is enough and get a grip on that insatiable hunger, we just may be surprised to discover a fulfilling, new—and different—richness in our lives.
Last night as I was pondering what to write in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I picked up a book that my friend, Perch Ducote—one of the wisest men of all—suggested I read. It’s called, The First 30 Days, by Ariane de Bonvoisin and she’s a fellow Stanford grad.
As I thumbed through the pages, I landed upon a section called “Comparison Sickness.” It caught my attention. After all, how many of us get caught in the comparison trap? I found myself in it earlier just that same day.
If we honestly look at our thoughts, I’d wager a bet that many of us have a mind that points out each and every one of our shortcomings. I’ve written about this very topic at length in Professional Destiny. There I call it the “little voice.” Our little voice says things like this:
“Look at her success. Why do things seem easy for her? She’s got it together—I don’t.”
“Why is he making so much money and I’m not. Will I wallow here forever? Everything he touches seems to turn to gold, but for me—it’s a constant struggle.”
“She’s more fit and more engaging than I am. Her clothes are nicer too. I should just fade into the wall paper whenever she’s around.”
Then I read this story about comparisons and complaints in Ariane’s book. It went like this:
“One day, God was listening to all the comparisons people were making to others, and he asked each person to put all their problems in a transparent bag and place it in a separate room. Then he asked everyone to line up and, one by one, go into this room and pick a bag, any bag. Since the bags were transparent, everyone could see what others were going through—all the changes in their lives, the decisions they had to make, their complaints and their struggles with others. The first person looked around and finally decided to leave with his own bag. The next person did the same thing; she left with the bag she dropped off. In the end, everyone picked up his or her own bag. Why? Because we are meant to work through our problems, changes and crises. Even though it may not feel like it at the moment, you have not been given anything you cannot handle. In fact you’re an expert in dealing with your unique set of challenges.”
This story contains such a relevant message for us during the week of giving thanks. Sure we have our share of problems and complaints—and our bag might seem worse than anyone else’s. But when it all comes down to it, we’re perfectly equipped to handle what we’ve got. And it we compare the other way, we can always find someone with a bigger and heavier bag to carry than ours.
It’s a wonderful reminder to be grateful for what we have. Happy Thanksgiving!
Finding your purpose and practicing it in your profession is an immensely gratifying and productive experience. Your Professional Destiny is Work (with a capital “W”) that reflects a deep desire with you. It’s Work that inspires you and ignites your creativity. But, how do you know if you are in it? Here are nine indicators, excerpted from my book, that will tell you:
You are engaged.When you’re doing what you love, you become passionate about your work and lose track of time. You feel alive, energetic and creative. There is simply not enough time in the day to do what you can’t wait to do.
You feel on track.Things come naturally. Work seems easy, though it may not for others—because you’re exercising your gift. Your level of satisfaction is your true guidance system.
You feel honest.You’re being yourself. You’re pursuing a path that is in line with your values and interests, and you’re living in true authenticity with yourself.
You become lighter.Being true to your values allows you to shed a huge burden—the burden of maintaining a facade. You instantly experience a sense of relief as the weight is lifted.
You are committed.You clearly set your vision and do what you say you will. You may not know how you are going to get there or when, but you know that you will.
You operate with compassion.Your sense of individual freedom gives you a new sense of community. Your interactions become genuinely rewarding and you create true connections with others.
You make a contribution.What you are doing is meaningful and, while you may be well compensated, your driving force is contribution above money.
You are fulfilled.When you fully express your gifts, talents and creativity, you feel a deep-seated sense of satisfaction. Being on the path to reaching your full potential just feels great.
You make a difference.Your work positively impacts others in a most meaningful way. You’re confident that you’re leaving a legacy, and you’re gratified by that knowledge.
Ultimately, your Professional Destiny is a soul-level urge to fully express yourself and try something deeply interesting to you. It’s a dream that you carry inside—maybe it’s time to let it out.
When pursuing your Professional Destiny, the difference between knowing where you want to go and actually getting there is discipline. In my book, I talk about the four types of discipline—of the mind, body, soul and actions—that are essential for maintaining focus and staying on course. In an earlier post, I’ve written about discipline of the mind. Yet to accomplish anything great, you must also make sure both your mind—and body—are fit for the task. Here is an excerpt from Professional Destiny about how to achieve discipline of the body:
Hone yourself for your best performance.Like a true professional, you need to practice your gift every day. To do this you must be fit, rested and have your physical and mental capacities about you. Avoid substances that numb your mind and distract you from your goals. Focus on being alert and clear.
Get energized. To pursue your passion, you must have energy and be strong enough to be in the places you need to be. Your body is what gets you there so it is important to take care of it. Healthy food is like high-performance fuel. Your engine will work better with it. You need energy to go the extra mile and accomplish your goals.
Get active.Physical activity and exercise gets you revved up. During any physical training you develop good habits that serve you in life such as developing mental toughness to get through pain, becoming laser-focused and forcing yourself to continue even when you feel like quitting.
Do not see yourself as trapped inside a limited body. Your greatest driver is your will—your will to succeed. With a strong will you can accomplish almost anything.
Be physically and mentally prepared for a race of learning and doing.Prioritize your action items and plot your course. Meet your appointments. Jump over any hurdles that threaten to hold you back so you can put them behind you. And then go full speed.
Lose the weight. This refers not so much to your physical weight, as your energetic weight. Streamline your relationships and your possessions and take only the essentials that you need. This means pulling the plug on draining or unhealthy relationships and breaking the bonds to unnecessary material possessions that keep you anchored.
In a sense, making significant change is like preparing for a marathon. It takes commitment, stamina and a huge dose of physical and mental discipline. Now the question is… are you ready for the run?
I’ve written extensively about the power of friends, having support to help you stay on course and avoiding naysayers (including your mind) while you pursue your dreams.
And it also talks about Professional Destiny (of course!) and gives the first press about my upcoming book…
A key takeaway is this: the path toward doing what you love always has a few bumps along the way, but if you have good friends and strong support, you’ll find that the road seems just a bit smoother.
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. —Andre Gide
Last night I gave a Professional Destiny talk at the Stanford Women’s Group of the East Bay. (Thanks to Christie Jordan for inviting the group to her home and being such a truly phenomenal host!)
When you’re with a group of such talented and astute women you can expect to get some great questions. And I did! One of my favorites was when I was asked about my scariest point of transition from corporate executive to consultant, coach and author.
It brought me back right to the heart of the matter.
My answer was that the first time I made the change was the hardest—by far—because I had no idea what to expect. It’s uncomfortable to step away from the known and into the unknown. It’s like a ship leaving harbor to venture out into the open sea.
So many of us are bound by golden handcuffs that make us feel secure, even if we’re not entirely happy. We don’t know exactly who we will be without our work identity and reputation. We don’t know what our future will look like, and we’re not sure how to proceed. We wonder if we will ever make money again. Or, if we’ll even recognize ourselves when we’re through. It’s a disconcerting journey—and definitely not for the faint of heart.
One of the hardest things to get used to is not knowing how long our term of transition from one point to the next will last. This applies to many life changes including a change in profession. For example, if we’re in the midst of career transition (whether voluntary or involuntary) we often have no idea how long we’ll have to be in this provisional existence. When will we cross the sea, so to speak, and get from here to there?
If we could know we would have a happy ending tomorrow, we would be fine. Yet, there’s no known date for things to get better and we wonder if our current uncertainty will be endless. But it’s all part of the journey. And that brings me to another favorite quote:
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”—William Shed
When contemplating change, sometimes we simply have to remember, that just as ships are not built to stay in the harbor, neither are we.
Last week in one of my coaching sessions, my client and I had a riveting discussion about financial survival vs. doing what you love. This incredible individual is an extremely talented and capable person, but has unfortunately been out of a job for a while. She now feels like she’s reached the point of no return where she has to take any job to pay her bills and was deeply troubled that she was giving up and selling out.
She recently read Professional Destiny so I reminded her of the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs discussion included right up front in chapter three. It’s essential to remember that our needs build upon each other. To demonstrate this, Maslow presents the hierarchy of needs as a triangle. At the base are Physiological (physical survival needs) and Safety (the need for security and stability). These needs MUST be met before you can address the higher level of Self Actualization at the top. As I mentioned in an earlier post When Temporary Work Leads to Your Life’s Work, if you’re living at a survival level and spending most of your time worrying about paying your bills and meeting basic needs, it’s quite hard to focus on finding your life’s work. If you’re anxious on a daily basis, you may want to consider taking a temporary job to pay the bills while you focus on finding your ideal career. In other words, it’s important to find a way to generate enough income so that you’re not in turmoil over a lack of it.
Even if an opportunity isn’t your idea of the perfect career, it can help you build a foundation while you focus on other things. You’ll be more effective and creative, if you’re not anxiety-ridden and struggling to survive.
If you find yourself in a financial crisis situation, my advice is twofold:
1. Take a survival job—and feel good about it! There is absolutely no shame in taking care of yourself. In fact, it’s smart. It’s incredibly hard to find your Professional Destiny if you’re beginning to panic about how to pay your rent, support your children or put food on the table. Take a position to ease the stress and meet your basic needs for survival and safety. But don’t stop there…
2. Invest time in your future. Find a minimum of three hours a week (in the evenings or weekends) to pursue your passion and develop your skills. It could be that you attend night school or vocational training. It could be that you build your website for a business that you want to start and begin building a community or customer base. Or it could be that you volunteer in an organization that you’re passionate about. As you learn the ropes, you’ll meet new people and build new contacts in the exact field you’re interested in. Who knows? You may be the next one hired!
As Maslow suggests, once your survival needs are met you are free to focus on your full self expression. Then you’ll have more energy and confidence to find work that truly energizes you, taps into your creative energy and reawakens your spirit. The path to your Professional Destiny isn’t always an expressway, but with determination and persistence you will get there.
Professional Destiny® is about finding the career you were born for. I've created this site to help you in your pursuit. Here, you'll find excerpts from my book, as well as new ideas and stories to help you make the most of your natural gifts. We're a community, so please join the conversation!
As I’ve written previously in Leadership 101 and Why Most Corporations Homogenize Remarkable People, great leadership is more about trust than it is about charisma. Too often these days, leaders are chosen for their alpha tendencies and star appeal rather than their competence, vision and ability to motivate a team. Throughout my experience, I’ve observed five unspoken rules top leaders follow to earn trust—and draw great performances from their teams. In each and every case, they:
