The brilliance of Inoue’s Karaoke machine is that it put social anxieties in perspective.

Singing your favorite songs, and singing your heart out, knowing full well that you may not be very good, and accepting that fact, is a liberating experience.

Adversity is Our Teacher

For much of human history, great hardship was viewed as the most noble of pursuits. The tougher, the better. Yet in modern society, we often think the opposite. We believe the goal of life is to be happy all the time. Comfort and convenience are so alluring it’s easy to lose sight of the value of adversity. While we chase comfort, we ignore our negative feelings, run away from fear, and become complacent. We don’t realize that adversity is our greatest teacher.

So, what’s your relationship with discomfort?

Do you flinch from pain or do you lean in and use it to grow? It’s inevitable you will fall down in life and business. The question is whether you get back up, and how fast you rebound.  We need to reframe how we see our discomfort. To do that, we first need a deeper understanding of pain.

An ancient Buddhist parable explains that pain comes in two parts. The first arrow is the initial pain, such as a failure, rejection, loss, or a simple backache. The second arrow is self-inflicted pain, caused by the story we tell ourselves about the situation. We fail, then we get hit by the arrow of self-doubt.

• We are rejected, then we get hit by the arrow of resentment.
• We lose something we want, then we get hit by the arrow of sadness.
• We feel back pain and we imagine chronic disability.

The Buddha taught that there is no relief from the first arrow. It hurts and we must accept that.

It’s what we do with the second arrow that matters. 

So, when you feel discomfort, don’t shy away from the heat. Instead, walk intentionally across the hot coals. Like physical pain, discomfort serves a critical role for alerting you to what needs to be accepted, changed, or avoided. You will be a more agile and resilient person if you make friends with the ups and downs of life.

Tips for Healthy & Conscious Living and Leading

• Be willing to embrace the unknown. Every time you breathe the world changes. Stability is an illusion.
• Distinguish between what you can and cannot control. Focusing on what you cannot control is an anxiety producer and time waster.
• Become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Accept yourself as imperfect by nature and lean into discomfort when you are able.
• Be tough enough to be gentle with yourself. When you are feeling vulnerable, know that you have been there before and the sun will rise tomorrow.
• Pause, reflect, refresh. If you fall down, recommit to your purpose, rest up, and tomorrow get back on the bike.

Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable is part of the “Go Deep” module in our Healthy & Conscious Leadership Program, offered by  The Healthy Leader in ILT, VILT, and online learning.

It is intentionally built to adjust, adapt, and bend. This is clearly an advantage in the air.
It’s also an advantage in life.

If you decided to live a life that was intentionally agile, what would it look like? You’d accept that everything is changing, evolving, and devolving. You would neither be, nor expect the world to be predictable. You would also accept that change is what we do all the time.

Personal Metamorphosis Happens Every Day

In Webster’s dictionary, transformation is defined as a “dramatic change in form, a kind of metamorphosis.” But transformation is not as big or scary as you may think. And every moment of every day, you are transforming yourself whether you know it or not.

Take the human body, for example. Your 50 to 70 trillion cells are dying and replacing themselves constantly. Your brain cells regenerate when you sleep; your skin cells every two months. In fact, every part of the human body has its own distinct life cycle.

You are literally becoming a new you all the time. So, remind yourself that you are a creature built for change and growth. And it’s not just you that is changing. Everything around you is changing too.

Tips for Embracing Change

• Change is personal.
  It affects you and everyone else differently, depending on where you sit, your genetics and psychology, and how you view uncertainty and your personal power.
• Change can be positive or negative.
  The Chinese character for change is made of two parts – “crisis” and “opportunity.”
  The dual nature of the character reflects the reality of transformation.
  Some of us naturally love change and embrace the thrill and opportunity in it.
  Others naturally resist change and view it as disquieting and disruptive.
  Whatever the case, the power to transform lies dormant inside of you.
• Change is messy and complicated.
  One of the main reasons we get stuck is that we get trapped in our own philosophy about change. Namely, how much personal power we feel to shape our own destiny. And the level of acceptance we have about the uncertainty of life. We must get the balance between our personal power and our acceptance of uncertainty just right or we succumb to becoming a victim, a controller, or a fatalist.
• Conscious people do it differently.
  They travel into the unknown. They keep the bigger picture in mind, And they recognize the natural impermanence of life. Most importantly, conscious people focus on the present moment because the past is gone, and the future is not here yet.

We truly have the power to transform ourselves and accelerate our potential and performance. We are all Healthy Leaders and the power of change lies within each of us.

___

Change Your Relationship to Change is a module in The Healthy Leader, Healthy & Conscious eLearning for Leadership Development at all levels of an enterprise.

Imagine biking down a street in Manhattan in a designated bike lane. Passing on the left is an endless procession of speedy cabs and limousines. On your right, you flash past hundreds of parked cars. Suddenly, a car door opens, you can’t get around it, so you’re forced to feel the true cost of unaware people.

Being asleep and unaware is a big liability.

And it’s happening more regularly in the face of all this change. It’s someone who offends a colleague with an unwitting faux pas. Or someone who ignores a customer’s concern and loses the sale. It’s someone who is tone deaf to the needs of his team. Or alienates her boss with a flippant comment. It’s a parent who ignores his teenager’s drug problem or a government worker who takes a small bribe.

The cost of unaware people is just too high to pay these days.

Especially when the antidote, becoming more conscious, costs little but returns exponentially.
Let’s face it. There is a growing gap between those who are awake and those who are asleep.
The faster the world changes, the bigger the gap becomes. Most people believe they are self-aware, but research shows that only ten to fifteen percent of us truly have this capability.

Some of us are changing and adapting with the times.

Others are falling behind. What are some of the pitfalls you face and the practices you can use to become more aware and conscious? There are four reasons why we are not changing fast enough:

• Too Stagnant– We are too slow and reactive, afraid of the uncertainty of change.
• Too Shallow– We are unaware and too superficial in our thinking and feeling.
• Too Small– Biased and close-minded, we often live in steel bunkers and cannot see our way out.
• Too Safe– Too cautious or isolated, we lack a sense of urgency and accountability.

So, how do you manage these pitfalls?

Based on our research, the most successful people follow four powerful practices of being Conscious:

• Get Real and Embrace change.
  We must see reality for what it is, not what we want it to be.
• Go Deep and Experience change.
  We must build a greater awareness of our inner self.
• Think Big and Expand change.
  This requires you to look outside yourself to see a world of infinite possibilities
• Step Up – Energize change.
  By stepping up we become positive change agents in our own lives.

When you engage in these four practices, not only do you feel better, but you perform better.
We examined thousands of assessments and found that self-aware people outperform on a variety of measures as rated by bosses, peers, and subordinates.

So, how conscious are you?

The Four Pitfalls and Four Practices are part of our Healthy & Conscious Leadership Program, offered by The Healthy Leader in ILT, VILT, and online learning.

• They lack an organization-wide leadership model for how leaders think and act.
• They often conflate management skills with leadership.
• They can’t effectively scale their leadership development.

The endgame is great leadership development at scale. Bob Rosen, founder and CEO of The Healthy Leader, says there are six critical factors to scalable leadership development:

• Learning agility. The ability to adapt quickly is the next core universal capability.

• Psychological safety. Adaptive spaces that are safe for interpersonal risk-taking, being vulnerable and trusting colleagues to support new ideas and behaviors.

• Diversity. Demographic shifts, diverse marketplaces and global teams will utilize diversity for rapid innovation, market growth and greater engagement.

• Learning by doing. Shorter attention spans and pressures to perform will prioritize just-in-time learning — including abbreviated coursework, digital solutions, learning in teams, and the ability to practice skills in a safe environment.
• Peer learning. Story-driven teaching by bosses, peers and subordinates will amplify real-life experiences, celebrate leadership lessons and foster greater collaboration and role modeling.
• Blended learning. It will be critical to mix in-person and virtual instructor-led training with engaging online guided and self-paced channels.

I regularly speak with organizations that believe front line, midlevel and senior leaders require different leadership skill sets. Our research shows that 55% of organizations believe that developing business and management competencies are more important for leaders than what are often referred to as “soft” leadership skills, such as emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring.

The Tide is Turning

Developing an organization-wide leadership model tops the priority list for this year, according to our HCM Outlook 2021 Study.

Top Priorities to Improve Business Impact of Leadership Development in 2021

Managers are authority figures; people follow their direction because they have to. People follow leaders because they want to, so there should be a clear distinction between management and leadership development.

Leadership Competencies are Essential

Make no mistake, leaders do need business and management competencies. But those are separate from leadership competencies, which are not at all “soft” but essential and foundational. Having one set of leadership competencies provides a common base upon which other skills and competencies can be based and developed.

Universal leadership models differ somewhat from organization to organization, but more than 65% of respondents to our 2020 Impact of Leadership Development Study agree that these are core leadership behaviors needing development to drive post-pandemic business success:

• Empathy, active listening and understanding others
• Leading during disruption
• Perseverance and resilience
• Collaborating inclusively
• Coaching
• Mentoring
• Recognizing the contributions of everyone
• Emotional intelligence
• Managing change

Traditionally, organizations focused heavily on senior leaders and executives. But the trend in recent years has been to focus more on emerging leaders and that trend intensified in the wake of COVID-19.

Bob Rosen’s six factors for scalable leadership development — anchored by a universal leadership model used at all levels of the organization — are the keys to success in making current and future leaders successful.

-Claude Werder, Senior VP and Principal HCM Analyst, Brandon Hall Group

This blog is a summary of key takeaways from the fourth in a series of four blogs on leadership development by Claude Werder, the entire article can be found at Brandon Hall Group.