During hard times, I am reminded of a phrase my late mother-in-law, who grew up in southwest Kansas during the Dust Bowl and the Depression, often said, “We must wear belts and suspenders.” This old saying implied that with “belts and suspenders,” one was always supporting the other.
Yet, during hard times, we as leaders routinely get caught in a cycle of seeking perfection, trying to please others, proving we are always right, and pretending that we have it all together when in reality we are as confused and stressed out as everyone else. This pattern of living and working yields significant difficulties on an on-going basis. It is not a pathway to being resilient.
However, there are two unique solutions in these kinds of situations and each supports the other. First, we must learn to be still. As we all know, leadership requires great patience, very focused attention, careful decision-making, and thoughtful execution. Leadership is most often defined by action, i.e. “Don’t just stand there, do something!” We are to get things done, and move quickly on to the next problem on the list.
Stillness, on the other hand, is a unique choice. John Paul Lederach in his book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul Of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005), writes, “The paradox is this: Stillness is not inactivity. It is the presence of disciplined activity without movement….It is that platform that generates authenticity of engagement, for it is the stage that makes true listening and seeing possible.”
When we choose inner stillness, we create the capacity to think deeply before action, rather than to react quickly and think later. As Ryan Holiday explains in his book, Stillness Is The Key (Portfolio/Penguin, 2019), inner stillness give us the opportunity to “Think about what’s important to you. Think about what’s actually going on. Think about what might be hidden from view. Think about what the rest of the chessboard looks like. Think about what the meaning of life really is.” All of these elements of reflection strengthen our ability to make wise decisions, and better choices.
Second, we need to build broad networks of support in conjunction with creating inner stillness. Herminia Ibarra in her book,. Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015) writes that we need to have three kinds of networks in our life, namely operational, personal, and strategic. As she explains, “The first helps you manage current internal responsibilities, the second boosts personal development, and the third focuses on new business directions and the stakeholders you must get on board to pursue these directions.” In particular, “… your strategic network - is made up of relationships that help you to envision the future, sell your ideas, and get the information and resources you need to exploit these ideas…. A good strategic network gives you connective advantage: the ability to marshal information, support, or other resources from one of your networks to obtain results in another.”
As we build these broad networks of support, we can leverage their vast experience, insights, and perspectives in order to gain fresh, new insights and perspectives about what is happening all around us as well as what is going on within us. And when we choose to create inner stillness and to listen more from this place of inner stillness, we come to better understand an old Chinese proverb: “It is not the size of the mountain that obstructs our way. It is the pebble in our shoe.” By removing the metaphorical pebble from our shoe with the assistance of our different networks and our capacity to create inner stillness, we can then work better with others to create the right solutions at the right time for the right reasons. For in hard times, this level of self-care, the sum of our inner stillness and our three healthy networks, is a force multiplier, i.e. it gives us the capacity to create better outcomes with our limited resources of time and energy. And that is a powerful choice during hard times.
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