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If you’re looking for a leadership model to help you and your teams transcend industry standards look no further than Flourishing Leadership. Flourishing leadership is an integrative approach to sustained personal and organizational high performance.
In this issue, we’ll start walking through this concentric circle model for Flourishing Leadership to help you better appreciate the dynamics at play so you can continue to navigate your leadership life with intentionality.
The Inner Game
“Knowing other is knowledge, knowing yourself is wisdom” - Lao Tzu
Great leadership starts with self-leadership!
Knowing yourself is the first step in your transformational journey.
Seems simple enough, but so many of us are neglecting this critical aspect of our development.
Our egos would rather we not pull back the curtain and deeply examine ourselves, but If flourishing is the goal we must fall in love with the process of introspection.
Flourishing leadership necessitates that we as individuals get adept in our ability to look inward and reflect back upon the self.
This involves the study of one’s own judgment, intentions, ambitions, desires, motivation, and natural tendencies.
Our thoughts, intuitions, feelings, and behavior patterns are all signals that can be invaluable inputs when processed holistically.
The challenge with the inner game is its neverending, the bar raises indefinitely. We will constantly try to outwit ourselves once we know how we operate.
The better we understand these inner game dynamics, the higher quality and more consistent our decision making will become. The result of this evaluative experience is wisdom!
In order to consistently compete in this inner game we must be relentless in our self-appraisal.
Take it personal! Understand yourself in the way you can understand it. Learn how you learn.
In most instances, we ourselves are the primary sources of our dissatisfaction with life.
Yet, when frustrations arise, we’ve been trained to look externally for both the source of the problem and its solution.
We must train ourselves to openly look inward and be able to see what we want to see (the virtues) and don’t want to see (the vices).
The better we know ourselves the better off we’ll be.
When we are not self aware, we tend to operate on auto-pilot and we don’t see how our own beliefs, thoughts, and habits may be limiting us. We call this DRIFT.
Managing and knowing the inner game is going to help you be the type of person that other people want to be with.
In my experience, the enneagram is the most effective starting point for anyone that wants to grow their self-awareness and reach their full potential.
Know Thyself
What are your self-beliefs?
“Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.” - Mahatma Gandhi
The flourishing leadership model is oriented around you. Environments change, relationships change, but wherever you go there you are.
The inner game really starts by determining what game you are playing. Your game should be authentic to you. It should play to your strengths.
So, before we can do anything else we must get clarity on who you are.
The enneagram is a sophisticated self-discovery tool that speaks to the age-old questions like: Who am I really? What motivates me, and how is that different to other people? How can I feel more fulfilled? Why does change sometimes seem so hard?
The enneagram helps reveal our core beliefs and motivations that shape our attention and the choices we are able to make. This self awareness has a ripple effect: changing how we see the world, how we respond to others, and how we show up.
It helps us make connections between who we are and why we do what we do.
We can use it to create a clear, tangible link between growing self-awareness and increasing our abilities to achieve our goals.
It reveals the why behind the what of our thinking, feeling, and actions.
In order to really understand what we do and why, we have to explore parts of ourselves we may not have ever realized existed.
The enneagram is a tool we can use to help us navigate that journey.
The Intersection
If you want to win the inner game, you’ll need to practice!
Do you have the will to practice?
The best in the world practice their skills everyday. Whether we’re talking athletes, fighters, or musicians they all have consistency, routine, and rituals integrated into their training regimens.
They’re all wise enough to realize practice is the game.
They’re not just practicing anything and everything. They’ve honed in on their specific things.
They’re constantly evaluating their training to ensure they are practicing at every naturally occurring opportunity that presents itself each and every day.
They’re deliberate and intentional.
Flourishing leadership provides us with this type of training ground. It’s called The Intersection.
We’ll break The Intersection down next week!
Stay The Course,