Reflective leadership

It’s been a tumultuous week, or should I say 2023!  I thought things might improve and was grateful to leave 2022 behind but the anxieties, threats and mistakes by those in leadership positions just seem to have followed us.

What is it about negativity that seems to enable it to hang around?   We look around us and navigate towards the darker side of things.  Isn’t it time we changed our mindset and look for the positives?

Your heart tells you yes, but your mind says, ‘Look around you.  Where are the thought shapers?  Where are the leaders to help us find positivity?’

We need a break-in, a break-through and through reflection we can do this. My answer then is, ‘Start looking elsewhere.  When the front and back doors are closed, climb through the window.’

In our Retreat’s 4-point cycle we  help you climb through the window.  After we’ve discovered how to relax, how to be at ease, we then start to reflect.  You see, being at ease first allows our minds to put aside the competing thoughts of this is good, this is bad.  They are merely thoughts.  You can step away from the emotion of the thought.  By stepping away from emotion you release anxiety, fear and dread.  Mistakes are just mistakes. 

It’s important too to remember that only you are in control of you.  You cannot control what others do.  Those in leadership positions who seem to have behaved so badly, to not have our best interests at heart, or who have made what we believe to be catastrophic decisions act with their own view of the world.  It may not be your view and why would it be?  They’ve had very different experiences to you, different upbringing, and thus different thinking.  And isn't that frustrating when you're in a leadership role yourself, to see others behaving so badly?

Let’s focus on you.  Step away and into ease, reflect on your life journey.  What have been the highlights for you?  What has propelled you to better things?  Even disappointments and worse has made you who you are, so thank every experience for the learning it has brought to you.  It might have made you stronger, more determined, or given you the knowledge that a skill or an opportunity does not fit you enabling you to move onto better things.  And once you’ve thanked those experiences take a close look at the highlights and delight in them.  Journal your journey to discover who you are.  The biggest break-through is when you do this graphically rather than in written form.  You don’t need to be an artist – stick drawing will do!

You will find that by doing this, by setting aside the competition of what was right or wrong, you will start to see the positivity. 

By going through the window, you’ve side-stepped the closed doors.  You can now explore the rooms in which sit opportunities and positivity.  You can renew and return.

And isn't this the role of leaders?  We should be focusing on ourselves first so that we can relax, reflect, renew and return to give the right level of support to our teams.  We can encourage them to do the same, and put systems in place to give them the environment where they have the time and the space to do this type of thinking.  That's what the Thinking Environment is all about.  And it pays dividends.
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To discover more about our exclusive four-phase cycle click on this link