Brian Castelli – With His Heart

I was thinking about the men’s leadership conference that I attended a few months ago.

An important take-away is that leaders aren’t the ones who sit back and complain when there is a problem. It’s the emerging leader who makes himself available to solve the problem. This doesn’t mean that we sweep things under the rug or somehow sugar-coat what’s real. No, it’s more of an attitude. It’s being able to say, “Yeah, this is bad. What can I do to help?”

As I look back on any kind of success that I’ve had in business and in life, I would say that is the attitude that buoyed me, that sustained me through the difficult times and led to tremendous growth. Recently, my son-in-law’s boss changed jobs. In the swirl of uncertainty, I heard a few people advise him to bail out, to find another position – fast! My counsel to him was the opposite. I told him to stand firm through the crisis, to demonstrate his ability to keep on delivering. I suggested that he might want to make it look like his boss was irrelevant – not in a mean way, but as a way of demonstrating his own personal capability and maturity. I suggested that he might want to be seen as someone unruffled by external events. This would be the characteristic of an emerging leader.

New leaders emerge as those willing and available to help solve the problems. Are you an emerging leader?

My friend, Laura, launched a blog a few weeks ago. You can check out Archer Coaching Blog.

In her first post, she offered this quote:

In my comment to her blog post, I pointed out that the words “for a very long time” really stuck with me. It reminded me of the time my wife and I went snorkeling in Hawaii.

I am a poor swimmer. We went out from a secluded cove. I could manage to stay out in the water for 20-30 minutes at a time before I became so uncomfortable that I had to go back to shore for a rest. After 10 minutes of building back my comfort while standing on solid ground I plunged back in. I repeated this process several times. (And we had a wonderful time!)

I think this story is appropriate in that it takes great courage to stay out where we can’t see the shore. I’m all for applying the “Just Do It” philosophy in some situations, but in others I think we need to build on our experience, taking ever greater risks as we strengthen ourselves. Sometimes we need a “safe haven” where we can retreat, recharge and replan. This will allow us to build up our “out of sight of shore” endurance for the biggest challenges of our lives.

Leaders aren’t created in an instant.