Although I advocate for being purposeful in every area of your life, there are events and times when you will not and cannot be fully prepared. On December 13, 2016, my family experienced a disaster that no one wanted nor were we prepared for. My brother-in-law, Joey Sharron, was swimming in Mexico when two waves hit him from behind and pushed him head-first into a sand bar. His neck was broken on impact and were it not for a woman standing on the beach 25 yards away and yelling for her husband to help him, he likely would have drowned and been pronounced dead at the scene.
He received 15 minutes of CPR without being resuscitated. As the lifeguards were stopping CPR, a physician from an adjacent hotel, who had watched the accident, ran for a defibrillator, and arrived on the scene and started CPR again. His arrival and intervention lasted 10 additional minutes and, after administering four shocks, he revived Joey.
Emergency surgery was performed in Mexico and three days later Joey was transported to Mass General in Boston where he was diagnosed as a quadriplegic. He is alive, has no brain damage, and has an amazing mindset. He is, in many ways, preparing himself and his family to accept his prognosis merely as a starting point, not his finishing point.
Two weeks into Joey’s injury I’m not fully prepared to grasp the enormity of his injury or the impact this will have on each family member. There are aspects of caring for and living with an accident of this magnitude that is beyond comprehension and leaves each of us crying and ill-prepared to deal with the severity of his condition.
But in the face of this accident, Joey specifically, and my family in general, have learned something new each and every day about what’s possible—possible for his recovery, possible for his work, and possible for what we can do to make the healing process healthier. Watching Joey handle this adversity in inspiring and courageous ways tells me that Joey can teach me a lot about the Preparation Principle and Transformational Leadership. Joey has said that he’s never going to give up and that he knows exactly what’s going to be thrown at him physically and emotionally. He knows this is a massive test for his health and quality of life, but also for his wife, family, and business too. He’s not naive in any way, but he believes that how he thinks about his injury and by the choices he makes with his mindset and his rehabilitation, he can overcome the situation and lead a productive and healthy life. Joey’s attitude is transforming what I believed was possible and is preparing me to be amazed at what he accomplishes.
The title of this section is living a purposeful life and not an accidental life. Accidental doesn’t mean accidental in the sense Joey experienced or that your leadership and life are mere accidents. But what I find with every executive and entrepreneur I’ve ever worked with is that the demands of their work are inhibiting them from designing the leadership and life that allows them to flourish.
The reality is that your transformational leadership journey will be filled with obstacles and barriers you anticipated as well as those you didn’t. You’ve likely looked at aspects of your leadership as well as your organization’s performance and realized much of the work you are doing needs to be transformed. You may have looked at your customer experiences and seen where they need to be transformed, or that your employee experiences need to be transformed in order for them to be able to bring their best selves to work. By now, you might be saying to yourself that your work needs to be converted from a long, slow slog in enemy territory with bullets flying over your head, into the highest expression of what you hope for as a leader.
One executive I worked with repeatedly told me of the eight to 10 meetings they were in each day, and the 250 emails they received. There was no white space to slow down and think, and they lamented that they felt like a human doing as opposed to a human being.
There are times when it is the nature of the beast to go from meeting to meeting and to navigate a mountain of emails. But the risk in doing so for prolonged periods of time is that you end up convincing yourself that you’re doing your best work. That would be similar to thinking that you could run a marathon every week for 52 weeks and expect for the 13th marathon to be as strong and powerful as the first, or that the 52nd would hold the potential for a personal best. That’s twisted thinking.
Whatever transformation you want for your organization, it will always start with you preparing for and undergoing an individual transformation first. There is no way to get around that. And here in the Preparation Principle, I want to prepare you not only for the flourishing leadership transformation that’s possible, but more importantly, for the personal transformation that leaves you and those who are important to you successful as well as supremely satisfied.
In order for you to cut the time it takes you to achieve greater success in half, you’ll need to be prepared to address the realities of transformational leadership. Specifically, you’ll need to learn to: welcome barriers and obstacles; be the role model for what you envision; leave the safe, comfortable, known, and predictable; and prepare for greatness and learn from a 16th-century monk. Let’s cover each one in more detail.
Your greatest successes are hidden in your greatest failures and barriers. Do you believe that? Let me make my case. Whenever you find yourself stuck or hindered from accomplishing what you want, there is a barrier or obstacle that’s preventing you from greater progress and, once addressed, will allow you to accelerate toward greater success. That’s a no-brainer, right? Since you likely deal with obstacles and barriers every day I’ll add that what hinders you most from greater success is not the obstacle per se, but that eight out of 10 times the barriers you encounter are mindset—not skill set—barriers, and in turn, cultivating a mindset of passion, innovation, and growth for yourself as well as for those you lead and work with will be the catalyst for overcoming obstacles and barriers. This is the first area of leadership you need to be prepared for.
And yet, preparing yourself to achieve your greatest successes requires a new frame of reference about barriers and obstacles, a frame of reference that welcomes barriers and obstacles because they provide you with three benefits. They are:
1. Test your mettle.
2. Confirm what you do know and what you still need to learn.
3. Be a role model to others for what you hope will become commonplace.
Let’s dive into each one in more detail.
Think about the rescue of Apollo 13 in 1970. Fifty hours into their mission and 200,000 miles from Earth, something went terribly wrong. Minutes after mission control asked the crew to turn on a hydrogen and oxygen tank–stirring fan, a sound that would send chills up any person’s spine was heard. A loud and unplanned bang led to fluctuations in capsule power and the firing of the spacecraft’s thrusters.
The problem was a second oxygen tank explosion following a short circuit. With limited power and life-essential resources running out, the crew had to abort their planned landing on the moon and instead use the lunar module as their lifeline. Engineers were given a mandate to bring the astronauts home safely. They worked around the clock to figure out how to provide them with oxygen, power, and a plan to return to Earth.
Close to four days after that ominous bang, Apollo 13 hurtled itself around the moon and successfully splashed down on Earth. Their return was hailed as one of the world’s most unprecedented engineering achievements and stunned not only the astronauts, but the world at large. This rescue was the ultimate obstacle as well as the ultimate in testing the engineering mettle of NASA. Afterward, this event role modeled what was possible and allowed, rather than the cancellation of other missions. It also allowed the continuation of the Apollo program.
It is not hyperbole to say that imbedded in every obstacle and barrier is the seed of your greatest achievement. Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple after a disagreement with cofounder Steve Wozniak. Steve Jobs never saw the oust coming and later said that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to him. Jobs turned this obstacle of being kicked out of the company and focused on his Next and Pixar projects. His focus resulted in him later selling Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion dollars. And after he returned to Apple he shepherded Apple’s market capitalization from $3 billion in 1997 to $350 billion in 2011. He did not go quietly into the night, sit in a corner, and lament his lot in life. On the contrary, he threw himself into other projects and channeled his drive and energy purposefully.
One of the great things about obstacles and barriers is that it confirms what we do know and what we don’t know and need to learn. In the NASA example, imagine a meeting with all of the engineers when they learn of the Apollo 13 disaster. I envision a meeting in which every engineer lists out what is known about the situation. They’ll need oxygen, thrust (to preserve physical as well as lunar module power), and they’ll need easy-to-follow instructions because of the lack of food and energy. That probably resulted in another list of what they did not know and needed to find out. What do we not know how to fix now that we need to fix first in order to make progress in bringing these astronauts home?
Obstacles are delightful in this regard. There are things in every form of adversity that you will know how to address or fix. But it will also be true that there are things you won’t know how to address or fix, and that will require you to learn something new, expand your knowledge, and possibly your ability to work with diverse groups of people to come up with the best solution.
Leaders like you, Joey, and me are role models. People are continually watching leaders, especially in times of adversity, and take their cues as to what they should do when the road to success is blocked. When employees see a leader respond with courage, confidence, and commitment, the message is sent in ways corporate marketing or human resources departments cannot send: This is the way we as an organization or team respond.
The important insight about role modeling is this: As a role model, you should welcome being tested, because when you’re tested and smack up against a yogurt-covered fan, you’ll learn more and grow more than you ever imagined possible, and you’ll become the exemplar for your organization as to what values and beliefs guide your leadership. If you didn’t have obstacles or barriers you would never have the refining fire for your leadership or the opportunity in real time to powerfully communicate what’s important to you. You would also have no urgency or desire to get better. You would be complacent and content to remain the same.
Barriers and obstacles, which you will find from doing the work I recommend, are necessary in order for you to become a transformational leader. And quite frankly, if your mindset is such that you want to avoid barriers and obstacles, your leadership becomes fat, flabby, uninspired, and, frankly, pedestrian.
Throughout the seven principles the case I’m making is this: When you find and articulate the one idea, hope, dream, or aspiration that has grabbed hold of you and won’t let go, it’s a game-changer. It changes how you engage at work as well as at home, it changes how you engage with employees and customers, and it changes the performance and results of your teams and organization.
But for many of you the idea of having this rallying cry for your leadership is clouded by your experience of the corporate communications department’s work on mission, purpose, and vision. Once articulated and distributed within six months no one can remember it or discuss it in emotional and compelling terms, so it dies a slow and quiet death.
However, when you work through the Purpose Principle with earnestness and commitment, the clarity and focus you need to take barriers and obstacles and convert them into opportunities for greatness emerges with greater frequency. Until you have this clarity and focus for your leadership, your leadership is more intellectual and less emotional. Yes, intellect is important, but to overcome big obstacles, you and your team must care deeply about something bigger than yourself; something other than money, profit, market share, and so on. Yes, they’re important, but transformational leaders are in love with something noble, uplifting, and meaningful.
In the next section we’ll look at how not preparing is the death knell for your desired results and what plans you need to make to become transformational.
From time to time you’ll find that what you’re doing is no longer working. I have worked with technology executives for more than 10 years. One of the hardest things they have had to leave behind is their enjoyment of the technical side of their work. They entered the technology field because of an enjoyment or skill in programming and have become enamored with programming or the intricacies of their technology. Although loving what you do and being good at it is essential to success at work, they’ve lost sight of the business value technology brings to an organization. When I suggest they forget their technology and instead focus on the business and economic value to their technology, I’m rewarded with deer-in-the-headlights looks. You would have thought I asked them to put their first child up for adoption. The separation anxiety they experience is rooted in the carefully constructed value they ascribe to themselves. If they’re an expert in their technology they will be seen as valuable and successful. When I ask them to focus on business and economic value to technology investments they don’t know how to do that, have never learned how to calculate ROI on technology spending, and experience the fight, freeze, or flee response. Importantly, until they know how to do what I’m asking, and until they see the value in doing so, they remain stuck in the known, safe, and predictable.
The same holds true in healthcare. Several of my hospital clients have physicians and nurses who can only see the world through the prism of their specialty or practice area. The implications for their practice areas on the overall businesses are not considered. The same can be found in higher education where many professors never leave the safe and comfortable confines of the ivory tower to know what is truly in the best interest of the world of work students are entering.
So what’s required in order to leave the safe and comfortable confines of the known and predictable? If you want to get the results you dream of, be prepared to step into the crucible that leadership is and recognize that there are four key motivators for leaving the safe, comfortable, and known.
The clarion call for writing this book was to prompt you to think bigger about your leadership and to connect your thinking with plans that have the power to convert your work life from a job into the highest expression possible of what is most important to you. In no uncertain terms, my dream was for you to become a catalyst for human flourishing in the world of work. But that cannot happen accidentally. It can only happen purposefully when a leader is no longer satisfied or content with his or her leadership and results.
When you have a dream for your professional life there will be times when you experience high levels of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is a sign that your dreams are being thwarted or are at risk of being compromised. If you are never dissatisfied with your current state or the changes taking place around you, your dreams are either too small or you have an unprecedented tolerance for maintaining the status quo. You go on a diet when you’re dissatisfied with how your pants feel and when your dreams of feeling comfortable in your clothes are in jeopardy. You’ll replace your car when you’re dissatisfied with the upkeep of your current vehicle or a dream of driving a newer model pervades your thinking. Each of our dissatisfactions are rooted in a dream we have.
The same holds true with your leadership. What part of your leadership are you dissatisfied with? What part of your leadership do you think needs to be dreamed of differently so that you can enjoy work more and also have a bigger impact on others? Dissatisfaction is not a negative. It’s the catalyst you need in order to start the process of dreaming bigger in order to leave the safe, comfortable, and known.
Each and every one of us has the capacity for floundering or flourishing. It is a choice we get to make and is ours alone. Which have you chosen today? To choose to flourish takes courage. Courage comes from the French word coeur and means “heart.” For you to choose to step outside of the safe, known, and predictable into uncharted territory is, as Joseph Campbell said in The Power of Myth, a heroic choice. The dissatisfaction you may feel compels you, oftentimes reluctantly, to venture outside the known and safe and to pursue something different even in the face of not having a clearly charted path. Dissatisfaction propels us to make choices based on the full knowledge that remaining the same is no longer an option, and that making a tentative choice forward into the unknown will be supported in time with faith and courage. The journey to transformational leadership is never linear and requires all of the seven principles. Each principle can help you to be more courageous and turn away from what has made you successful in the past toward what will make you successful in the future.
Let’s be clear: To be a transformational leader you must believe you are not a victim. You have the power and capacity to make decisions, to make plans, to learn new skills, and expand your experiences so as to be more valuable to your organization, your customers, and your employees. With very few exceptions, the senior leaders in your organization believed in something and were purposeful as to what they wanted to create either in their role, scope, or impact. The believed that what they envisioned was possible and that they were responsible for creating it.
While working with Starbucks, a senior vice president told me the story about how the founder and CEO, Howard Shultz, started working for Starbucks as a marketing manager and left four years later to start his own coffee company because of a disagreement with the owners. He believed he would be better off leaving and starting his own company. Four years later he bought the company from the original owners and now has an empire of 25,000 coffee shops across the world.
The story was told in the hopes of sharing insights as to what makes Starbucks what it is today. Starbucks is led by a CEO who believes it is better to walk away from situations that are not right and don’t hold the potential for doing great work. Was there a risk for Howard Shultz to leave? Certainly. Was there a benefit? Certainly. What was present in copious amounts for Howard Shultz was a belief that living and leading a life of his choosing is never dictated by circumstance. He believed and chose to live his life in ways where he had greater control and influence and not to delegate that to others. Will all of your decisions pay as handsome a dividend for you as Howard Shultz’s decision did for him? Actually, yes, they will. They will just look different.
If you dream, choose, and believe, the likelihood is that you will commit to moving outside of the safe, comfortable, and known. The commitment that’s next is to continually put one foot in front of the other without wanting guarantees or to know everything will be perfect. It’s about making progress every day toward that which is important and inspiring for you. That brings us to the fourth key motivator.
What one idea have you learned so far that prompts you to do something different, scary, bold, or exciting? Leadership is primarily a solo activity in that no one can dream, make choices for, or believe for you. You must do all of that on your own. But once you’ve dreamed, made a decision, and fostered an unshakable belief, doing something each day that moves the needle on performance comes naturally. More than anything every successful leader has cultivated a bias for action—a bias for taking one action every day that gets you closer to greater success and satisfaction.
My experience is that the motivators in the shortest supply are dream and belief and the motivator that is in the greatest supply is action. And therein lies the dilemma for many leaders. They find themselves compelled to act but haven’t clarified their dreams and by extension cultivated the belief necessary to be successful. I am not naïve, nor do I have my head in the sand when I consider the demands faced by most leaders today. The rate of change has accelerated to the point that most leaders feel dizzy, overwhelmed, overburdened, and over-scheduled.
What should you plan on doing? You should prepare yourself for a breakthrough. If you like the idea of a breakthrough in performance and what it means professionally, let me also prepare you for what precedes a breakthrough: a breakdown. It’s not uncommon for breakthroughs to be preceded by breakdowns in communication, breakdowns in resource allocation, breakdowns in employee/leader trust and respect. Wherever you envision a breakthrough, attaining it requires overcoming your biggest barriers, leaving the safe and comfortable behind, and embarking on a hero’s adventure. Although your breakthroughs are aided and made easier with the seven principles of transformational leadership, in the next section you’ll learn a three-step process for taking the dreaming, choosing, believing, and action framework and making it relevant to your everyday work life.
Is failing to prepare the death knell of transformational leadership? Yes, but not in the manner you’re accustomed to. The planning I’m advocating is the planning for undergoing the individual transformation required to lead the organizational transformation you desire.
In the Purpose Principle, I claimed that defining your purpose is not the same as looking at life through rose-colored glasses. The questions about purpose, meaning, and significance are not softball questions, but rather the hardball strategic life questions my clients courageously ask themselves.
And for too many of you, the exigency of your daily to-do list forces you into a transactional way of engaging with life and leads to never planning to live the most rewarding and enriching life. It’s not in the plans, so it’s not going to happen.
People at work or in your personal life who have achieved something extraordinary and who live lives defined as rewarding and uplifting have a clear and compelling plan for achieving what’s important to them. In this section, I want to take any theory and convert it into actionable next steps. But there is a rub: I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all prescription for planning your leadership. Yes, the seven principles have existed for millennia and have transformed cultures both positively as well as negatively. What I am convinced of, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that once you have a leadership process you believe in and you have a purpose that is compelling for you, you are smart enough and talented enough to make a decisive plan for your leadership.
So, in this chapter I am not taking the position of the sage on the stage handing you stone tablets with 10 strategies for leading the organizational transformation you want. Instead, I’m respecting your intelligence and commitment and acting as the guide by your side. As a fellow traveler and guide to executives and entrepreneurs on the road to flourishing, I will share with you what my most successful clients (and possibly Howard Shultz as well) have done to plan for personal and organizational transformations. In turn, you’ll have a prescription for next steps you can personalize in ways that work for you.
The Preparation Principle outlines specifically what successful leaders do above and beyond the other six principles. The following three characteristics of transformational leaders are continuously planned into the daily work of leading their organizations.
The first thing transformational leaders plan on doing is waking up. Not in the sense of opening their eyes first thing in the morning and getting out of bed, which of course they do, but they wake up to their hopes, dreams, and aspirations, they wake up to the impact they have on others, they wake up to what they do well, why they don’t do well, and what they will do to get better. Waking up in this sense is the process of continually looking at the activities, actions, and mindset the leader has in seeing themselves clearly through the eyes of the people who matter most to them.
They wake up to the reaction others have to their emails, voicemails, and the meetings they hold. They are also waking up and seeing clearly what their triggers and vices are. For example, they wake up to the fact that when the senior-most executive in their organizations attends one of their meetings, they become overly forceful and describe their work in grandiose and overly productive ways. Transformational leaders wake up to their impact with others as a catalyst for either greater performance or lesser performance.
When transformational leaders grow up they take 100 percent responsibility for their actions and their impact. They don’t shy away in any manner or form to the fact that they have a responsibility to positively impact those that they lead. In turn, they take 100 percent responsibility for their actions and decisions, and do so willingly. They have grown into the realization that people are continually watching them and taking cues as to what is important to them and how they should behave.
They also grow up to the fact that many employees don’t like to be held accountable and that one of their primary jobs is to role model accountability and truth-telling. This is not theoretical for transformational leaders, but is planned into their work on a daily and weekly basis.
By showing up we’re not referencing just physically being present, but mentally and emotionally present also. By showing up, transformational leaders have woken up to the priorities and promises necessary to achieve their purpose, as well as execute on their projects; they plan behaviorally specific actions that send a leadership message in purposeful and powerful ways.
Transformational leaders recognize that the only tool they have in their toolkit is themselves. That is a liberating as well as frightening thought. You are the vehicle by which one of two things happens: extraordinary performance or ordinary performance. By your actions people will know what you stand for, what you value, hope for and will reward. The showing up process is never ending for transformational leaders and frankly they don’t want it to be. Transformational leaders recognize that doing transformational work is not a paint by numbers exercise nor is it a straight line point A to point B endeavor. There are circuitous routes that occasionally take leaders down dead-end roads, and while many people may think this a waste of time, the transformational leader looks at these diversions as an excellent opportunity to show up as a continual learner. A learner who aspires to innovate and grow based on their successes as well as their failures. In order for you to plan for success and satisfaction you need to continually wake up, grow up, and show up. If you don’t embrace these traits and characteristics then life is a journey with accidental outcomes. The Preparation Principle and this section on planning is not about how to manage your calendar specifically, but rather strives to impress upon you that living your purpose, priorities, and promises each day is a choice you must make purposefully otherwise it will not happen. With intention and attention to your leadership as well as your personal life, your life plan is one of your designing.
In the next section we will link waking up, growing up, and showing up to what you can learn from a 16th-century monk by the name of Ignatius of Loyola.
Discernment. That’s what you can learn from Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Discernment about yourself primarily, but equally as important, discernment about others and how their thoughts, words, or actions trigger a response in you. Let’s be clear about something before we discuss the merits of St. Ignatius: Leadership is a solo activity in the sense that you are the only tool you have in your toolkit. Yes, I’ve said that before, but it’s worth repeating because there is nowhere for you to hide when it comes to being seen, known, and a catalyst for transformation.
Every major faith tradition extols the benefit of knowing oneself in the pursuit of the divine. Buddha said, “It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.” The Prophet Muhammad said, “He who knows himself knows His Lord.” In the Bible, in Lamentations Chapter 3 verse 40, it reads, “Let us examine and probe our ways, And let us return to the LORD.”
While I’ve stipulated that you have to undergo an individual transformation first in order to create an organizational transformation, you too will be required to lead others through their own transformation. In order for the biggest and most audacious results to be yours, you will have to know yourself in ways you don’t now, and by so doing, assure the victory Buddha spoke of while probing your ways as in Lamentations. Waking up to the real you, the you that is capable of extraordinary works, may have fears and concerns rooted in whether you’re capable of being transformational. If you are like the leaders I work with, waking up to what’s working in your leadership and what’s not can feel daunting. That’s why I want to introduce you to a 16th-century Catholic monk by the name of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
Who was Ignatius of Loyola? Loyola was a hot-headed rich kid born into nobility in 16th-century Spain. He joined the army at 17, and was known for strutting around with his cape swung open to show off his legs in tight-fitting hose and sword. He was a womanizer, had a big ego and a quick temper, that had to rely on his privileged status to escape prosecution for numerous violent crimes. At the Battle of Pamplona in 1521 he was gravely injured when a cannonball hit him in the legs, wounding his right leg and fracturing the left in multiple places. He returned home to his father’s castle in Loyola, where he underwent several surgical operations to repair his legs, having the bones set and then reset when his vanity got the best of him. His vanity was such that he had his legs rebroken because he thought his legs would look bad in tights. And this was before anesthesia. Think about that for a second. The vanity and narcissism of Ignatius was profound.
But here’s where the story gets interesting. Ignatius woke up to the direction his life was taking. He saw the vices, addictions, and ways of being in the world that led him away from what was good, uplifting and eternal, and toward what was selfish, narcissistic and ego driven. He underwent a spiritual conversion that led after many years to the creation of the religious order the Jesuits. Today there are 16,000-plus Jesuit priests, brothers, scholastics, and novices worldwide which represents the largest male religious order in the Catholic Church. Jesuits are pastors in parishes, teachers, and chaplains. They are also doctors, lawyers, and astronomers. They care for the whole person: body, mind, and soul and in their education ministries, they seek to nurture “men and women for others.” All this came from what was an ego-driven, angry, spoiled rich kid? Yes, and what Ignatius left behind and is the central part of what is called Ignatian Spirituality is the Examination of Conscious. A 15-minute, once or twice daily, examination of the day’s activities and how we respond to them.
While I personally have practiced Ignatian Spirituality for the last three years, I’m not suggesting you embrace it. What I am suggesting is that the practice Ignatius suggested is transformational in its ability to increase our awareness of ourselves and of the world we experience. When you are an overwhelmed, overburdened and over-scheduled leader you need a process for pulling back the layers of your way of seeing the work and people you interact with and infusing a transformational discernment process into your day. The variation on Ignatius’s examination I’m going to propose is without a doubt the fastest way for leaders to facilitate their own individual transformation. If you use this process once per day you’ll grow faster and be capable of leading others with greater clarity and focus.
Here’s a snapshot of what Ignatius taught in his Examination of Conscious. There are five parts to Ignatius’s process, five questions that when answered purposefully and thoughtfully takes 15 minutes to answer. They are:
1. Creation: Where did I see God’s love expressed or received today? Ignatius believed that the whole world was created from love, in love, and for love. He helped Jesuits pay attention to all of creation as an act of love and to intentionally and purposefully seek out examples of things created in love and for love.
2. Presence: Where did I experience God’s presence today? Ignatius also believed that God was hiding in plain sight and that we didn’t need to go looking for the Divine, but that we needed to simply be more aware of where the Divine was hiding in plain sight. This question raises our awareness to the Divine and asks for examples of where God’s presence was felt or seen.
3. Memory: What were the events today that was a violation of love done to me or by me? This is a biggie for Ignatius. What he asked priests to do was review every moment of their day from rising from bed all the way through to going back to bed. He wanted Jesuits to become acutely aware of their affective states. For you and me, he wanted us to pay attention to the kid with his jeans hanging 12 inches off his waist, with earbuds, and slowly walking across the crosswalk oblivious to us missing our light because of him. Ignatius would want to know our reaction to him and would say to all of us today that understanding the reactions we have to situations is essential if we are going to lead a movement. We have to understand ourselves in light of our strengths as well as our shortcomings.
4. Mercy: Where do I need God’s mercy today? We never live up fully to our potential. We fall short and disappoint people. This question was to remind people that we do have shortcomings and that we can be extended forgiveness just as we can forgive others.
5. Eternity: What am I excited about for tomorrow and why? This last question is rooted in the belief of creating a new heaven on earth as a co-creator with the Divine. What will I create tomorrow and what is exciting about doing so for me?
The first paragraph of this section said discernment is what you can learn from Saint Ignatius. Discernment about yourself primarily, but equally as important, discernment about others and how their thoughts, words, or actions trigger a response in you. I’ve created a variation of Igantius’s questions but with the same intent of creating a transformational perspective of yourself and others so you can as Gandhi said, be the change you want to see in the world.
1. Where did I create the most value and/or well-being today?
Every day you have the opportunity and responsibility to plant in the hearts and minds of your employees and customers something of value and/or well-being. Identify one, two, or three ways you created value or well being today. Over time you will see this part of your professional life more clearly, which will instill greater confidence and courage in you as well as more credibility and connection with those you are interacting with.
2. Where was I most present and in the moment today?
Far too often leaders are either living in the past and living an event from weeks, months, or even years ago. This has them living in fear of repeating this event. Or, they are living in the future to the extent that they are disconnected from the important insights and impact of the present. This question pulls you toward the current moment so as to see at what times and in what places are you most connected and present. This is a powerful clue as to what part of your work is the most captivating for you.
3. What are the two or three most pivotal events or experiences I had today and what was my reaction to them?
This part of the Transformation Examination is about getting real with yourself. It asks you to isolate two or three events from the day and specifically identify your reactions to them. This question is not a onion-peeling, navel-gazing question, but rather a massively important awareness-building question. Remember the admonishment from Socrates about Know Thyself. That’s the intent of this question.
4. Where do I regret not living up to my highest potential today?
Let’s be real. There are parts of the day that don’t go well. We do something or say something that has a negative impact on someone or damages our reputation. When we can see these events clearly and own them we are living responsibly. Over time you might see patterns to your shortcomings, and with the help of the other principles, a coach, or mentor you can devise strategies for reducing or eliminating it. But change in this area requires seeing and owning the shortcoming. A word of caution though. This question can bring out your worst critic and can become an opportunity to scourge yourself. Avoid that by paying attention to the Praising Principle.
5. What am I excited about creating tomorrow and why?
This is the part of the examination that most people like. They are action-oriented leaders who want to get going and do some planning. Yes, it is empowering to know what you will create from one day to the next, but only when your plans for tomorrow are insightfully informed by today. Isolate two to three things you want to create and why it is important to you.
What is your reaction to these questions? Do you see them as helpful, valuable, provocative, time-wasting, navel-gazing, or an impediment to doing the work that matters most to you?
Whatever your reaction keep this in mind. These questions are not time wasters. They are performance accelerators. What the people whom you lead want most of all is to trust you, respect you, and have a meaningful personal connection with you so they can come along side of you and create something noteworthy and transformational. They want that from you, but you cannot give that to them unless you trust, respect, and have a personal connection with yourself. The Transformation Examination will help you build the connection and by doing so, transform your leadership as well as create a mindset of innovation and growth.
All throughout this chapter I’ve presented you with options for how to prepare for the leadership adventure before you. Each strategy for preparation is assisted with the Transformation Examination. In the closing section I’ll sit down across from you with a cup of coffee and suggest how to integrate all of the principles and set you on the path to personal and organizational transformation.