I was listening to a leader speak about the ebb and flow, or uneven progress within a particular project he was assigned. He was frustrated with what he felt were long delays in achieving results. The coordination of a matrixed work environment that had dotted lines of accountability and alignment was proving to be difficult. This leader wanted synchronicity of thought and action in all of his efforts.

I see this same type of struggle for synchronicity in our personal lives. We want steady flow of measureable progress in our relationships, our experiences and in anything concerning our well-being. When we grow we don’t want the gap of maturity and immaturity to increase with those we love. When we want to rest, play, reflect, cut-loose, or an assortment of other options, we largely want the world around us to be “in sync” with where we are, or want to be.

I am growing in my conviction that the best leadership whether for professional and personal reasons is competence in strategically living the tension of opposites, entanglements, and de-synchronous dynamics. This process is not just about optimizing effect within the external situation, but the deeper changes within the life of the individual leader. Waiting, tension of opposites, lack of things going the way we want, are some of the critical elements for improvement. Maybe results aren’t as much about a smooth, straight, and upward pathway as they are about intelligent leadership within cycles, incongruence, and variation from our own idea, or ideal.

Your thoughts?

“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” It is never easy to think differently in order to perceive and then act differently. My thought constellation gets stuck in just that, my thoughts. Thoughts are past tense, thinking is generative. “Felt” is past tense, “feeling” is present tense and also generative. They say we have between 75,000 and 125,000 thoughts every day and that 90% of them are merely a recycling of what we already believe and think. The way out of some of our difficulties is to get into them through fresh thinking.

My thoughts adjust how I look and feel about the world. These adjustments change the way I then behave. My different behaviors are likely to stimulate different reactions from people and situations I face. These changes effect my interpretation and process of making meaning, and ultimately my core beliefs, and once my core beliefs change, I am different, and likely for the better.

What are we doing to think differently in the key situations and relationships we face today?

I was startled today as I looked into his eyes. What do we do when everything is gray slush and we just want to be free from the uncertainty and void? What do we do with the truth that we can never return to Eden? How do we manage the reality that we cannot reverse evolution or slip back into a former mindset that seemed to shield us from a present reality that pulls us apart? Our only salvation is to go forward through the desert into deeper and ever-deeper levels of consciousness. I’m not convinced that the exchange is necessarily pain for happiness, but a degree of immobility for power. . .power to grow, to live fully, to understand the origins of our anguish, how to stop it, and the pathway that is necessary for both cessation and an emergence of a greater whole.

“When crows find a dying snake they behave as if they were eagles. When I see myself as a victim, I am hurt by trifling failures.” - Shantideva

Today I left a well educated leader who may have lived the vast majority of his life out of the victim modality. Think this doesn’t relate to most of us? You would be wrong! The prevailing norm in my experience is that the majority of people see that life has done things to them . . . largely unfairly and undeservedly. Personal responsibility is rarely acknowledged.

This leader could do really good things, but has largely chosen to do tiny things because he has not owned his life well enough. It should be a gut check for all of us from my perspective.

We are bombarded with tens of thousands of messages in multiple forms throughout each day. Each of us use filters to block, or sort through the messages in order to expedite understanding and the overall management of data within our lives. How well are we listening? What do we use to assure that we are paying attention and then acting on the important matters of our lives? There have been far too many times that I thought I was awake and aware only to find how I failed in both. The cost of this form of blindness is immense . . . the truth of this matter is that generally what we call blindness is not some cute area that we should get to when we can, but rather a killer that will destroy us and others if left unchecked. It is partial blindness, not sightlessness that we must address . . . each of us must clean away the obstructions that keep us from being empty, open and able to see what often is right before us.

A leaders first task is to acknowledge reality. Shall we begin?

It amazes me how poorly most of us are concerning the fundamentals of getting along. So much of my work with leaders is focused on interpersonal competencies. Becoming a parent requires a minimum level of competency, likewise, the entry qualifications for groups, social networks, teams, or families, is oftentimes equally low. Interpersonal turbulence is created as we live our lives in the reciprocal volley of relationships. What one does, impacts generally not just another, but the greater whole.

We seem to forget about the requirement of playing by a common set of rules that governs our collective actions. The present norm is to do what we think is good, with special emphasis on it being good for ourselves personally. If this is largely true, the prevailing outcome within social networks is chaos. Chaos occurs as each individual defaults to their idea of what the group norm should be, even if it is “to each his own,” and remains accountable only to their opinion of behavioral integrity and goodness. The issue in this kind of chaos isn’t that people aren’t interested in doing what seems good, but that good for the greater whole requires more than intention, but outcomes that measureably are better in the judgement of the larger group.