S1E3: Showing Up Ready To Lead In A New Era Of Leadership

Proactive Mindset Formation, Part 3 of 7

Times have changed. The standard for effective leadership has changed. We are living with a generation of people who no longer put up with task-driven, results-only authoritarian leadership. We live in a generation of people who demand to be acknowledged. Technology in part drives this demand. Likes. Follows. Go live. Go viral. Get seen. Get paid. Playing fields are leveled. Access points to gaining a platform for your thoughts and ideas are easy to access. Um. Here’s me on a podcast talking to you.

And yet, it’s funny. This need for acknowledgement and affirmation generation busted down a very thick wall that has been keeping people isolated from personal growth and better leadership for generations. It busted down the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps barrier. It shattered the showing-weakness-is-weak screen.  Technology can arguably be blamed for the demand for compassionate leadership.

But what does compassionate leadership mean? Why was the wall built up to shame it so strong? Do you want to lead with more compassion? Maybe you lead with too much.

That’s just an idea of what we’re going to think, feel, and take action on in this episode of the Six Frames of the MettlEdge Mind Podcast series.  

Let there be compassion.

Focus: What are you thinking about all of this right now? Go where your brain is taking you.

Many of us show up with an edge.

A comparison and control, measuring ourselves up against others to gain an advantage for ourselves.

This comparison and control generates in us a hunger to prove something. As competitors, this desire—or need—to prove something gives us our edge—and edge many see as strength.

But. Is it truly an edge? Or is it a wall? A barrier? A screen? Or perhaps it is—a mask?

Here’s why I challenge it:

Experts claim humans are most creative, connected, and effective when they relate with compassion toward one another and within themselves. (Ehrnreich, 2004)

Humans are most creative, connected, and effective not when they seek to gain an advantage for themselves, but when they seek to suffer and move forward together. That is the true meaning of the word compassion. Suffer together.

Humans are most creative, connected, and effective when they do not show up with something to prove, but when they show up with a desire to acknowledge people. Oh snap.

Humans are most creative, connected, and effective when they show up wanting to see people, be with them, suffer with them, and not stay there in the suffering, but move forward and grow through it together. Oh wait, humans are most creative, connected, and effective when they think, feel, and take action together.

Let me share a bit more on this.

“While empathy refers more generally to our ability to take the perspective of and feel the emotions of another person, compassion is when those feelings and thoughts include the desire to help”. (What is Compassion)

How about that? It is our desire to help people that results in our most effective, creative, and connected outcomes.  It is our willingness to overrule and unroot our comparison and control-based way of being with others, our self-protecting, prove-myself-to-people mentality that gives us an edge.

It is our willingness to embrace what we may even still think to be weak that results in our most effective, creative, and connected outcomes.

We live in a competitive culture, one where winners are the ones who strive for excellence.

They are also the ones who set the standard for others. If compassion brings us the best results, doesn’t it seem obvious that the path to competitive success and excellence is paved by practicing compassion?

Yet, rather than being mindful of how our actions affect others and genuinely caring about being with people, recognizing the positive impact we can have when we suffer together, we are often more concerned about what happens to us.

What’s in it for me? How can I protect myself? How can I prove myself?

We more often compare ourselves to others than we rest in having compassion for one another. We do what we can to mitigate suffering rather than allowing suffering to strengthen us—and our leadership.

We hide behind the wall, the barrier, the screen, the mask when we believe we don’t have the competitive advantage.

We hyper-perform when we believe we do.

So, we stifle creativity, strangle connections, and limit people and possibilities by prioritizing personal performance, position, and power.

Fuel: Have you ever thought about compassion like this? Are you skeptical? That’s okay. I have to chose to overrule thoughts that tempt me to keep building the wall daily. That’s why I use the word overrule and not obliterate. Our battle will always be a battle of the mind. So, have you ever thought about compassion as being this kind of effective?

Compassion is practiced by people who personify powerlessness.

·       They release the urge to prove themselves for the gain of greater collective outcomes.

·       They prioritize relational hospitality extending an invitation through their presence, creating a welcoming environment for both people and opportunities.

·       They refuse play the comparison game. And this is their edge. Compassionate people have the ultimate competitive edge. Their advantage is not one of performance, position, and power, but of genuine service, strength, and security.

To not play the comparison game in a comparison-driven culture is hard.  It’s counterintuitive. It’s not safe. It’s dangerous.

People expect you to show up comparing and defining yourself by what you do. People expect you to give them a reason to be impressed by you. People expect you to size them up.

In fact, they will often discount you when they size themselves up against you and you don’t reciprocate. This is the danger. And there will be days this danger is more than you want to take on.

Again…the word overrule. It’s your choice whether or not you do so.

But doing so is where compassion makes you better, whether or not the people around you believe that yet for themselves. They may not trust you are for real. They may not want you to be.

The choice to resist the temptation to engage in the performance game and choose instead to practice compassion proves not your credibility, your power, your reputation, yourself. It proves you want to show up serving others more than yourself.

It proves you want to see people, be with them, suffer with them, and not stay there in the suffering, but move forward and grow through it together. Oh wait on this again, humans are most creative, connected, and effective when they think, feel, and take action together.

Compassion is more than wanting to serve others, to care for others. This is sometimes why we so often associate compassion with weakness. We confuse it with neediness. And with needy people. If we practice compassion, are we ourselves weak by association?

Here is what needs to be understood. Compassion involves being responsible to people, not for them.

Feeling someone else’s pain with a desire to make them feel better is much easier than feeling someone else’s pain and helping them move forward through it. Feeling someone else’s pain with a desire to fix it for them is much easier than feeling someone elses’s pain and helping them move forward through it. Feeling someone else’s pain without being with them, helping them think, feel, and take action through it is weak. 

If we only feel someone’s suffering for the sake of them being seen. For the sake of a like. A follow. An acknowledgement. An accept-me-as-I-am demand. For them to feel better. What many in this generation may call compassion. We have only exchanged authoritarian leadership for lenient. Walls for rivers with no banks. Barriers for unbridled chaos. Screens for starved souls. 

And leaders who are spent, stressed, and stuck.

To be compassionate means we also believe people are capable. Including ourselves.

We need to believe we can think, feel, and take action on our feelings. We need to believe others can, too. Even when some of them feel bad. When some of them feel like suffering.

Compassion means feeling them to do what you can to make a positive change. To take a step forward in action. Remember, tension is one of the most useful forces you have to move you from your careful, comfortable, and controlled existence to the heights of your potential.

A dear friend just this week was on the verge of a battle of her mind and chose not to engage.

I saw her. I acknowledged her pain. Her struggle. Her suffering. And I asked her what she was thinking about it. She said, “I don’t care. If I thought about it I would.” And that was that.

Why do I share this? Compassion led me to ask her to think because compassion is more than sharing in someone’s suffering. More than sitting in the sad. It is battling through to wherever the suffering leads.

Without my having to say I’m really interested in you thinking, feeling, and taking action she didn’t want to think. She knows the three are connected—we all do. She knows that thinking leads to feeling and feeling often leads us to places we don’t know what to do with. She wasn’t ready to go there so that’s where we landed. This time. I’ll keep giving her opportunity to think so she can get to the place where she moves forward.

But many of us when we want to be compassionate, we also don’t want to be in over our heads. So we sell compassion short and instead practice acknowledgement.

The choice to resist the temptation to engage in the performance game and choose instead to practice compassion, and not just acknowledgement, proves your strength.

It builds your confidence to show up with compassion again. And again.

It fosters creativity, deepens connections, and cultivates excellence.

Over time, it becomes your edge, and edge that many may doubt, but by your determined desire to serve them with compassion, they will discover it is strength. And they’ll want to practice it too.

To drive home the intrinsic value of compassion over comparison, of showing up having nothing to prove, “when we feel compassion, our heart rate slows down, we secrete the “bonding hormone” oxytocin, and regions of the brain linked to empathy, caregiving, and feelings of pleasure light up, which often results in our wanting to approach and care for other people.” (What is Compassion)

Compassion builds a connection between our bodies and minds, reduces cognitive dissonance, and enables us to relate with one another on a deeper level. It ultimately enhances our collective performance.

So. Let There Be Compassion.

Fight: In what way do you want to fight to let there be compassion in your life?

What are you thinking and feeling? Are you feeling like you don’t want to think because you don’t want to feel? Maybe you’ve not ready to do battle. But if you are, remember this: feelings are not bullies unless you let them be bullies. Suffering is something we have sedated.

Use your thinking and your feeling to inform the actions you want to take to move yourself forward into the leader you were made to be.

What do you want to do in response?

When will you do it?

What difference will it make?

This has been episode three of our podcast series on Proactive Mindset Formation.

Up next in our “The Six Frames of a Proactive Mind” Series, Let There Be Compassion.

Don’t forget to join our Substack community. Download the substack app to your mobile device and search for @MettlEdge. Then, follow me—Jill Williams—to begin to receive this podcast in your inbox weekly and catch me when I go live.

Also, you can go to my website, mettledge.com, and check out our available 1:1 coaching opportunities and our 6-month MettlEdge Mind Cohort. As I said at the beginning, I’m interested in the theory behind proactive mindset formation, but I’m way more interested in making the complex process of forming a proactive mindset accessible, doable, attainable—simple and approachable—even though it will always involve more nuance and incomprehensibility than we may be able to imagine or than we may prefer.

It is this interest that has driven me to create the model I’m sharing with you. And it is why I want to do more than talk about the model. I want to give you a way to engage with it in a powerful way, with 2 to 3 people you trust in our 6-month mettledge mind cohort.

Schedule a call to talk more about this at mettledge.com. Click on learn more.

I pray this podcast has been a blessing to you! Let’s go!

References:
https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine-home-fall-2024/soundbites-fall-2024/
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jude&version=ESV