Because the world needs you.

Because you are human, there's no other way to be. You can't be a leader without being human. You can't be an engineer without being human. You can't be a zookeeper without being human. Or a rocket scientist. Or an accountant.

Because everyone else at work is human.

We are all bought into the "way it is:" just do the job and live by the employment contract we signed: do this job, get this money.

Whoever gets the highest position and most money, wins.

We boil everything down to dollars and numbers.

And that has cost us dearly. We know it has cost us dearly, is costing us dearly.

And yet we can't break the narrative.

Power (inherent in every organization), distorts everything. For everyone at every level in the organization.

For leaders: The Wall Street Journal brought research done in 2001 (Galinsky, Inesi, Magee, and Grunsfeld) back to the table in 2012 in the article, Five Reasons Why It's Lonely at the Top: five ways in which power perverts, contorts and undermines a number of psychological processes that normally nurture close connections and form the foundation of healthy relationships.

For everyone else: Everyone being led lives vulnerably and feeling as if everything at risk: success on the job, financial security.

We holler about leadership from the mountain tops:

"Be authentic!"

"Be self-aware!"

But the quarterly analyst meeting, the stock price, the investors' demands ... they're all louder.

Tasha Eurich wrote a book called Insight a few years ago.

Admittedly cherry-picking one thing from her work:

• 95% of us believe we are self-aware.
• Only 15% of us actually are.

We all understand the impact and the price we pay when we continue to give in to the prevailing narrative and "acceptable" way of living.

To stay safe.

To retain power.

95% of us continue to rationalize why it's okay to give up our humanity every day, to go along with what is so terribly expensive for our own selves, our families, our communities, and yes, our world.

15% of us know every time we intellectualize or rationalize a choice to our detriment ... and can choose differently.

15% of us know every time we have the opportunity in our hands, voices, action, or inaction to either diminish another human being ... or to see that human being and have a profound positive effect.

Being a self-aware human isn't easy. It's simple, but not easy.

When 85% of the people around us are "going along with the program," it takes courage to be in the drastic minority.

The system you're a part of might spit you out.

Your desire to preserve who you are must outweigh what you are in that system.

Your own brain fights you when you want to be vulnerable in any situation - when you crave being seen and understood. With vulnerability comes risk to our primordial instinct to be safer in numbers.

If you are a leader or a manager, you have the potential to exponentially influence the world.

Finding the capacity to be human = exponentially positive influence.

Continuing to march to the beat of your organization = the most likely outcome: exponentially negative influence and getting to be known as a "toxic leader at a toxic organization."

Because even choosing not to act has an effect.

On your own life.

On the lives of those depending on you.

And on the lives of everyone depending on them.

Who's in?

DM me or type, "I'm in!" in the comments and I'll send you my Leadership Intention Guide.