Being a Graceful Leader

It is already Thursday again, so welcome back to my newsletter! I’ll be featuring thoughts from the author of Grace Notes, John Baldoni! Also, coming up today at 12 pm EDT/9 am PT/5 pm GMT is my weekly interview for Newsweek, Better. Julia Pimsleur, author of Go Big Now, will speak with me about mastering your mindset. If you’d like a reminder about that interview, click here.

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To say that the past year and a half has tested our patience would be a severe understatement. John Baldoni, an executive coach and author, has just released his fifteenth book called Grace Notes. The book focuses on the exercise of self-reflection and consideration as a tool for us to build respect for ourselves and others. Here are a few thoughts John shared on incorporating more grace and mercy into our lives. To view our entire conversation, it is available here.

Grace in Leadership:

“From a broad standpoint, grace is given to us with no strings attached. It is a catalyst for goodness. It is generosity. It’s compassion, it's respect. And from a leadership standpoint, it is acting on our better nature and energizing the organization to move forward - so we need it more than ever. It's a kindness, a connectedness, and that willingness to bring people together and look at our better nature. And gosh, we live in such contentious times, how easy is it to throw stones? Grace is the opposite.”

If you are burned out, own it:

“Own the fact that you’re on a hair-trigger, own the fact that you’re burned out, own the fact that you don't have a lot of reserves. And so, when you acknowledge it, you'll say, ‘Okay, I'm a human being.’ Take a pause, whatever a pause means - because it could be metaphorically or physically looking out the window. Take a walk and be kind to yourself. Especially if you're in a challenging situation. Consider all the good things that you are, that you've done, your accomplishments, but then just say, ‘I'm a human being. I have survived.’ And this is where resilience comes in. Resilience, I used to think, is just simply being knocked down and bouncing back. But so often we bounce back to a transformation.”

Grace as the enabler of mercy:

“Grace is the enabler of mercy. Why? Because grace enables us to act for the greater good. Mercy is in simpler parlance: give somebody a break. Don't take it personally on a small thing, a slight thing - turn the other cheek. It's also acting with an open-heartedness, and part of that is not making it personal. Take a step back from it. Not everything is about us. Mercy is the capacity to understand the human condition. It is empathy and action. It is kindness. And the way a leader shows it is by treating people with respect, being generous to them, and when mistakes are made, say, ‘Let's turn this into a learning experience. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ That's mercy in action.”

Hope to have you join us at noon for my interview with Julia Pimsleur! Next week, I have a discussion with the authors of Unleashed, Anne Morriss and Frances Frei, about how to empower everyone around you! To mark that down on your calendar, add a reminder from this link here.

If you can’t make today’s interview, fear not, because we do make a replay available! We always upload my weekly interviews to my YouTube page. If you’d like to be notified when the newest episode is available, subscribe to my channel and you’ll receive a notification.

Wishing you health and success -?

Dorie