Discussing Leadership - open forum

During our latest open forum on leadership, we discussed the importance of words and their impact. We followed through with the importance of changing our paradigm from necessities to possibilities towards a higher level of performance.

From "necessities" to "possibilities" language.

We have all heard the story of the boy who cried wolf. When we overuse needs language "I need this.", "We need that." ends up falling on death ears and the desired results for expedience is lost.

It is true that there is a place for needs language. A great example was cited, "If the house is burning down. . . I need water." At the same time we recognized that needs language is often overused. How often is your house burning down?

There is a big difference in stating, "I want to spend time with my spouse." compared to "I need to spend time with my spouse." We recommend to use possibility language which sounds like, "We want this.", "I want that." It suggests a desire to co-create together as opposed to a requirement to tolerate the other.

Developing Self-Awareness

An interesting comment was made about how we can't change what we are not aware of. This raises the question, "How do you develop self-awareness?"

Coach P's insight was that the answer lies in having a clear vision and mission. Awareness is a choice. We choose to focus on certain things and to ignore other things. Once we set our mind to focus on something specific, we become more aware of our surroundings to get to our focus.

A third party may help to distinguish the trees from the forest and can highlight gaps in our awareness. Again, choosing to follow-through will propel a chain reaction where we suddenly notice what was not noticeable before.

Case in point, If I ask you to count how many blue Ford F150 trucks are on the road, you will undoubtedly count a few and may completely ignore the grey ones. (not anymore because I raised your attention to the grey ones as well).

Do you need to be more aware of the impact of your decisions on the people around you? It is up to you to decide if this is important to you and to take action to become more self-aware.