Leading without limits
As I start to write this week, I am sitting in departures at Brandenburg airport, Berlin waiting to fly back to Dublin. I have been here since Sunday and my first trip here has been amazing.?
I had originally just planned to spend a couple of days with my good friends Erik Thureson and Johannes Metzler. Erik was travelling from Phoenix to Berlin Film Festival to work on the sales and distribution side of his amazing documentary Two Weeks’ Notice. I wrote about Erik and Two Weeks’ Notice in a previous newsletter. You can read about it?here.?
Watching Erik in action as he followed his intuition to set up meetings and create conversations was inspiring. Always listening, never forcing, never selling, he just shared his moving and incredible story and saw people, who were in town on serious business, become moved and inspired to get involved. I have no doubt that the connections he made will ensure that Two Weeks’ Notice positively impacts millions of people across the planet.?
It was early January when I decided to make the trip and Johannes my good friend and colleague suggested we use the opportunity of us being in the same place to run and event for leaders. It was middle of January before we finally decided to run the event, so we only had a month to make it happen. Not a lot of time!
We set a date, we decided what we wanted the day to look like, we had an online leaflet designed and started to tell people about it. Johannes did an amazing job enrolling people, even when he was on holidays. A couple of people were even enrolled from a chair lift while he was skiing. We hired a room. We created an amazing workbook for each attendee (thanks to the amazing Jo Smith for a super job on both the workbook and the leaflet). And finally, we planned the day.
On Monday 17th?February, twelve incredible people had an amazing time with Johannes and me exploring the possibility of ‘Leading Without Limits’.
The whole way through creating the event we kept asking the question, ‘How can we most powerfully serve each person attending so that they get the most from this day than any other programme they have attended before? I can’t know for sure yet if we achieved that, but that was 100% the place we were coming from, each step of the way in creating the event.
The event didn’t start at 9.30am on the 17th. For each attendee, it started the day they signed up. They immediately found themselves in a WhatsApp group, with just Johannes and me. In the group we asked them to think about and share something about their highest value challenges and ambitions. We enrolled them in listening to resources that would help them get the most out of the day in Berlin. We asked and answered questions and provided individual support in the run up to the day to make sure that every person in the room could show up open and ready for a day of transformation … not just information!
On the day of the event, Johannes outlined that what we would present was not about tactics, tips or tools. It was not a day about delegation or time management or other leadership competencies. We created an environment in which the attendees could experience insights that would allow them to transform how they saw themselves, transform how they saw their challenges and ambitions and also unlock new possibilities for actions they could take to move forward with those same challenges or ambitions.
From our own experience of decades of personal and professional development work, we have seen that transformation from the inside out to create a new foundation, to create new perspectives and ways of seeing things is what creates the most leverage for sustainable change.
As the day unfolded, we went deep into the power of listening, into how to access our innate clarity about what we want and clarity about next actions. We went deep into looking at where our resilience really comes from. We went deep into how we can create incredible results, independent of our circumstances.
We finished the day where we started - with a reminder that ‘The power is inside each of us’. We are not broken, or defective, or in need of repair in any way. We are whole and complete … we always have been, we always will be. As we begin to see this, as we begin to wake up to who we really are and how powerful we are to create what we want, a new world of possibilities begins to emerge. And along with these possibilities we can also access incredible clarity around the next actions we need to take.?
Transformation was our big hope for the day. Our big hope was that each person would leave with at least one big insight that would create a permanent shift or transformation for them. I don’t know yet if this happened for everyone, but I know that even before the end of the day, it had happened for some of the people in the room. As the post event feedback starts to come back, it’s clear that even more of the group are experiencing the kind of breakthroughs and transformations we had hoped for.
So often we can get stuck. Our tendency can be to look for something outside of us to fix the problem, or to fix us, or get us moving again … a tool, a tip, a hack, a technique, a training course. Nothing wrong with looking outside, but what if the most leveraged impact we have is to look inside for new insights and perspectives. Insights and perspectives that lead to shifts at a foundational level that results in new ways of seeing, and new ways of being that are infinitely more powerful than anything that is outside of us.
If you are curious about what I am pointing to here; if you want to access more of that power that is inside of you, either for yourself or for your organisation or both, call us! We may be able to help.
Much love
Peter