“The Serenity Prayer” For Leaders #MLQH
Most of us have heard The Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
I learned the text by heart at a young age: my parents had hung it on a plaque over our kitchen table. I later discovered that it is an excerpt of a longer prayer written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The prayer has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, who have certainly helped popularize it.
As a lifelong student of Stoicism (my friends know that there’s been a copy of one translation or another of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations on my bedside table for more than 30 years), I continually find The Serenity Prayer a useful touchstone and mantra. Those people who seem to me both happiest and most successful in life appear to be those who focus their energy on what they can control, and not on what they cannot control. While I can’t dictate, or often even anticipate, what may happen to me, I can control how I react to those events. I can also work to prepare myself for how I should react to things that don’t go my way. (These were the lessons of Marcus’s teachers, Epictetus and Seneca.)
I’ve often shared this “Stoic” wisdom with my clients. Focus your time and energy on what you can control: your organization, your team, yourself. Bring your people together to create a common goal, and talk openly and proactively about what might get in the way of achieving your objectives and how you can overcome impediments or curve-balls. Most of all, be a role model of resilience and self-management
Over the years, however, I’ve come to think of one possible fine-tune to The Serenity Prayer, one which might be especially meaningful to leaders. There are sometimes things you cannot fundamentally change that you can still influence. What you can do will vary from case to case, but here are a few tips: Engage others, especially “opponents,” in dialogue. Listen more carefully, and be willing to rethink your own positions. Seek to learn, constantly, knowing that greater knowledge will help you see situations and issues with more clarity and subtlety. Seek win-win outcomes. Practice both curiosity and generosity. Work to grow the pie rather than competing as if everything is a zero-sum game.
Boethius, another Stoic philosopher, observed in his Consolations of Philosophy that our human world is a changeable place: The Wheel of Fortune turns inexorably, and if you’re up today you may well be down tomorrow. (And vice-versa.) That’s something worth thinking about in both good times and bad.
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