Why Leaders Have Breakdowns

In this post, I'm going to talk about how transformational leaders create opportunities for breakthroughs out of unpleasant situations they might rather avoid.

Every single one of us have experiences in life we've learned to try and avoid. The particulars of these experiences will be unique for each of us.

One of the experiences I learned to hate was that of being?excluded. For you it might be anger, sadness, feeling unsafe, feeling embarrassed, or anything else.

Exclusion is the feeling that I didn't belong, I wasn't needed, or I wasn't wanted. I hated the feeling of showing up at school to discover everyone had gone to a party and I hadn't been invited.

As time went on, this relationship to being excluded grew. I found new situations that left me feeling the same way, and I developed strategies to avoid those situations.

By ensuring I only ever spent time with people I already knew were a guaranteed yes to me, I didn't have to feel left out. By losing myself in my own passions and hobbies, I could ensure that I always had something to do, even if no one else was involved.

These approaches allowed me to avoid the?problem?of being left out. As time wears on, I create better and better strategies to avoid having to be with this experience. My life becomes an expression of "Not having to feel left out".

The thing is, life is really abundant, and so I'm going to keep coming up against situations that leave me feeling excluded. As the cycle spins on, it takes less and less to trigger this in me. Maybe I'm at the grocery store, and I notice two of my pickleball friends there talking to each other.

"Why didn't I get invited? What's going on?"

You might be able to look upon this and say "Adam, that's nonsense, it's just coincidence that these two people happened to meet up in the same grocery store as you." That's the wisdom of being outside of someone's internal story.

The point, though, is that I've got a problem in my life, and that problem is called "Exclusion".

This is the default human approach. We have "problems", and we work to solve those problems.

Leaders have something different than "problems".

We have "breakdowns".

A breakdown is the thing that stands between what I really want, and where I am currently.

One of the things I'm working to create right now is a community. I've been pushing forward the torch of leadership solo for quite some time. I don't want to push this forward by myself any longer. There's a lot I can achieve by myself, but there's a lot that will forever remain out of my reach.

Put differently, there's a level of impact and transformation that I'd like to create, for which, doing it alone is insufficient.

In order to create this new result, I need to create a breakthrough. Being satisfied with doing things by myself will no longer be sufficient.

I'm aiming to create a new breakthrough in Connection.

And inside this commitment, feeling?excluded?ceases to be a "problem". It becomes a breakdown.

When I start to feel excluded, I want to pull away and isolate. The last thing I want to do is open up and connect with someone about how I feel. I want to go and lick my wounds and shake my fist at all the normies who don't appreciate me.

But there's no breakthrough down that path — just more of the same.

So now I have two choices, and the actual circumstances are identical down each choice.

Down the first path, I can invite people to join me in community, and have them respond in whatever way leaves me feeling excluded. I relate to that feeling as a problem, and to overcome the problem, I curl up into the safety of my own isolation.

Down the second path, I can invite people to join me in community, and have them respond in whatever way leaves me feeling excluded. But, I relate to that feeling as a?breakdown?in the face of my commitment to Connection.

When an experience is a?breakdown, it means I'm on the right path. There isn't anything to fix, just an opportunity to refocus myself on the breakthrough I'm committed to creating, and taking the next appropriate action.

I'll still feel everything I'm going to feel. Exclusion isn't going to feel great, because I've built up a story about it. Holding it as a breakdown simply helps me distinguish what is happening and refocus my attention on what is most important.

We don't always get a choice in the way the world presents itself to us. But we always have a choice in how we relate to what is happening.

Get clear on the breakthrough you want to create, and lean into the breakdowns.