Monthly Archives: September 2018

What stops breakthroughs

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Brain Lightbulb

Our brain want to keep us safe and so we often approach life counting on a certain order of things, thinking that predictability and control will keep us safe. Then we encounter the experience of uncertainty, often with chaos close hard on its heels. This ambiguity and randomness can sometimes be disconcerting, as we struggle to understand and make sense of what is happening. 

We try to deal with things dealing rationally, sometimes emotionally. Neuroscientist David Eagleman captures the duality: “There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in [our] brain, each competing to control the single output channel of [our] behaviour. The rational system is one that cares about the analysis of things in the outside world, while the emotional system monitors the internal state….”

Because we don’t see a ready way to relate powerfully with these dual realities, we attempt to apply patterns of order and the more we do that, the less effective we become. Predictability and control in a world where you are moving to the next level. There is no certainty as an inevitability or predictability of an outcome. We are the ones saying something and looking for a breakthrough to make it happen. Real power occurs when we know we have something to say about the way things are. Recognising that shifts the horizon of what’s possible, and it’s from there the full range available in being human can be explored and lived.

Journey of development

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David has a way of taking you through a journey of development that makes one stand back and look at things from the outside at which point it becomes painfully obvious the areas one needs to improve or change even if you feel you want to rebut them at first. A great coach who helped me to solve a few things and I like to think now a good friend as well. Thank you for all your help David.

Marcus Harris
Actor and owner of Incite Insight

What does it take to be a leader?

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Being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership as one’s natural self-expression does not come from learning and trying to emulate the characteristics or styles of noteworthy leaders, or learning what effective leaders do and trying to emulate them (and most certainly not from merely being in a leadership position, or position of authority).

If you are not being a leader, and you try to act like a leader, you are likely to fail. That’s called being inauthentic (playing a role or pretending to be a leader), deadly in any attempt to exercise leadership.

Imagine someone who wants to be a great leader?

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Imagine someone who wants to be a great leader. In the normal course of events, such a man or woman would start off by, let’s say, studying leadership, perhaps in school, in books, or as an apprentice. Eventually, he or she would collect all the things that great leaders hav, degrees, credentials, diplomas, great track records, and great biographies. Then, at that point, we say, “Well, Mr. or Ms. X is a great leader!” Later, we send our children to the same schools so that they can become great leaders too.
 
Except, most of the children who go to those schools never do become great leaders. And we explain that failure on the basis of genes, environment, intelligence, opportunity, and the like. It never occurs to us that our template for becoming a great leader, or, more accurately, for becoming a great anything, is backwards. Never do we consider that what makes a great leader is NOT the school, books, or education, but simply BEING a great leader.
 
Now, I know that statement looks absurd at first, but it’s a very interesting possibility. If you discipline yourself to look for what’s present, for what is occurring in the moment, then you can ask yourself, “When someone is being a great leader, what is present?” What’s present (and all that is present, really) is being a great leader. What produces greatness, at the moment when greatness shows up, is being great, period. All the credentials follow from that, not the reverse.
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