Meditations On Leadership
These are my thoughts on leadership related topics and ideas. It is meant to be a sort of journal for me and if you find it useful than I am happy to have helped.
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” ― Dale Carnegie This principle is taught in How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The principle here is fairly simple. People are generally interested in themselves. They are concerned about how many likes they get on a post, how many people favorite their pins, and how many retweets they get. People also tend to connect with people that have similar interests. So, one of the fastest ways to connect with people is to become interested in them. Now before you run off and try to use this to manipulate anyone you need to know that people are very good at sniffing out BS. The trick isn't to pretend that you are interested in them it is to actually be interested in them. It's not easy though because you and I are very interested in ourselves and we like talking about us. If someone tells a story about their vacation we want to talk about ours because we remember ours and it is important to our personal experience. We don't really want to know more about their vacation or about their trip home. How do you do it? I honestly think that it is going to be a different journey for everyone. It would be nice to lay out a 10 step program but I have found that those sorts of programs are rarely as effective as they claim to be. I can tell you what works for me and I only do it with the disclaimer that I am far from perfect at it. First, I work on myself. I am very human and I have very selfish tendencies. To combat that I try to cultivate gratitude. There are lots of ways to do that but I prefer the "count your blessings" method. Basically I pray and in my prayers I express gratitude for things. I find that if I am more specific about what I am grateful for I end up feeling more grateful and as a result, less selfish. Once I feel grateful and less selfish I try to widen my perspective. The easiest way for me to do this is to visualize myself where I am and then "zoom out" to a birds-eye view of myself, then to the building I am in, the city, nation, country, earth, solar system, galaxy, universe, then I think about the billions of years before and after my life and how short I have to live in comparison to the vast expanse of time. Once I have that perspective I feel a lot more motivated to be kind and thoughtful. I feel like "what can I do with this short little life of mine that is good? What can I do to be happy and help others to be happy?" (As a side note this is a great thing to do if you are ever upset about something small like getting cut off while driving.) This technique helps me to not want to waste time on inconsequential things. Now that I have gratitude and perspective I can listen to someone else's experiences and problems and I can do it in a way that I have no real desire to "one up them." I don't want to show off, I want to connect with this person and really understand them. They are also on this little blue speck we call earth living for a short time. How amazing that I get to be with them in this moment of the eternities and connect? Of course there are situations that I find myself in where I don't wish to connect for whatever reason. I don't want to imply that you should do this in a situation that is negative for you. Use your reason to figure out how and when to connect with people and how and when to disconnect with people for your own safety or sanity. Leadership LessonIt is important to be interested in the people you lead. If you aren't interested in them and you don't want to be interested in them you have no business leading them. If you are interested or want to be interested in them try talking and thinking about yourself a lot less. Find out what is important to them. Talk about what is important to them. Ask about what is important to them. Care about what is important to them.
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AuthorJ. LaVarr Roberts Archives
April 2021
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