Catching up with a UK colleague/friend a couple of weeks ago, the conversation turned to the economy. My friend observed that new patterns of activity are coming into play globally, that there are changes due to e.g. the economy, global warming, and catastrophes like wars, tsunamis, and the earthquake in China. (BTW, many of the spiritual teachers I’ve spoken to say these changes are the indicators of the Ascension – or as others call it, Confluence – I mentioned in my previous post).
I asked her how she saw all these changes impacting her business.
The answer I suspect many of us are tempted to give involves hunkering down to try to weather the storm, trying to make the best of a bad or confusing time.
To me, there’s a very different approach we need to be considering. There is, as Lindsey observed, no one leader we can put our trust in to take us through what many feel are increasingly gloomy times. In my mind, that means we each have to step up and become leaders ourselves, in our own areas, wherever we are called to do so, in roles large or small. As many of you know, I’m a dancer as well as a businessperson. I’ve learned that to dance really well, you need both a strong leader AND a strong follower – many of you have heard me say this before. Sometimes the two partners switch roles. Sometimes both give themselves over to the leadership of the musicians creating the music to which they are moving, or to members of the audience who cheer or catch the dancer’s eye and spur them on to steps and movements they didn’t even know they knew. A truly impactful performance is a fluid thing created from multiple inputs and a sharing of the leadership role, even if one person starts out or continues as the overall leader.
This metaphor is relevant in a lot of areas of life, business included. I suggest that each of us has some piece of a leadership role in the world we now live in. When we look within to understand our particular strengths, talents, interests, and potential, then we can start contributing to the world around us from that place of authority and deep knowing that is the hallmark of a leader. A number of my clients have found the work of Marcus Buckingham around finding and working from your strengths very helpful for engaging in this exploration. What have you found?