My self-leadership is self-authority—my power to author my life, from the inside out. It's my freedom to make choices that make sense to me, regardless of outside influence. This doesn't mean that I don't factor in consensus belief, or that I dismiss what others think. It does mean that when I'm on my game, the buck stops with me, and I like it that way.
How do we give our leadership away? Let us count the ways:
- To doctors, lawyers, scientists, pills and diet books, and experts on TV and other media...
- To our spouse, our friends, our kids, and unwritten family rules...
- To clients, bosses, co-workers, company culture...
- To religious leaders, anti-religious leaders, political ideas, fashion trends, and even the weather...
- False or limiting beliefs and cognitive distortions.
- You name it.
We live in a world pulls us from our center with a powerful, seductive gravity of common thought.
Degrees, certifications and titles are all products of some amount of consensus agreement and couldn't exist without it. We invest our power in pills and concoctions, and "proven" science (I once read that only 1 in 3 people have the predicted reaction to any pharmaceutical. Advil is a miracle drug for me, and does nothing whatsoever for my wife).
Read More...Tags: Leadership, Choice, Authority
(And a Little Bit about Dog Training)
You’ll rarely, if ever, hear someone called a “oversensitive hard-ass” or a “cold bleeding-heart.” There’s Probably a good reason for that. Even those of us who are not familiar with Jungian personality type (Please see “About Type” at the end of this blog installment) will admit that some folks appear to decide with their heart, and others with their head. Once more, we sometimes find our opposite (of our own preference for decision-making) a bit annoying, and reserve pejoratives like “hard-ass” or “wussy” for those who have decision-making priorities so frustratingly different from our own.
It's a fool who will use his or her favorite tool for every task, instead of the best tool—or best combination of tools—for the work at hand.
Yes, some folks default to making decisions based on facts, data logic; some folks choose on values, potential impact on relationships, emotional cues. That accepted, it’s important to recognize that both ways of approaching choice are rational, or thought-based processes, and the only difference is what kind of information is prioritized in the decision-making process. After all, thinkers feel deeply, and many feelers are brilliant at logical thinking. Read More...Tags: Jungian Type, MBTI, Meyers-Briggs, Thinker, Feeler, Psychological Type, Preferences, Choice, Success, Happiness, Appreciation
