The Thoughtful Leaders Blog
Posted by Lisa Kohn on March 29, 2012
 I will admit it. I’m going to see Bruce Springsteen play for the umpteenth time on Wednesday and I’m taking my teenage daughter with me. I’m excited!
And with Bruce on my mind this week and leadership always on my mind, I started thinking about some of the lyrics from his songs that have Thoughtful Leadership implications. “Talk about a dream, try to make it real” jumps out. I guess it helps that it was the caption in my high school yearbook as well.
Thoughtful Leadership encourages us to take the time, the reflection, to move toward realizing our dreams. Bruce suggests we try to make our dreams real, but how? We often have the best intentions, we even map out strategies and action plans, but the dreams that matter to us do not always happen.
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Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on March 26, 2012
“You’ve got to ask. Asking is, in my opinion, the world’s most powerful and neglected secret to success and happiness.” Percy Ross
Recently a client was complaining to me about her current job. She felt underutilized, unfulfilled, and less than engaged. Yet she adored the company, and wanted to stay there…she just was at a point where her specific daily tasks left her empty.
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Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on March 12, 2012
“If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to meet it.” Jonathan Winters
I like this idea. I’m not the best swimmer, but I’ve spent too much time waiting for ships to dock so that I can get on them and sail away. I love the visual of swimming out to meet my ship – finding it and catching it.
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Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on February 27, 2012
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” Helen Keller
What is there to say to expand on this quote? Not a whole lot. It kind of speaks for itself. And yet, it bears expanding upon because it is worth repeating and remembering – and it can be so easy to forget.
Recently I was sick, really sick. In my desperation to have something simple in the house that I could eat, in light of my inability to make it to the store, I accepted my daughter’s offer to walk to the store and get what we needed. And then I asked her to take her little brother with her, so that I could have some peace in the house and he could get out. Later that day, as she was about to go out to run her own errands, I asked even more of her – to finish up some of my holiday shopping and again take her brother with her.
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Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on February 13, 2012
“Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.” John Quincy Adams
Ever notice that sometimes when you are about to give up – when you’ve tried too hard or too long and the obstacles seem too great, when you just don’t have it in you to keep going – as if by magic, you have a breakthrough. I see this in my own life, when the prospects with whom I have been following up with for years finally bring us in for a project. I witness it in the lives of my clients, when the proposal they’ve put before their boss, which has seemingly disappeared, is brought back as a topic of discussion…and then funded. I notice it in the life of my son, who has literally cried his way through homework because handwriting is so difficult for him, and then one day he found himself easily putting pencil to paper and capturing his thoughts without struggling. In each one of these instances, frustration has been high and we’ve all been at the “breaking point,” but when we’ve been patient, when we’ve persevered, it has been magical.
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Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on December 26, 2011
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Theodore Roosevelt
A colleague recently cornered me in the hallway to complain. “Everything is going wrong on this new project,” she moaned. “We simply don’t have the resources to make this happen by the deadline. It simply can’t be done.”
How often have we realized we don’t have the necessary resources to accomplish something, and so we get frustrated and angry, or we simply give up and stop trying? We feel so overwhelmed that we can only see what can’t be done instead of what can. We take stock and realize that we simply don’t have what it takes to achieve what we’re aiming for…so we walk away.
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Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on November 14, 2011
“There is no try, only do.” Yoda
Many of us probably remember Yoda from our childhood – that small creature from Star Wars who taught Luke Skywalker to trust in himself and in the Force. Many of us probably never thought twice about Yoda’s guidance, although we remember it well. I think Yoda actually had great advice for us all.
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Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on October 31, 2011
“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” Japanese proverb
When we guide our clients through personal and professional future planning, we share this quote over and over again. As many of us contemplate the future, we often either dream of our castles in the sky and yet do nothing to get there, or we keep moving and doing what’s in front of us without a thought about where we really want to go and what/who we really want to be. We forget to act in ways that will lead us to our ultimate goal or to even allow ourselves the time and space to figure out what our ultimate goal is.
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Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on October 24, 2011
“All glory comes from daring to begin.” Eugene F. Ware
Sometimes starting is simply the hardest part. There’s a project you need to tackle, an article (or book) you want to write, a number of phone calls you need to make, a relationship you want to build…but all you can do is sit at your desk, not starting. The task seems too daunting and a million other urgent issues or immediate tasks at hand seem to appear, as if out of nowhere. So you never begin, and you therefore never finish.
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Posted by Chatsworth Consulting Group on September 26, 2011
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Martin Luther
The other day a client shared with me her frustration with a project at work. She was convinced that the project was going to blow up, that there was no way she could meet the deliverables and the deadlines, and that her world would, in fact, go to pieces.
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View Robyn McLeod's profile
Good sound advise. In fact to go a step further, the right answer is the biggest killer of innovation. So thinking you know without exploring could be very short sighted.
Thank you for your thoughts. Innovation certainly does suffer when many possible answers, especially the “wrong” ones, are not brought to the fore.