“Our greatness lies not so much in our being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves.”
~Gandhi
We are fortunate to partner with many leaders as their Executive Coaches. Bearing witness to our clients’ deepening self-awareness and growth is a gift beyond measure.
The greatest gift is watching them first realize that their main goal is to “remake themselves” to be the people and leaders they want to be…and then do it.
So many of our clients come to us with practical issues. “Help me strengthen my team to work well together and to work well without me,” they ask. “I feel so tied down by the day-to-day, I can’t and don’t spend time thinking strategically,” they offer. “I want to get that promotion, that buy-in from my manager (or peers), that sense that I’ve done a great job,” they share.
Practical things that require practical approaches.
We absolutely support our clients as they get clearer on and closer to attaining these goals. We help them cross that finish line. But often the path to what they desire is not the path they assumed they’d have to take. Because we’ve learned over our decades of experience with thousands of coaching clients that awareness really is the first step and that all the change we wish to see and be usually starts with, at least in some ways, changing ourselves.
To be clear, we don’t coach and support our clients to be totally different people. In fact, we coach and support many of our clients to become even more authentic in how they show up and how they engage. What we do help them look at and remake are their self-limiting beliefs, values, and behaviors.
As I’ve said to many clients, along our journey we adapt to succeed or sometimes just to survive. However, those adaptations that may have worked for us at one point often outlive their usefulness and eventually hold us back. Like the client who learned to hesitate before speaking from the first boss who lambasted them for saying something “silly” or wrong. Or the client who learned to explode and demand from the peers who would only collaborate if you yelled louder than they did. And the client who learned to couch everything he said carefully in order to not be seen as an “angry black man.”
There are so many ways to remake ourselves to be the people and leaders we want to be, and that will give us the fuel and insight we need to also remake the world.
How have you had to remake yourself? What have you learned?
Click here to comment.
If you enjoyed this post, you can read more like it in our book, The Power of Thoughtful Leadership: 101 Minutes To Being the Leader You Want To Be, available on Amazon.
For support in remaking yourself to remake your world, contact Robyn at rmcleod@chatsworthconsulting.com.
Click here to receive The Thoughtful Leaders™ Blog posts via e-mail and receive a copy of “Ending Leadership Frenzy: 5 Steps to Becoming a More Thoughtful and Effective Leader.”
Photo Credit: NoraC/Bigstock.com
