The final waypoint is where you get to play Alpha Rummy.

The game of cards is another data point to appreciate that Social Agency is our power to lead, no matter what cards the universe serves up for us.

At the end of Alpha there is a mentoring and support phase, while successful participants continue to receive editions of the On Leadership journal (unless they unsubscribe – and why would anyone do that?).

Your Leadership Journey starts right now!

Managing Change and Creating new Habits

One of the most stubborn obstacles to any successful behavioural transition and change is the inertia created by old habits and behaviours.

Our old ways of thinking and behaving have enormous leverage over us.

So, if we want to establish new ways of thinking and behaving we must act immediately on new learning, knowledge and choices, and be relentless to habituate the change. Otherwise, the old ways creep back in.

Many of us know how a ‘New Year’s Resolution’ fails in week two, for example. Or maybe losing weight, or eating healthier, or embarking on an exercise regime… just fades away.

A frequent reason why people fail to bed down a new habit or way of doing things is inaction in the immediate aftermath of the choice.

The vital step is thus the first immediate step in the new direction—we must join together all three elements of our Agency: we think, choose and act forthwith!

Alpha and the immediate mentoring phase help you to implement the practice of Influential Leadership—to transition from knowing to doing.

In addition, we share the online Leadership Notes that will refresh, rekindle and keep you on track.

It depends on what your ‘world’ is:

• A Grade 11 learner faces a multitude of subject choices in preparation for their next life phase – as a tertiary student, an entrepreneur, an artist, a musician or a tradesman.

• A Grade 12 learner might face unemployment.

• What about the solo entrepreneur who must make the call to grow or stay solo?

• Then there are the newly employed who face a ‘boss’ from the Industrial Revolution, they want to escape but cannot find another job.

• Perhaps the aspirant best-selling author who needs more than writing.

• Take the corporate executive who realises that their staff say yes just because they’re the ‘boss’, not because they agree, support or respect their views.

• There’s the sportsperson who knows their game is not up to scratch, and their sport is full of chemical cheating, but is too afraid to face the issues.

• Maybe a politician who does want to represent the electorate, but is caught up in a corrupt system.

There are as many ‘worlds’ as there are people, and they change as we proceed with our lives and within different social domains.

We each have our story, our issues, our need to do better, be better and live better.

Influential Leadership Creates Leverage

I frequently deploy one of Archimedes’ mechanical inventions as a metaphor to illustrate the power of iLeadership—leverage that gets mighty things done (for our betterment).

His idea, captured in the infographic above, establishes that:

• A person can move a seemingly immoveable object with a long enough beam if mounted on a fulcrum—which turns it into a lever.

There are four essential elements in Archimedes’ mechanical solution to shift the world—likewise for us to deploy in the practice of iLeadership:

Person. Object (Leadership Moment). (Beam) / Lever. Fulcrum = Leverage

There is a substantive story to tell around each of the four elements, but for brevity, here is a summary:

• The person brings intent and agency to do something, to achieve something, to engage with a Leadership Moment. The person becomes an Influential Leader when they are conscious of a Leadership Moment, pick up the beam, turn it into a lever, then shift the event, condition or circumstance (for the better)!

• The object gives purpose—something worth moving, doing, achieving—it is the object in the Leadership Moment—the event, condition or circumstance that iLeadership will shift and shape. The earth symbolises something big, extraordinary, beyond what seems possible.

• The lever is what a beam, an ordinary static object becomes when it is transformed into an enabling tool—a lever—when combined with a fulcrum. It is the way in which the person uses something ordinary to extend their power (leverage).  The beam becomes a lever when we apply our self-efficacy and Social Agency to it at a Leadership Moment. A person who decides to practice iLeadership transforms from a bystander (the inert beam) into a dynamic lever!

• The fulcrum is the platform that ensures stability and grounding to help transform the inert beam into a dynamic lever and offers the person leverage (power beyond the ordinary).

In the iLeadership context, the fulcrum is the Influential Leadership System architecture—it is the firm and replicable base on which, and from which, a person leverages the inert beam into a dynamic lever.

When aligned, these four elements create a system where small, well-placed actions produce outsized change.

iLeadership, like mechanical leverage, is not about brute force but about design, choice, positioning and alignment – it is about influencing and shaping things (for the better).