Last week you had the opportunity to choose your parents.
- Did you choose well?
- Did you choose the ones you had?
- Did you design better ones?
Ah, if we could, but it is not so.
Whatever our forebears bequeath us, our lives are filled with our own opportunities and choices.
No matter the most perfect of mothers and fathers, they cannot live our lives—that power belongs to us.
Another question for us is whether our children would choose us as their parents.
That is a tougher question because the answer is in our hands …
The rhetorical question posed in Leadership Weekly Note 2823 was also a leadership moment in at least two ways.
- Firstly, did you bother to work through the question?
- Secondly, did you look in the mirror to better understand yourself?
As influential leaders, we must be able to recognise leadership moments, then be equipped and prepared to rise to them.
Leadership moments are the subject of our 29th Note of 2023.
Leadership moments are one of the five Influential Leadership System’s architectural elements.
Leadership moments happen all around us, all the time.
They arise from our own initiative, and they exist across the tapestry of our lives like windows of opportunity.
Leadership moments are precisely the reason leadership exists.
Without leadership moments leadership would not be necessary and thus not need to exist!
What is a leadership moment?
Those who have completed Alpha (or are busy with it) will enjoy an entire Module (#9) covering the matter, but for the sake of context here is a one-line definition.
A leadership moment is a social circumstance that activates (triggers) the practice of leadership.
Leadership moments happen all the time, anywhere—in our homes, on the way to the mall, in our workspaces, at school, in parliament, on the sports field.
The question is how we prepare for them.
I am sure we all agree that the greater the moment, the better prepared we must be.
If I were asked to present the Influential Leadership System to the General Assembly of the United Nations, I would feel greater pressure to be prepared than if I were sharing it with a smaller audience (even if every audience deserves the same effort).
So, how do you cope with your leadership moments if you have not prepared for them?
And, even preceding that, if you do not have an eye for leadership moments, how do you see them?
We need both capabilities!
Firstly, we must be able to see a leadership moment for what it is.
Secondly, we must be prepared to tackle it effectively. We must be ready for our leadership moments!
I refer you to the philosophical advisory in the first infographic above.
It comes from the world’s leading mathematician and astronomer of the time, Hypatia.[i]
[If you are unfamiliar with her life and work, find a brief overview from Britannica below. She certainly tackled big leadership moments of her time.]
There are many ideas in her twin lines; I offer two takeouts:
- Understanding (knowledge) is an accretive process.
- We can only understand things beyond ourselves if we first understand ourselves and what is close.
The second point is also close to the heart of influential leadership in another area, namely, self-awareness. This is our first-amongst-equals behavioural attribute.
Self-understanding is the bedrock of knowing others and other things, and leading.
Let us now turn to a well-used but perfectly apt idiom attributed to the Roman philosopher, playwright and politician, Lucius Seneca, in the infographic below.
It is an idea we know so well, but seems to me, also lost on us much of the time.
Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.
If we are prepared, we see the opportunity and transform it into what looks like luck!
Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers (2008), suggests that it takes (in the order of) 10,000 hours of diligent and focused practice to be ready for the moment of being great at something.[ii]
Seneca and Gladwell are two thousand years apart, but essentially saying the same thing. It is a truism.
Are you able to see your leadership moments? Are you prepared for them? And, most importantly, do you tackle them?
Regards,
Colin @ Karoo
Influential leadership prepares us for our moments!
[i] Deakin, Michael. “Hypatia”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 30 Jun. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hypatia. Accessed 16 July 2023.
[ii] Do not get hung up on the moot point about the actual number of hours. The principle is what we value.
