Controlling Emotions

And yes, before we get started, I really do mean it… do not try to control your emotions or your feelings. Learn to use them instead.

Little kids are told to control their emotions over and over again. This gets taught early and reinforced throughout life. But it turns out that the lesson is not quite right. You should not be controlling your emotions. You should be controlling your actions and reactions to your emotions.

Your emotions are like the instruments on your car. Controlling your emotions is like controlling the speedometer on your car so it says exactly what speed you want regardless of how fast the car is really going. When you drive you don’t control the speedometer, you control the speed of the vehicle using the speedometer as a guide.

So why would you expect the vehicle of yourself to work any different? You need your emotions, your instruments, and you need them to be working as accurately and with as much precision as possible.

An unfortunate majority of the people in the world spend their entire life working to control their speedometers rather than their actual speed. It happens with emotions, it happens in business, it happens in politics… it is just a part of our human nature. Unfortunately, the only possible outcome of controlling your instruments instead of using them to control your vehicle is that you end up flying blind. You are unable to tell where the you are, how fast you’re moving and where you’re heading. You may very well slam into a mountain, the ground or any number of other things. Turn off or reduce the accuracy of your instruments at your own peril.

OK, so you leave the speedometer connected, but maybe you don’t like risk so you decide to just drive 40 on the freeway so you can easily stay safe. This almost works, but easy safety is seldom as safe as it appears. In this case, going 40 on the freeway to create safety from getting a ticket and safety from losing control of your own car also creates a new risk, namely that someone else will crash into you as they are not expecting you to be going 40 on a freeway.

In the same way as creating safety in one area often also creates a consequent risk in another, disconnecting your emotions also creates a consequent risk. The unintended consequence of disconnecting your life instruments, your emotions, is that you will be living an emotionally blind life, and you will have little chance of ever creating the only thing you really want. You will have little chance of ever finding true happiness and satisfaction in life.

Imagine a video game: You are a pilot flying a plane in a race or a battle across uneven terrain with obstacles such as trees, buildings, mountains, and canyons.

In this game, your engine makes more power the closer you are to the ground, and less power the higher you are. Therefore you can go faster near the ground and the obstacles, but slower if you’re up high away from the obstacles. But the lower you fly, the less time you have to react to the obstacles and terrain. Also, the faster you go, this problem is increased. But to do your best in the game, you have fly as low and as fast as you can.

Now imagine it is foggy out, and you have only your instruments to guide you.

This is a pretty good analogy for how we live our lives. We are the pilots. The obstacles and the terrain represent our interactions with other people. Our lifelong pursuit of happiness, success, and love is the race. And our emotions are the only instruments available to guide us through the fog.

While you can fly carefree and safe at 30,000 ft, doing so will leave your engine weak, and you will miss out on any chance of performing well. To follow the analogy, you can keep a safe emotional distance, but doing so will dilute your interactions with people.

You can detach yourself from your emotions, turn them off, decrease their accuracy, or simply ignore them. But doing so has dire consequences, as your emotions are the only instruments you have by which you can measure your happiness, stress, loss, sadness, joy, etc.

Controlling your emotions rather than controlling your reactions to your emotions is a lot like controlling the altimeter of the airplane rather than using what the altimeter is trying to tell you in order to keep from crashing into the ground.

Rather than controlling your emotions, work to improve the ACCURACY of your emotions and to control your REACTIONS to your emotions.

Stay Tuned for Part 2, Redirecting your reactions to your emotions.  (Part 2 is now available).

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Leadership

It is actually very simple:  Leadership is executive management, or management of management.  Leadership is the executive task, while management is the administrative task.  To illustrate with an analogy:  Management is administering Execution as in blocking and tackling, while Leadership is Building the Team and Developing the Play Book.

Basically, management is all the things you need to administer to keep a business running.  It is organizing processes, looking after finances, minimizing risks, administering details, and handling the day to day operations and operational difficulties.  Management is everything you absolutely need to make a business operate.  Without good management, a business will stumble around drunkenly, fall down from time to time, and possibly even break its neck.  With good management a company will survive.  Leadership is the management of that management process.  In that absence of good management, leadership builds it.

Then building on top of good management, leadership adds team building (at all levels of an organization), vision, and executive direction.

This is a simple concept, but for a variety of reasons, the whole world wants to make it seem complicated.

For one thing:  Business leadership is not a quality that is limited to only executive management

The qualities of leadership don’t start in the executive office.  Rather they start with individuals and how they approach everyday life.  You don’t have to be in business to be a leader.  And you can’t be an effective leader of others unless you are an effective leader of yourself.  The show “Undercover Boss” recently had Larry O’Donnell working side by side with the rank and file employees.  Without going into all the details, you can observe self leadership in the one very self directed, self motivated, porta-pot cleaning employee.  You can bet that if you promote him to the first level of management that he would understand how to build the skills and attitude that the workers need to be successful.

For another thing:  Leadership is not limited to business management

Even someone who is self employed with no employees still has need of leadership. The army of one still has to figure out what battles to fight, where to be and when to be there, what skills are the most critical ones to develop, and on and on and on.  The leadership task of team building doesn’t fall away just because you have a team of one.  In fact, the opposite is true:  It is more important than ever that you figure out how to invest in the human resources of your army of one, because there is nobody else around to do it!  Granted your team building is easier without the personality issues in a team of many, but the requirement itself still exists.

Yet one more thing:  We don’t have a set of certified credentials to qualify someone as a leader

Unfortunately, we have a long and rich history of teaching management as business administration and not as leadership.  This has lead to a large population of credentialed professionals who consider themselves leaders, but who have actually had very little leadership focus in their education and experience.  We don’t have an army of credentialed professionals running around with MBL (Masters of Business Leadership) degrees.  We have an army of credentialed business administration professionals instead.

Combine this with the fact that actual leadership training is a fragmented discipline with thousands of self certified experts (not to label them as arrogant, it’s just that there is no other kind of certification!) and each expert is teaching their own personal brand, flavor, and subset of the subject.  You have leadership experts coming from a religious framework.  You have leadership experts teaching from a sports perspective.   You have military leaders, leaders who have been successful in business, and on and on.  The only thing you don’t have is any common curriculum that is accredited for making one a leader!

So the credentialed professional managers, the MBAs, really don’t even have a clear program for leadership.  Plus, the lack of leadership curriculum means that the MBA certification is still the highest available.  They are left with no clear path to follow, and no clear indication of whether they are managers or leaders.  So of course they declare themselves leaders.

Finally:  Leadership is separating the executive task from the administrative task

But what is the Executive task and how does it differ from the Administrative task?

The executive task can best be described as fixing an entire type of problem, rather than fixing the individual problem.  This is not to say that administrators and managers shouldn’t be expected to look for, recognize, and correct the type of problem.  Leadership can and should be encouraged, taught, and rewarded in every single member of a team, from top to bottom.

Back to the Waste Management example, Larry O’Donnell is showing great potential as a leader.  However, is he fixing the type of problem or is he fixing the specific problem?  Assuming the entire exercise isn’t just a PR ploy, let’s consider a comment from the CBS website about his episode of the show.

kellibrooke noted: Anyone see a problem with how he handled Jaclyn’s situation? Her position required way too much work and she didn’t make enough money to keep her home. So… instead of realizing that her current job didn’t pay enough for all the work she did… He made her into one of him. Put her on salary, made her a management employee. That’s awesome for her… but what about her ‘replacement’ that she is supposed to hire? That person will be in the same boat as Jaclyn was. I’m happy for Jaclyn but the real issue is the job itself and the fact that people can’t support their families and keep their homes based on the wages he’s handing out to non-management employees. She’ll now be eligible for bonuses….what about the people he saw picking up trash and cleaning the johns….where are their bonuses??

Herein lies the real question:  Is Larry O’Donnell a great leader?  Or is he a great administrator?  He certainly fixed the individual problem.  Time will tell if he can address the type of problem as a whole.

By Jason Wilton

What traits do the very best leaders exhibit? When you know what great leaders do, it’s easier to develop your enlightened leadership skills. So, let’s examine some of what the best of the best do on a regular basis.

Great leaders look backwards and forward.

You’ve probably heard many people say that enlightened leadership is forward-thinking. That’s definitely part of the story. The best leaders are always looking over the horizon, seeing what’s ahead and visualizing the best future course of action. That’s just half of the process, though. The great leaders also look back to history. They want to know how things got the way they are and what empirical evidence shows them about possible future courses of action. They look forward while learning from the past.

Enlightened leadership is an honest process.

The best leaders don’t bother stretching the truth, shielding people from uncomfortable realities or otherwise engaging in dishonest behavior. They recognize the role trust plays in leadership and they treat it as something sacred. They know that being honest is the best way to gain respect and to persuade others to follow their lead. There’s no room for dishonesty in enlightened leadership.

Awesome leaders take time to listen.

Communication is an essential aspect of quality leadership. That means that leaders must do a good job of conveying their ideas and messages. That’s not all of what goes into great communication, though. There’s a listening component at play, as well. The very best leaders make time to listen to others. They really pay attention to what’s said and they use that information and opinion as part of their decision making calculus. They’re not insulated and aloof. They’re accessible and they really do make a point of caring about the perspectives of others.

Those three characteristics are definitely among the most significant components of enlightened leadership. It would be a gross oversimplification to claim that anyone exhibiting those three traits was guaranteed to be a fabulous leader, but it isn’t an exaggeration to argue that all good leaders will make a point of looking back and into the future while being honest and accessible.

If you’re sincerely interested in becoming a truly wonderful leader, you’ll note those traits and do everything in your power to make them part of your approach. They’re not sufficient to elevate you to your full potential, but their undoubtedly necessary for anyone who wants to display enlightened leadership skills.

This periodic journal of practical leadership and management tips provides great material about leadership development: http://www.enleadership.com/blog Enlightened leadership is one of many topics you can learn about at this great site.
Article Source: Three Significant Components of Enlightened Leadership