It Starts with YOU
Our awareness of the internal feelings, emotions, and preferences of OTHERS depends on how well we know our own. Resonance or empathy requires us to have good internal boundaries. We must understand where our role ends and another’s begins, because if we start to blend the two, we can begin to drown in other’s problems and risk becoming ineffective and burnout quickly.
Benefits of Intentional Leadership:
- Organizational alignment and conscious culture of trust and care
- More effective leadership of self and others
- Agility in chaos
- Comfort in ambiguity
- Clarity and growth while having fun
- More creativity, happiness, and health
At any given moment a leader is either above the line or below the line. Leaders that are above the line are open and curious and are genuinely interested in learning and understand that growth is essential and only happens outside of the comfort zone. Leaders that are below the line tend to have a more closed posture, take things personally, react instead of think, can be more defensive, and are more addicted to being right than learning. Everything starts with recognizing “where” you are (being self-aware) in terms of being above or below the line.
In the 1960’s & 70’s Dr. Bob Barkley, a visionary dentist from a small town in Western Illinois, created a remarkable health-centered, relationship based, values driven, high trust new patient experience which became the foundation of his very successful dental practice and subsequent speaking career. He was the first to coin the term co-diagnosis and advocate collaborating with a patient as to the choice of treatment that best meets their needs and wants. It wasn’t until 1995 that Daniel Goleman published his seminal book Emotional Intelligence in which he described the neurological and behavioral basis of what Barkley had done years earlier. Barkley, like his mentor L.D. Pankey, was so far ahead of the science that we’re just now catching up.
Recent research by Paul Zak, PhD in his book Trust Factor shows when you create a positive social interaction with another person, the hormone oxytocin surges through the brain creating a sense of trust. Zak states – “This simple mechanism, a positive social interaction, creates a perpetual trust-building cycle…”