Gratitude Trumps An Underdog Story
Of all the engaging forms of communication from a leader, I consistently find that of storytelling the most powerful. And honestly, I’m personally drawn to the underdog story. And in the US, we love our underdog stories dearly. So why not promote this consistently as the way to mobilize commitment in organizations?
Well, it does have limitations and if you’re strongest mode of communication to others is through stories, let’s expand your range of influence by looking closer at times when modifying your powerful communication style will work even better.
Change Intensity To Improve Communication
Click Here To Get Your FREE Practice
Let’s extend your foundation through a free practice to get a strong mind-body development pathway going for you.
The practice is geared for you to get a deeper glimpse at the power within your storytelling style. Right alongside your free practice are 3 concepts in this video that will help more easily adjust out of a complete storytelling push and allow for those times when a different type of magnetic communication can come to the fore.
Check out the video for a fuller discussion of:
- Intensity as a measure
- Your reality bias
- Allowing common ground
Over the next few weeks, this combination of concepts and a live, mind-body practice will help you build out an extension to your persuasive storytelling communication style as a leader. Get started now and download your free copy of the practice and start connecting to an even broader audience, especially those that seem distant to your leadership at present.
Storytelling Style Frustrating Others?
It might not be obvious to you or perhaps acceptable that a storytelling style of communication for a leader does indeed make it difficult for some people to follow. Certainly it isn’t necessary for everyone to follow but in an organization, it necessary for a critical mass and crucial functions to align to your direction.
Storytelling is great to engage hearts and minds is a wide range of situations and with a variety of people. For those people you find that don’t respond, let’s look at some key elements that might need more awareness on your part to better tailor your approach. This can be especially crucial for entrepreneurs who need to engage people who seem to miss the crucial heat connection that signals commitment to your vision in a deep way.
In this video we look closely at these 3 aspects:
- The seductive “underdog” story
- The narrowness of the “underdog” story
- Frustration meeting the real you
Combine this with your free foundation practice, and you’ll better glimpse the powerful points and limitations of your storytelling style while building out a different, and equally deep communication style.
Deep Dive: Entrepreneur As Servant Leader
Servant leadership is a pretty big topic. We’re working with the particular nature of being of service as a way to unlocking potential in others with the confidence that superior results will emerge.
There is a shadow to this philosophy in that many leaders are of service but want to simultaneously control methods and outcomes. This is an over-constrained situation which almost always ends with a swing back to command-and-control styles of leadership out of sheer effort and frustration.
So, being aware of your particular approach to servant leadership is central here. The video will give you some more context and ideas but here are some core concepts.
Confusing Working Hard With Suffering
Let’s begin by looking very closely at your relationship between working hard and suffering. In Western countries, particularly in the US, the Protestant work ethic has equated working hard with suffering as the path to superior results. Yes, for decades the mantra of working smarter, not harder has echoed many organizational hallways, the majority of supervisors, managers and leaders still hold onto this belief because they were raised this way.
By closely observing the interconnection and their depth in your beliefs and ways of working in the world will help you make a logical, rather than inherrited, determination of what works best. For so many leaders, this belief runs counter to their logical actions and undermines them in many hidden ways. Exposing it helps your make conscious decisions where this work ethic is helpful and where to relax it.
Exchanging Effectiveness For Laboring
A close cousin to hard work and suffering is that of persistent laboriously thinking that this will always pay off with enough energy, patience and time. I have close leader friends who pull of tremendous things through this belief. However, looking for effectiveness, even if it means doing nothing for a period, can prove invaluable.
This smacks against deeply help ideas about the US work ethic, so it may not feel comfortable at all. But let’s consider a few things before judging too quickly. First off, the world will continue to become more technologically sophisticated, complex and information rich at an exponential rate. Let that sink in for a moment. Linear thinking and pattern recognition s natural and habitual for humans. Exponential thinking and pattern recognition is not.
Second, constantly expending your time and energy does not allow you take advantage of narrowly available opportunities because you aren’t aware of them and frequently won’t have the energy to surge through the narrow window of opportunity. Is it uncomfortable to do some waiting for the opportunity window to open? Yes!
Lastly, effective means going beyond achieving a goal because with exponential progress strongly at play today, linear goal achievement will be left behind. Pouring energy constantly into something that isn’t achieving at an accelerated rate with greater ease could very well mean the direction, method or both are in error.
Linear, steady effort feels quite natural because and is strongly supported in the US by a long held and deep belief of hard work is superior for success. However, be far more mindful of effectiveness as often as you can will help you seize more opportunities with less draining effort.
Serving Because Of Strength
Servant leadership often is criticized as a soft approach and unworkable in environments where strong rules and accountability are needed to keep things working properly. I am not here to overturn this belief directly. Simply seeing that serving others is a sign of deep strength because your power far exceeds the challenge at the moment.
If plans, capabilities and systems are too fragile to support serving others in their various daily challenges, then those areas probably should be addressed. But are those gaps your gaps as a leader or factors of the environment in which you are leading?
A careful inventory, observation and delineation between you as a leader and your environment can help you draw on your servant leadership capabilities at appropriate times without loosing sight of them in a busy, stressed and possibly chaotic environment.
At Your Leadership Edge?
If this deep dive was thought provoking for you but you aren’t quite sure how to proceed, then I encourage a non-linear approach to investing in your own leadership capabilities with coaching. Try it out for 30 days, risk-free with me by clicking here. This coaching program is designed to make a huge impact for you, under your direction while still feeling smooth and natural. It is customized and refined dynamically without deviating from your objectives. Do you want to see what non-linear development looks like? Are you looking for an exponential improvement in yourself? Try it out for 30 days, risk-free with me by clicking here.
Help Your Underdog Leader
There are so many endearing underdog leaders out there. We pull for them and work extra hard because their story and approach bring out our best. We want to be part of the underdog story and eventual emergence of the hero or heroine. There is nothing wrong with this.
Have you or are you working with a leader whose underdog story just doesn’t match with the leadership task at hand? Is it obvious to you but they can’t seem to break with it and switch up their style to meet the current need?
In this video we look at 3 ways to help them take a slightly different approach:
- Can you fulfill part of the need for “the story”?
- Build commitment for the next step
- Draw forth reflections on their inventory of strengths
Keep these front and center as a mentor, peer and to some extent a follower, and it will help them glimpse the edges of their style while promoting working beyond their current leadership limitations.
A Practice To Develop Leadership Through Gratitude
Click Here To Get Your FREE Practice
We’ve challenged some deep and old beliefs here. I sincerely hope you will start the free foundation practice and try some of these ideas so you can become aware of new possibilities for you as a leader.
In this video I introduce the second, free practice and in this one we complete our carefully constructed scaffold for your new leadership dimension. Here is where noticing effectiveness, the exponential change reality of today and applying your time and energy more carefully should yield better results. However, coalescing these will be facilitated by this free practice in the vein of gratitude. Download your free copy by clicking here and try it out for the next 2 weeks.
All my best,
Russell Lindquist, Founder & Principal
Russell is a Certified Integral Professional Coach™. I help leaders and entrepreneurs break through plateaus, earn more respect and move on to their next level of success. 80% of my clients take on more responsibility with less stress, more success, and half of them get a promotion or earn more money within 6 months of completing their program. www.tessagen.com
