IRISH MUSINGS #1
It has been a while since I have felt like I had something worth saying. In my old life, writing and public speaking were occupational hazards, but now my audience comes one at a time, virtually, and with extrinsic goals for our time together. Five years of working with tier-one operators has changed me. When we updated the website and migrated everything here, a blog was an integral part of the new ecosystem's framework. I didn’t want to add to the deluge of newsletters and weekly digests that I work hard to streamline. I think I decline about a dozen newsletter requests a week, and I still get about half a dozen in my email every day.
So, stuff this for a game of soldiers….. I am not writing a weekly blog about whatever nonsense pops into my head on a random basis. However, the blog idea on the website makes sense, and since there is now a space where people look and wonder why I haven’t posted anything, I decided to fill it with helpful content. That being the case, I’ve decided to share the first part of every session, of every program we sell for free here on the blog. I’ll add a brief comment, but the bulk of the post will be one of the sessions or an introduction to a program. I’m OCD and ADHD, so I’m going to post the programs in order. That means My Leadership is up first.
If you are wondering if this is worth your time and effort to read long-form posts, I can only say that people pay me a lot of money to teach them this material. While a snapshot of each session won’t offer you the same experience as one of my clients, it will provide you with a taste of what they get.
Last big idea: I absolutely believe we all need to get out of our comfort zones and stop spoon-feeding each other pre-chewed food. This material is complex, challenging, and only valuable if you integrate it into your life through practice.
Now we’ve got rid of the disclaimers… I hope you enjoy this stuff. I spent half a lifetime creating it.
MY LEADERSHIP — GOLDEN CHOICE
NAMING INSTINCTIVE CHOICES
Fast is the default, but flow comes through discipline—where awareness and instinct move as one. The military has a term known as the Kill Chain, which spans from Sensor to Shooter. Instinctive leaders have their own 'Kill Chain: Sight to Success.' Like the military version, speed matters—but so does accuracy at each step. Can you see it clearly enough to exploit it?
INTRODUCTION — The Leadership Kill Chain
All of our programs operate within a metaphor. This is part of the initial activation methodology. My Leadership uses a climbing metaphor, where we will begin at the foot of the wall and end with the summit. Every leader moves through the same sequence that makes the leadership kill chain, but what you've stored at each section is yours alone—built biographically through repetition under pressure.
My Leadership is the first of three programs in My Success, expanding your awareness to see what's coming and counter blind reactions. Five sessions calibrate five precision elements:
Subconscious Goal: Recognize your instinctive pattern when you step up to lead
Subconscious Assessment: Understand the biases that shape your judgment
Subconscious Decision: Recognize the environments that improve decision-making
Subconscious Action: Calibrate your characteristic approach to each situation
Subconscious Reaction: Increase your intentionality around the impact you unintentionally cause under stress
The Origin Story
I created these programs in response to a felt need as a leader. I had staff who were graduates of top schools, had the credentials and titles that led people to assume they were qualified leaders, but they were in their 20s and 30s, and they lacked the experience to deal with the situations those assumptions created. I grew up on the streets of war-torn Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s. I'd spent years developing my own instinctive leadership Kill Chain. It worked, and the successes it produced brought me into ever larger leadership roles. Still, I had no idea how to train young men and women from safe places, how to move through life instinctively, knowing what to do because they'd practiced their leadership chain so often it had become instinctive. From Sight to Success, their leadership kill chain lacked deep, instinctive sequences to enable them to move quickly from one choice to another, thereby dealing with emerging situations that were impossible to predict.
So, I built a training program that eventually evolved into what is now Bespoke Compass's first core program, My Leadership. I used a climbing metaphor because I'd figured out over the years that people learn complex ideas more easily through metaphor. Historically, we stand close to our ancestors, gazing into the flames in a cold, dank cave, listening to the stories that explain how to get through the next day. So, I use a climbing metaphor, and everything from Activation Narratives to Integration models is steeped in ancient ways of making us wiser.
Discomfort is a Feature, Not a Bug
The final element I found took me longer than I'd like to admit. There are no comfortable ways to equip people with an effective leadership kill chain. I could, and did, find safe ways to equip them, but it was not a comfortable experience. The resistance you may feel in my writing style, the layout of this blog, and the complexity that is woven throughout both our programs are a feature, not a bug. Being uncomfortable is normal.
I plan to write a post for the principle underlying every session of all eight of our core programs. Alongside the principle, I will include the Activation Narrative that is part of that session. Imagine sitting around an open fire on the side of a mountain, sipping coffee as we rest up for the next day. The stories I tell aren’t comfortable, nor are they trauma porn. They are designed to elicit a specific response from the reader, tied to that particular link in the Kill Chain sequence.
In the next post, we'll explore the first link in what we call our instinctive Leadership Kill Chain—setting a Goal.
— Robert (Sherpa) Millar