IRISH MUSINGS #2

I have an 11-year-old son, who, by his own admission, is 90% American and 10% Irish. We have raised him not to be nice or modest. We just wrapped up soccer (football) a couple of weeks ago and will start tonight with twice-a-week conditioning training at the local YMCA. It’s that downtime between sports for my budding athlete, so we try to focus on areas he needs to work on and ignore the areas he has already mastered. That means running and jumping will be our primary focus every Tuesday and Thursday evening while my wife takes a class at the Y.

My Beloved is the jock in the family, so it is always a gag when I step up to coach our son. I can handle outfield in baseball, because that’s just cricket with a big glove, and of course, soccer (football) is the state religion back home. Basketball, on the other hand, is alien, barely comprehensible, and ridiculously fast. But I’m really good at doing one thing repeatedly until we get it right. Tonight, we will practice in the past. We know John needs to improve his running and jumping, so each session we will look back at where he has come from, before imagining where he wants to get to.

Why did you get this wee peek into my domestic bliss and immigrant experience? Because practicing in the past is the only way I know to improve. In the main sessions, you will find an explanation of the principle, as well as an activation narrative from my past. The point is to stimulate your subconscious, with the hopes you see something from your past that expands your awareness of what is just around the corner. Have fun back there!

MY LEADERSHIP — GOLDEN CHOICE

SESSION ONE — THE WALL - the Instinctive question

The First Golden Rule:

“You cannot know the future, but we can see just around the corner by following the pattern.”

― Robert (Sherpa) Millar

PRINCIPLE — SUBCONSCIOUS GOAL

Session one opens your eyes to the impact your subconscious thinking has on your leadership. The first step in expanding your awareness begins here. Building awareness systematically over the program’s five sessions.

Instinctive leadership starts with a specific opportunity or obstacle that casts a shadow, prompting a reaction. Typically, this results in requesting the agreed-upon process, protocol, or plan to address it. But for the instinctive leader, the shadow provokes a different question. Picture the instinctive leader in an interrogation room with the shadow, and here are two opening questions:

“What will we do about this?” or “What do we think about this?”

If you are an instinctive leader, then you will fall into one of these two categories. There are no bilingual leaders. As you were developing a way to build those first towers of wooden blocks, you stumbled upon a winning solution, which was affirmed by the authority who was helping you learn to lead. It worked reliably in subsequent leadership experiences.

So, now we begin to get serious in our climb. You will need to take the first real step up onto the wall. This will feel uncomfortable for many of you. I once had a client shout at me and call me a Tarot Card reader. He wanted to think his way to an increased awareness of his subconscious sequence. What I was asking him was frustrating because it was expected that we would be ‘thinking’ about these steps, when we must ‘feel’ our way to awareness before we could think about that expanded awareness.

"The man with insight enough to admit his limitation comes nearest to perfection."

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I was born in Northern Ireland on January 5th, 1971, at the beginning of a thirty-year war that we now call The Troubles. I developed my instinctive leadership sequence in the day-to-day survival caused by systemic poverty and violence. There wasn’t time to read the manual or calculate the best solution for the dangerous situations I found myself in. I needed to act —and act fast — if I was to ensure we got through the latest nightmare. Very few of the experiences that littered my childhood and early adulthood could be predicted or planned for. From an early age, I tended to feel responsible for others, which meant I needed to develop a subconscious sequence of steps that let me think on my feet as a young leader. My goals in those early years tended to be low on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid. But the sequence I developed then is still what I use today to achieve success in the higher areas of that pyramid.

Where does this instinctive sequence come from, if it's not innate? It originates from the same place all subconscious sequences are built: you encountered a novel experience, and through repetition, review, and results, you developed a reliable method to achieve the intended outcome.

Imagine a toddler stacking wooden blocks. They try, fail, try again. Once successful, they look to the Authority in the room—social referencing, which builds subconscious sequences. If you're an instinctive leader, it means that during your formative years, you were given repeated opportunities to lead, with an Authority Figure offering feedback. You had the chance to explore different ways to lead yourself and others safely.

Like the blocks, you discovered leadership has unavoidable core steps. You must set a goal, assess the potential available, decide on options, and act on decisions. At that point, you discover the last reliable step: leadership always comes with stress.

You don't have to be a genius to sequence how leadership works. This program is laid out without the frills and spills typical of Mystery or Magic models, which are embedded to increase the guru's value by creating yet another way to achieve a successful and healthy life.

In the next post, we'll explore the second link in what we call our instinctive Leadership Kill Chain—managing the biases in our subjective assessments.

— Robert (Sherpa) Millar