MY LEADERSHIP - 3
SESSION THREE — THE ROPE
This is a link to the ‘Principles’ tutorial video - ‘My Leadership - Session 3 - Principles’
Alongside the Principes video, I have included the ‘Activation Narrative’ that is part of this session in the self-guided workbooks. 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 the topic our clients are working on in this session.
The Third Golden Rule:
"In my experience, after a terrible decision, most people autopsy the decision-making process, rather than the decision-making environment."
― Robert (Sherpa) Millar
One of the oddities of living in a high-risk environment for too long is that it often creates a skewed perception of risk. I was no exception. I have always loved to climb things, and after I got sober, I found myself in the mountains and sea cliffs of Ireland, where we did free soloing, not because we were advanced rock climbers, but because we had never seen climbing gear. From Ireland, I graduated to the Alps. Climbing and hiking in the mountains should be done with care, the right equipment, and proper planning. We decided to hike and climb without any of these safety elements. Once with another Irishman, I found myself lost in the Swiss Alps. We had climbed for several hours in dense clouds and rough terrain, losing the path to the summit we were aiming for that day. After another hour of fruitless hiking, we were starting to get worried. Visibility was atrocious; climbing through clouds for that long had saturated even the Gore-Tex. Just as we were beginning to wonder how to extricate ourselves, the sun broke through, and out of the mist came this ancient farmer with a sheepdog. Between my limited German and his limited English, he helped reset our path, and eventually we made it to the summit and back to base camp with only sore feet and exhaustion. The bizarre thing was that he was so high in the mountains, and then, when we said goodbye and started on the route he had pointed out, the strangeness increased. We had only taken a dozen steps, looked back to shout thanks, and he and the dog were gone! It was surreal, visibility was still good, we could see for miles, but they were gone! To this day, it remains one of the strangest things that has happened to me. Did an angel show up and help us? Was it an optical illusion or a dip in the terrain? Who knows, but I like to think that my ancestors sent a shepherd to rectify what could have been a terminally bad decision. Why the trip down memory lane to my wild younger years? It is all about the reason I was making one dumb decision after another. You see, without realizing it, I had developed a subconscious category for what environmental conditions I needed to make good decisions. Like my Biases, what those two conditions are isn’t relevant, so moving on. I obviously ran out of rope in the climbing metaphor. I made one bad decision after another due to the environment, as much as it was the trauma-induced risk-taking tendencies.
As you were developing a way to build this third level of the tower of wooden blocks, you stumbled upon a winning solution, which was affirmed by your Authority, who was helping you learn to lead. So, then you coded the things you noticed when you made those significant decisions. Hey presto! You created a subconscious category that ‘knows’ exactly what you need to make good decisions. The problem is that knowledge then became coded, and your subconscious couldn’t make good decisions without those conditions.
In the next post, we'll explore the fourth link in what we call our instinctive Leadership Kill Chain—how you instinctively act.
— Robert (Sherpa) Millar