IRISH MUSINGS #5

When I was training to be a professional Christian, my mentor made me count to ten every time I touched a doorknob. It was to stop me from bounding into rooms like an overly enthusiastic 700lb gorilla looking for a treat. I have ADHD, or at least that’s the letters they use now to explain what was just called annoying back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. My natural approach to most things is to run through the wall to save time finding the door. It took a long time to instill the habit of walking into spaces gently and quietly. Clergy tend to be the front line for things like death, divorce, illness, and despair. Big personalities are fine for the pulpit and youth work, not so much for the grieving widow who just lost her husband. Fortunately, my job now requires a big personality contained within a tiny virtual box, utilizing tightly woven programs. So, that means I rarely count outside the door before jumping in. Most situations in my work require someone like me exactly. yeah, for me! Sadly, visiting my son’s school is a whole different kettle of fish. They don’t appreciate loud and proud. Obviously, this session is about how you act.

SESSION FOUR — THE HARNESS

Acting Appropriately

The Fourth Golden Rule:

“No one intentionally acts inappropriately; they always have an instinctive justification.”

― Robert (Sherpa) Millar

PRINCIPLE — NAMING MY CHARACTER

Session four moves to how you act as an instinctive leader. Instinctive leaders have a distinct style, a characteristic way they approach leadership that is often subconscious. “That’s so unlike him!” is only possible as a statement if the person being discussed has a habitual way of acting.

 As you developed a way to build this fourth level of the tower of wooden blocks, you stumbled upon a winning solution for how best to act in leadership situations, which was affirmed by your Authority, who was helping you learn to lead. Then you found that solution reliably worked in the subsequent leadership experiences. At this point, you created a subconscious category that ‘knows’ exactly how to act as a leader. The problem is that knowledge became codified, and your subconscious stopped testing other ways to lead. It became hardwired.

Like all instinctive leaders, you have your own unique approach to leading. Now, we need to identify a call sign that precedes the "because" explanation of your leadership actions. Then, you will validate both the call-sign and the "because" explanation with lived experience, and finally, add them as the fourth of five snapshots of you as an instinctive leader.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

- Will Durant

“I would shoot right through a baby to kill a catholic.” The room went still. The men in the room looked at the speaker, then at each other, nodded, and finally glanced at me to see my reaction to this succinct explanation of their dedication to the Cause. I was in a house that belonged to the local commander of one of the Protestant terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland. In the early years of my spiritual leadership, I found myself working with these loyalist paramilitary groups, and they were trying to impress me with their discipline and dedication. A couple of weeks later, I was in the same house, where that spokesman was lying unconscious and bleeding, with his older brother standing over him. He had run afoul of the organization’s rules, and his brother had been sent to teach him that those rules weren’t optional. These young men had the power of life and death over entire communities, and my job was to lead them in exploring and expanding their understanding of power.                    

Fast forward a few years, and I was living in Germany, on a trip to America to a billionaire’s rural retreat with a group of multimillionaires. It was a weekend fundraiser, and my wife and I were there as full-time foreign missionaries. These individuals had achieved extraordinary levels of success in their fields and had amassed an equally impressive amount of personal wealth. Our job was to lead them in exploring and expanding their understanding of wealth.

Fast forward one more time, and I now live in America. It was 2016, and I had just resigned as a pastor of a large church in the Midwest, marking the first step in my decision to end a 25-year vocation as a spiritual leader. I had burned myself out trying to lead people who wanted to stay comfortable. They didn’t ask to be challenged; they didn’t really need a leader like me. In hindsight, my approach to leading them was wildly inappropriate for most of them.

My approach to all three groups was the same. You see, I have only one instinctive approach as a leader. It is aggressive, uncomfortable, and relentless. I am subconsciously optimized to work with people who live in extreme environments. So, if you make me a local pastor in the Midwest, I inevitably struggle to be effective in leading and will eventually fail.

In the next post, we'll explore the final link in what we call our instinctive Leadership Kill Chain— the unintentional impact on others when we are reacting to stress.

— Robert (Sherpa) Millar