Our promise to our clients, both leaders and organizations, is to help them expand their impact and achieve a better balance, but what type of balance is needed in today’s uncertain times?
Our journey as human beings and leaders is a subtle balance between our commitment to ourselves and who we are and our commitment to a larger picture or a whole.
We spend our lives trying to find the right balance between discovering and owning who we are as individuals while also connecting and serving the whole. The whole could be a family, an organization, a nation, or much larger.
There is a broad spectrum within this journey. At one end, some people lose themselves while serving the whole, they become martyrs. At the other end, some are only aware of their individual presence and needs and can’t feel a connection nor a responsibility towards anything more significant than themselves.
Owning and honoring our individuality
When was the last time that you stopped and asked yourself, who am I at a deeper level? What are my gifts, and what are my shortcomings?
As leaders, we often try to carefully construct a persona hiding away what we perceive as our limitations and displaying what we believe will be rewarded by the system/organization. However, our leadership styles and successes and failures reflect our authentic essence and not a limited persona.
Frequently, taking our impact to the next level requires aligning the persona with our essence and working with parts of us forming the blocks.
Many times to reach the next level in our success, we need to stop and examine which behaviors are still required and which ones were limiting our success, but we managed to get away with them.
It takes courage to take that inner journey of reflection to examine who we are.
- Are you aware of your needs? And do you accept the responsibility of meeting those needs?
- What values are you using to lead your life?
- What are you compromising to get acceptance and validation from the whole?
- Do you still find joy in what you do, or have you outgrown that role?
- What are the qualities of your relationships with others, and do you have clear boundaries?
- When you look in the mirror, do you know the person you see beyond the roles he or she plays?
Serving the Whole
Nietzsche said: “Those who have a ‘why to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.'”
- Are you clear around the WHY of what you are creating, and is it still congruent with who you are today?
- Is the why behind your creation serving you as an individual or a larger whole?
- Is it time to change that whole or maybe to expand it?
- Are you creating from a survival place, thus sabotaging the whole as you are creating? Or are you creating from a place of abundance that preserves your wellbeing while contributing to the wellbeing of a larger system?
- If today was your last day, do you look back feeling proud of the impact you had on everything around you?
- If you are born a unique piece in a larger puzzle, what is your distinctive mark and place in the puzzle?
The interesting dilemma is that to contribute to the whole, we can only do that by first discovering who we are uniquely, else our piece of the puzzle will not fit perfectly into the puzzle.
So, what is the right balance?
The right balance is very subjective and very different from one person to another and can vary based on your life phase. However, the listed questions can be a handy checklist to revisit every now and then measure where you are at that spectrum.
Photo Credit: Dr. Ghadeer Anan
