When I asked someone on our team how they were doing last week, she said, “January has been a long year.”  It resonated. 

I’ve been struggling recently.  Dealing with threats both real and imagined to people I care about.  I feel myself bracing and moving into a defensive crouch.

For many of us, things feel under attack.  Some of the leaders we support are not just in an urgent / reactive mode, but carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.  And in that state, the temptation may be to gloss over our own feelings and focus on what we need to do - and who we need to be - for the people we lead or care about.  

But we ARE one of the people that we need to care about.  

As leaders, we’re often conditioned to believe the fallacy that we are in control.  “I’m the leader, so all these things that are happening are because of me.” “I can control how other people feel and what they do.”  These are blatant distortions of reality that leaders are frequently invited to embrace.  We’re told that great leaders take responsibility for everything and everyone … they decide what’s going to happen and then make it happen.  Essentially, we’re told - though never in so many words - that great leaders play god.  And for most of my career, I was all too ready to hear it.  That’s often what my ego wanted to believe anyways.  But abundant research shows that the most effective leaders don’t operate that way.

Think about what’s going to happen during the rest of your day.  What are you going to do?  Who are the people that you’re going to be with?  What are things you might say to them?  Now I’m going to invite you to entertain a startling thought.   Imagine that it might be the last conversation you’re going to ever have with those people.  What would you say to them if you knew you may never speak again?  How present would you be in that conversation?  How honest would you be?