Introduction
“Believe deep down in your heart that you’re destined to do great things.” — Joe Paterno
What’s your destiny?
In challenging his players to believe in their destiny to do great things, Joe Paterno was tapping in their need for what Abraham Maslow called self-actualization. According to Maslow, all of us are motivated to reach our full potential (once our other lower needs are met). If we believe, deep down in our hearts, that we are destined to do great things, our need for self-actualization will motivate us to do just that.
Do you believe that you are destined to do great things?
Do you want to have more impact in the world?
Do you want to expand and fufill your potential?
Great achievements begin with intention. Vincent Van Gogh put it well in a letter he wrote to his brother Theo, “Great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed.” Similarly, Jim Collins wrote, “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.”[1] Steven Covey’s second habit of highly effective people is to begin with the end in mind.
About the same time that Jim Collins’ Good to Great was first published, I was sent to San Antonio to lead a team that had experienced some high-profile failures and, unsurprisingly, had low morale. In my search for ideas on how to improve the workplace culture, I came across the Fish! Philosophy.[2] While all four of the principles of the Fish! Philosophy work well together to encourage positivity and increase engagement and productivity, the last one, “Choose Your Attitude,” had a profound impact on my leadership approach.[3] Having already been a student of choice and discipline, having been inspired by authors like Paul the Apostle[4], Viktor Frankl[5], Steven Covey, and Alan Cohen, that principle resonated with me. So, I decided to heed the advice. I decided to choose, consciously and deliberately, what would be my leadership mindset.
I decided that I wanted to lead with and lead into C.A.R.E. – Confidence, Appreciation, Responsibility, and Enthusiasm. I chose to focus on these four elements for my leadership mindset not as a description of elements I thought I had already mastered, but as a prescription of elements I wanted to master to be the kind of leader I aspired to be. I believed that I could build trust, increase engagement, and deliver performance if I could lead with genuine
- confidence (in myself, in the people I led, in our team, and in our purpose and mission),
- appreciation (having it for the people I led and promoting it among them)
- responsibility (my own, leading by example, and expecting and enabling it in the people I led), and
- enthusiasm (having it myself and inspiring it in the people I led).
Knowing that this leadership mindset was aspirational, I knew that I had a lot of work to do. I knew that choice was just the beginning. It would take focus and discipline to achieve. There were some elements that I was better at than others and some that I knew I would need help with.
I can tell you now, from over twenty years of experience since then, that: it is still a journey; it has paid off; and grounding makes an enormous difference in getting there.
In the next five articles I will describe in more detail what I mean by and what I have learned about leading with confidence, appreciation, responsibility, and enthusiasm, and how grounding makes a difference.
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[1] Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Other’s Don’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 11.
[2] Created by John Christensen in 1998 and inspired by his visit to Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market in 1997.
[3] The first three principles are: Play, Be There, and Make Their Day.
[4] For example, “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2 ESV) and “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8 ESV).
[5] Consider, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” from his book Man’s Search for Meaning.