THE FUTURE-GENERATING SELF

I am indebted to my strategic coach, Dan Sullivan, for a wonderful distinction that he calls 'the future-based self'. That insight has been the inspiration for the core concepts in this newsletter. However, not only have the concepts been somewhat expanded, but here we've applied them quite distinctively.

There are three selves from which we can operate. While the future-generating self is where we may all be eager to arrive, we need the entire mosaic: past-based selves, present-focused selves as well as future-generating selves to produce the personal and collective leadership breakthroughs that we all want.

I'm presenting this newsletter in three parts. The first part will go out this week, the next two instalments will follow with a week's interval each. This is too important to condense further, but serialising it may make it easier to read and digest.

THE PAST-BASED SELF:

The past-based self is our memory of our past, our allegiance to our history, our connection to what we've gone through in the past. It is the impact the past has on our personality, our beliefs, our habits, our selves.

The Problem: When we live excessively from the past, we tend to see ourselves as victims. We tend to perpetuate past problems by investing them with undue emotional credence and importance. We have a sense of making the same mistakes over and over, of somehow being 'trapped'.

We see this in action when we run across a sullen sales representative in a store. You can sense their apathy, their anger, their deadness. We can be almost sure that nothing has happened that very day between breakfast and our encounter with them to produce such a life-sapping impact. We almost certainly have not done anything to them ourselves to evoke such a reaction. Yet they flick this attitude with pathetic defiance at the world, almost as a form of revenge. The sad fact is that they rarely make it very far, and their attitude becomes a cemetary for any future prospects they might have had. Somewhere this person's past is still imprisoning their future.

We experience this when an executive constantly feels disrespected or undermined when anyone disagrees with them. They flare up when confronted, they explode when questioned, they intimidate and ridicule. It doesn't take long to see that, despite their position and authority, they feel quite unloved or unappreciated. Such vehemance almost always betrays an inner disquiet. Only deep fear can provoke such excessive and paranoid reflexes, especially when they are overtly so 'powerful' and 'successful'.

Whole countries and economies can be crippled when the past becomes a barrier to hope and possibility. It has long been claimed, by leaders clearly conditioned by an 'us and them' mentality from the past, that poverty is an implacable and largely unconquerable foe. And then we see micro-enterprise flourishing through initiatives like the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, empowering people and giving them the wherewithal to remake their lives. Fascinatingly, default levels are LOWER than with normal lenders worldwide. Professor De Soto has argued in a similar vein, that if we can allow poor people to collateralise whatever they own -- land, tools, village homes, whatever, we can give them the ability to take powerful steps out of the vicious cyle of poverty.

In a wonderful interview in ACROSS THE BOARD magazine, strategic innovator C.K. Pralahad points out that there are billions in the developing world who our past-obsessed paradigms keep us from developing as market opportunities. Once we stimulate these people's ability to consume, and let them (for example) buy a $300 item by making $25 monthly payments with sensible interest, we suddenly raise the bar of both aspiration and quality of life for them. Cellphones have caught on to this, and are multiplying like spitfire in China, India and elsewhere accordingly. Sony in South America is making wonderful strides in this arena. Singer established itself in the developing world by offering sewing machines on this model, breaking through the shackles of past-based economic thinking about 'value' and 'profitability models', and helping to redefine life-styles in the process.

The Solution: As a counselor and as a coach, and as a human being, I have only the greatest compassion for our past wounds and the frequently devastating emotional impact that our failures can have on us. However, as the past cannot be literally undone, our only option is to put it to its best possible use: as a crucible for learning.

We need to experience the pain fully first. Most of us don't. We don't dare. And yet this backfires. Because the pain instead of being worked through and healed, gets repressed, and locked up, it mutates into the type of distorted thinking or behaviours we've mentioned above.

And it's not only okay, but wise, to seek all the legitimate support we can. It's only a crutch in a pejorative sense when we don't take the ultimate responsibility ourselves...in time.

But having experienced the pain, and allowed time for recovery and perspective, then rather than store the experience away in a compartment labeled 'pain' or 'humiliation', we need to suck it's marrow for every ounce of learning and insight we can. When yesterday's experience paves the way for today's achievement and tomorrow's enduring success, then we have truly become life-artists and architects.

Great leaders have the ability to coach and guide their teams to not be trapped by the past, but not to duck it either. Wasting pain is madness. As leaders, we have to make sure every experience is leveraged for everything it can possibly offer up for future productivity, value-creation and service. Essentially, we human beings are meaning-makers, it's in our blood and genes. We have to CHOOSE the meaning we give our past!

ACTION POINT:

Take an inventory in your own leadership life: moments when it seems you are acting from your own past-based self; when your reactions seem not to truly reflect the situation, or opportunity, or interaction before you. You are clearly reacting to something else, you are speaking from a past wound, you are actually lashing out (albeit in camouflage) at a past injustice or slight. Treat yourself kindly, with curiousity, not judgement. But let's summon the courage to investigate these past moments that may be keeping us trapped and let's transform them into universities for learning and future strength.

Let's ask for whatever coaching or mentoring we need, let's share our agony with those we trust, let's ask for supportive feedback from colleagues and allies so that we can calibrate and course-correct.

Look also for where members in your team seem stuck in past reflexes. Help them discover what their own future-generating self might look like, and what the barriers are. Whenever they explain their problem by referring to 'them', to externalities...beware. Show compassion, deeply listen. They may well have a point. Despite that, however, invite them to take the stance of creativity, responsibility, personal leadership. Ask them to extract the most empowering and encouraging learning they possibly can from these past experiences, and use everything they've gone through, and are now hopefully in the process of 'growing through' to anchor their progress and growth.

Beware of moments when your team, or organisation, seem trapped by past-referencing or limitation-justifying paradigms or conclusions. Ensure the past is not governing your present, much less your future. Investigate the failures, not in the spirit of a witch-hunt or 'whodunit', but rather in the spirit of discovery and exploration, as a way to make new journeys and adventures possible. Do it in the vein of exploration. After all, disasters temper us, they caution us, they guide us, but they cannot extinguish that essential spirit within us -- not unless we abdicate and let them. Leaders will choose otherwise.

Spencer Johnson called some of this 'Old Cheese' in his wonderful parable. These are also 'old bandages' being retained as a shrine to the past. In the coming weeks, identify some areas of personal evolution, evolution in those you lead and manage, opportunities for team organisational evolution. Identify the past-based reflexes, paradigms, conclusions, inhibitions and behaviours for each.

Explore the past pain. With a sense of wonder and awe, extract the learning and look for all the areas where you can leverage that learning.

A new launch fell flat. What does that teach us about our market, our consumers, our own understanding of them, our ability to distribute or deliver? What might this tell us about differentiation, about our competitors?

We had a catastrophic slump in quality. How are we defining quality? What are we measuring? How are we holding people accountable? Who do we celebrate and promote in our company? Are we ensuring we're aligned with our customer's priorities?

Our attrition rate was abominable last year, and this seems to be chronic. What is the quality of our leadership? How carefully do we hire, induct, develop? Are we understaffed? What is our work environment like? Do we incentivise intelligently? Where are people moving on to?

We're in the third parched and empty relationship. What kind of people do we approach? Why do we shut down? What is it that we're so terrified by as intimacy increases? What holds us back from asking for what we want? Why can't we relax enough to be playful and romantic?

I can't confront people directly, so I get savagely sarcastic. What am I defending against? Who did I have to cope with in this way, growing up? What role models for communication and openness did I have? How has this ability served me well in other contexts that I may be inappropriately applying it here?

I see this talented team-member start strong but never quite come through on commitments. Where have they picked up this self-sabotage? Are they aware of it? Do they have some unwritten rules about success? Do they value themselves and their commitments sufficiently? Is this a past operating pattern they're aware of?

And so on.

Then as you think about it again, having explored it for learnings you can apply, you'll find you've transformed that situation in your perception, you've recreated the mistake into something purposeful. Moreover, you'll find that you are no longer arguing for your limitations, which is finally what perpetuates them.

Most critically, let's look for occasions in which we can operate anew, making a new choice consciously, increasingly liberated from the past-influenced 'default positions' that we previously allowed to constrain us. Such re-invention is the very heart and soul of true leadership.

Only then will we really be ready to step more fully and fruitfully into our present and therefore able to fulfill its potential. We'll turn to that next week.

HAPPY BREAKTHROUGH!

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