Increasing leadership, starting from challenging experiences

Developing personal spirituality

Paul wanted to rediscover meaning in his work and revive the desire to continue in his professional life, but he kept telling himself that his life was miserable and that he was destined to be unhappy.

As for Stephane, he wanted to have more power as a leader, but kept complaining about others and about outside events, which he considered to be the sole causes of the problems in his professional life.

Jean, Paul and Stephane all believed they had a “good” reason to be unhappy and objectively found themselves in difficult professional, as well as personal, situations.

They shared another trait: they did not trust their capacity to pull through and they didn’t even want to consider such a possibility. They believed that their problems came from the outside world: they had become the spectators of their own unhappy life.

Today, Jean, Paul and Stephane have attained their goals and are happy: how did this happen?

We worked together on three main guidelines, starting from the analysis of their professional positions while at the same time focusing on them as individuals and on their personal lives. These are the three guidelines:

1. Inner resources

When facing difficult situations, we can avail ourselves of self-analysis techniques that will help us to better understand our reactions under tense conditions, to handle our emotions and deal with the blues…

These techniques are reassuring because they help us define and understand what is happening within us. Thanks to these techniques we can start working on our self-awareness: the better I know myself, the more I will become aware of my inner resources.

Finally, these techniques are at the base of the development of individual spirituality, the stepping-stone to comprehend difficult situations. These situations are to be seen not only as events that require action, but also as factors favoring development, self-knowledge and self-enrichment, a self-enrichment which will help us cope with painful circumstances.

2. Getting rid of denial

When facing difficult situations, we tend to develop defense mechanisms, such as denial, to protect ourselves from the unbearable or painful aspects of a problem.

Denial leads us to believe that a particular situation has no solution, and hence justifies our not looking for a solution. Because of denial, we forget that we are the actors of our own life and we convince ourselves that “it’s our boss’ fault”; “we don’t have the right to…”; “it’s always been like that”; “the company where I have worked so hard should recognize my efforts”… Denial can indeed be a protective tool, yet it keeps us from facing facts and curbs spiritual and personal development.

In the first place, getting rid of denial will put a stop to our complaints and will enable us to understand all the aspects of a situation as well as our own feelings. This will in turn lead us to adopt a new approach, such as openly communicating with our boss, acting differently within a company that doesn’t fully appreciate our qualities, or launching out into a new activity…

It should be noted that denial is useful to protect ourselves from unbearable situations.
A coach should therefore choose the right moment to lead a person towards a more realistic approach. This may require a long wait, but pausing is better than risking harm without attaining awareness.

Often, however, a person gets rid of denial spontaneously, after only a few meetings with the coach, simply because the latter points out that he or she spends too much time complaining.

3. Responsibility

Getting rid of denial often engenders a feeling of guilt directed towards ourselves: “why didn’t I see this before?”; “how could I have been so stupid?”, or towards others: “why didn’t I understand that I was hurting that person?” In such a difficult and delicate moment it is imperative to explain the difference between responsibility and guilt.
Guilt concerns the past and makes us feel miserable. It can be crushing, but it is yet another expression of denial and inaction, which keeps us from looking at ourselves as masters of our own life.

Responsibility, on the other hand, is a path towards the future.
It enables us to move from a situation in which we were battered by all sorts of miserable circumstances to a situation in which we tell ourselves: “circumstances are truly difficult, but only one person could change them, even partly, and I am that person”.
This awareness of our responsibility is a major, though difficult, step towards the development of our personality and our well-being. Being responsible means that we can no longer complain (except when we need to let off steam!), nor hope that an outside savior (our spouse, family, friends, destiny, God…) will come to extricate us from a difficult situation.
To be responsible means to understand and to act so as to become our own rescuers.

These three guidelines to self-awareness are difficult to follow, because they require the courage to assess ourselves, to accept our strengths and our weaknesses and, consequently, to take charge of our own life.
When living through painful moments, we need time, even years sometimes, to pursue these three guidelines.
This time is by no means wasted, since it is necessary to truly and deeply develop our self-awareness and find unexpected resources within ourselves.
Leadership is achieved through this unique and personal path leading to a greater confidence in our capabilities, nurtured by our experience.

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