Fear, anger, pain. In certain cases, they can start an action. Yet, you need to leave them behind as soon as your action crystallizes and takes a concrete shape.
If you fail to do it, you’ll soon find yourself projecting that initial, important emotion on every body and every thing around you. You will burn down bridges, forgo opportunities, isolate in your own narrative.
Remember fear, anger and pain, but leave them behind as soon as you can.
The change you are seeking demands it.
To be a leader, in life and at work, you need to let go.
Let go of schedules and outcomes, experience and opinions, details and plans. Let go of control. Let go of yourself. Let go of your definition of reality. Let go of your certainties.
If you cling to any of these, being a leader is going to be much more difficult. And eventually you will be the one regretting it the most.
When you are rejected, the opportunity is not in “better luck next time”, or “it’s their loss”, or “you are better than this”.
The opportunity is in taking a step back and checking where it hurts.
Are you disappointed because you cannot pay the next bill or because you were enjoying what you were doing? Because you have to cancel your next vacation or because you genuinely thought you were delivering your best job? Because you have to face the questions of family and friends or because you felt for once you had something to give to a cause?
When we take the time to check where it hurts, we can more easily spot what is next. And it might be something utterly surprising.
If your story is about how good you are, how much money you make, how big of a house you own, how many cars you have, how resounding your title is, how easily your product sells, how fantastic your company is, how many employees you have hired in the past year, how much revenue you made last year, how many new features you have released in the past six months.
Why should we care?
Tell us about the challenges instead, and we will be hooked. Even better, we will empathize.
If you cast a corporation as protagonist, do not brag about its size, its reach, its wealth, its influence. If you cast a product as a protagonist, do not brag about its newness, its hipness, its celebrity. The world spares no empathy for an overdog; market with a graceful humility.
Robert Mckee, Thomas Gerace – “Storynomics”
When somebody attacks you on some of the features that define you (your work, your values, your reputation), all you can do is continue nurturing those very same features.
Going head-to-head can be fascinating in a sense. Demolishing the attacker’s argument, pointing out all the good that you have done, bringing people onboard to testify on that goodness, providing evidence that what you say is correct. Fascinating, and costly. And eventually it will most likely play in the hands of your opposer.
You are in it for the long term, not for the next news cycle. Work, values, reputation are built over time. Let others craft and enjoy the hourly commentary, the back-and-forth, the speculation, as it will be soon gone.
You, on the other hand, are here to stay.
You've got this 