“If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.” - Alain de Botton -
"We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change." - Sheryl Sandberg –
The other day my leadership coach gave me some homework. She asked me to watch a lecture by John C. Maxwell, based on his book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. She wanted me to reflect on one law, in particular. I’m not going to tell you which one because I’m going to start using it and I want to see how that goes first.
As usual, I just had to be a keener (and to be fair I am super super keen to become a better leader) so I went down a little YouTube rabbit hole one afternoon and learned about all 21 laws. They all resonated with me in some way, though not everything Maxwell himself says and does feels aligned with the type of leader I want to be.
The first law is called the Law of the Lid and it made the biggest impression. In a nutshell, what the Law of the Lid says is that the strength of an entity – be it an organisation, a movement or a country - is directly proportional to the strength of its leadership. A poor leader is very unlikely to be at the helm of a successful organisation and vice versa. What that means for us is that the more effective we are as leaders, the healthier and stronger the organisations we lead will be.
Somehow, I implicitly knew this. At the end of last year, I told my leadership coach I wanted to really work on my leadership this year, both to guide the organisations I lead into a new era and to be a more effective change maker. And if I’m honest, I also want to improve my experience of Earth School (what I sometimes call life on planet Earth) a little bit. Because leadership translates across all aspects of our lives.
It’s not that I’m a bad leader. In fact, many people, including my coach, have told me that I am a good one. But I know there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Becoming a better leader, like most projects, requires establishing a baseline. Knowing where we’re at. Whenever we start a new project, we do an assessment of where we’re at, right? The same is true of cultivating leadership. We first have to know where we’re at and then start from that place to get to where we want to be.
If you’ve read Strong Ground, and I highly recommend you do, you’ll know that both the name and the premise of the book were inspired by the journey of its author, Brené Brown, embarked on to recover from a painful injury.
As I wrote about in my previous blog, as part of her recovery process, Brené worked with a personal trainer. His name was Tony. To develop a plan to help her recover, Tony first conducted an assessment of where Brené was at. The results pointed to an extremely weak core. As a result, other muscles were being recruited to do work they were less equipped to do. Tony cautioned that unless Brené committed to fixing the root cause of the problem in addressing her weak core, she was going to keep getting injured. In other words, the way forward was to build strong ground first.
Neither the result, nor the outcome, pleased Brené. But it did serve her in the long run. She built stronger ground in both her physical body and in her body of work. Because that experience helped her deepen her work on leadership. Work we’re all benefiting from.
Reading Strong Ground took me back to the literature review for my PhD, which was on the way in which leadership shaped Loss and Damage policy. Specifically, it reminded me of one of the leadership theories I resonated with most. It’s called Theory U and it was developed and refined by a group of academics and researchers led by Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer, whose work focuses on how leadership can drive and shape transformation, including in some very tough circumstances. The idea of Theory U, is to “lead from the future as it emerges” by shifting from an ego-centric approach to a system based approach that focuses on looking at change through the perspective of the whole.
This is very similar to how Tony designed Brené’s recovery process: A resilient mind and body must work together to build stronger ground. Theory U posits that transformation happens and new possibilities emerge when we listen deeply (both to our inner and outer worlds) and let go of old identities. The key is letting go of the things we think we know and being open to other ways of seeing both the world and ourselves. That’s what Brené did in her recovery by allowing Tony to guide her.
Just like Tony, my own coach recommended a 360 assessment of my leadership to get a sense of what I needed to work on. She asked for the names of at least a dozen people I work with in many different capacities. I gave her 20 names. Over the course of three months she reached out to each person and conducted interviews with most.
I deliberately put a few people on the list whom I knew would give critical feedback. There was a part of me that wanted to hold back because I’ve grown so much over the past few years. The version of me who interacted with those people no longer exists. My inner child takes the wheel much less frequently these days. But there are still lessons to learn or cement from those experiences. So I wrote the list and sent the emails. And then, I waited with excitement and more than a little trepidation if I’m honest.
While I was waiting for the leadership assessment, I started building stronger ground in my body. At the end of last year, I started working virtually with a trainer. That accountability helped me get started on the journey back to being physically, mentally and spiritually fit.
Over the winter holidays I re-read Atomic Habits by James Clear and got the accompanying workbook, which I highly recommend if you’re really committed to change. First, I learned more about stacking habits. Waking up led to going to the gym and coming home from the gym led to making a smoothie, which led to sitting down and doing some journaling before starting my work day.
By the time I started back to work at the beginning of this year I was waking up at 5 am every weekday and getting to the gym most mornings. On days I didn’t have time to get to the gym and back before I started work (some days my work day starts very early) I would go for a walk and do some core work and then get to the gym in the afternoon. That required some pretty careful planning and early mornings, supported by a foundation of good sleep habits (if you want to know more about those I highly recommend delving into the work of Matt Walker, the self-professed Sleep Diplomat).
I had started eating more healthfully over the holidays and have continued improving on that as work has scaled up this year. Over the past two months I took on additional work I hadn’t expected to do and that has been challenging. But having strong ground means that I get to the gym no matter what. Now that that project is over, I’ve got a little more breathing room, fewer calls each day and that feels good. But I am stronger for having gotten through that tough time without losing sight of what my body needed.
A few weeks ago, my coach informed me that she was done with the assessment. She told me, “There’s lots to build on”. A year ago, perhaps even six months ago, that would have filled me with dread. My mind would have started looping with thoughts, imagining the very worst case scenario. My heart would have started racing. My chest would have gotten tight. And my stomach would have felt like a ball of molten lead. I would have felt like a failure before I even knew the outcome of the assessment.
But I didn’t do that, Dear Reader. Because the last few years, I’ve been on what I call a worthiness bender. I know that I am not what I do. I am worthy simply because I am. I exist; therefore, I am worthy. It’s from that place of worthiness that I am growing as a leader.
That is only possible because I love myself. Self-love, in my view, underpins a growth mindset. At least one that doesn’t come from the idea of having to “fix” ourselves (I’ve been there). I want to learn and grow. I want to rise and transform. But I also know that I’m okay as I am. Right here. Right now. The being part is done. And, because I love myself, I want to get better at the doing of being human. Being a better leader is part of that.
I showed up on the call to receive an overview of the assessment and develop a plan for how to grow as a leader with the intention of learning and growing and a sense of curiosity about what that could look like. There were a lot of positive things in the assessment and some opportunity feedback. Things that I could work on. If I’m completely honest some of those things were difficult to hear. But as my coach reminded me, “There is nothing here that you haven’t already told me yourself.”
We’re still developing a plan for how to address the things I want to work on. I need to figure out what I want to focus on first. This week my homework is to develop a very clear vision of where I want to be as a leader in five years and where I’d like to help take the initiatives and the company I founded. That feels exciting and fun. And it’s also foundational. Because everything we create in our world begins first in our imaginations. Building strong ground is starting where you are and it’s also knowing where we want to get to. And then developing the systems to get there.
More on that later this year. We must build those things on a solid foundation. That starts with loving yourself as you are now. If you really want to build strong ground, you’ll need to focus on that first. There are a lot of things you can do and I’ve written previously about what supported me on my journey. You could write yourself a daily letter to love, meditate, spend time in nature, or spend some time developing heart/brain coherence as I am doing these days. Whatever you decide to do, make time for it. There’s nothing more important in this life than learning to love the wonderful human you are. See you here next month!
Erin Roberts is the founder of the Climate Leadership Initiative and advises the amazing team driving the work, including the New Generation program, empowering young climate negotiators from across the Global South. This year she’s building strong ground on all fronts and hopes you’ll join her and us in the journey!
