Reading Brian Germain’s book called “Transcending Fear” has given me many insights into being courageous. After all we wouldn’t need courage if we didn’t have fear. These are both intense emotions found at either end of a spectrum and create great tension when we find ourselves experiencing them.
I love how Brian puts this into perspective when he claims:
“Intellectual ability is praised above all our strengths in our society. Nevertheless, it is our ability to negotiate our emotions that gives us the ability to access our true intellect in a time of need. By cultivating our ability to operate despite a compulsion to react emotionally, we can discover how to control our level of intensity and thereby harness the potential within us.”
How easy does it sound? And yet for those of us experienced in managing and leading other human beings we know how challenging it is. We lead human beings whose emotions erupt without notice and sometimes without obvious reason.
To truly harness our potential as a leader of these people, we need to rise above our intense emotion of fear or anger in the moment, be present with the intensity of the emotion and despite our initial compulsion to react in the same way we dig deep and take control. This allows us to access our true intellect and we are supposed to do it “in the moment” – sounds easy? No it requires great mindfulness which is difficult in this era of mind-full-ness!
Our minds are frequently too full with the 24/7 world we live in and allow ourselves to be immersed in so we find it hard to make the space to harness the kind of potential I am talking about here. Our minds are busy intellectually – immersed in the things we need to complete and the deadlines we need to meet.
A couple of weeks ago I received an opportunity to practise this capability – it is possible – after taking a few quiet moments to step “out” of the emotional mess being created, breathing and being mindful of your feelings, you find the words and the courage to share what is happening for you and open the conversation to explore the potential that everyone could bring and is missing out on – if we could only navigate a path through the intensity of the emotion. And I achieved all of this in about 20 minutes – bringing me to the conclusion that it CAN be done. And I also appreciate it is not easy because such mindfulness and behaviour requires great discipline and rigour – far greater than pure intellectual ability will ever bring.
