นำตนเองก่อน
ภาวะผู้นำ (Leadership) เป็นทักษะที่หลายคนสับสนกับการมีอำนาจ หรืออำนาจที่มาพร้อมกับสถานะทางสังคมบางอย่าง เพราะภาวะผู้นำ เป็นอารมณ์ที่เกิดขึ้นในจิตใจของผู้นำ แล้วถ่ายทอดให้ผู้ติดตามรู้สึกเชื่อมโยงภายใต้เป้าหมายเดียวกัน
ผู้นำทำให้คนของพวกเขาต้องการติดตามและมีส่วนร่วมในการบรรลุเป้าหมายร่วมกัน และผู้นำกระทำโดยมีจรรยาบรรณและความมั่นใจ
ผู้นำไม่ได้เป็นเสมือนเจ้านายผู้กำหนดงาน แต่อธิบายงานนั้นแล้วมอบหมายงานให้ผู้ติดตาม
การจะเป็นผู้นำได้นั้น ก่อนอื่น ต้องเรียนรู้วิธีจัดการกับความคิดและความไม่มั่นคงของตนเอง
Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude
Authors: Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin
Published: Jun 13, 2017
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Lead Yourself First is a book on leadership that highlights the importance of solitude, putting order in your mind and growing self-awareness before you lead others, and how to do it by setting strong goals which align with those around you, making them want to follow your lead and take initiative on those defined objectives.
2. Authors: Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin
Published: Jun 13, 2017
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Lead Yourself First is a book on leadership that highlights the importance of solitude, putting order in your mind and growing
self-awareness before you lead others, and how to do it by setting strong goals which align with those around you, making
them want to follow your lead and take initiative on those defined objectives.
14. 3 บทเรียนจากหนังสือ
1. ผู้นาที่ยิ่งใหญ่ใช้การอยู่เพียงลาพัง จัดการกับสี่ด้านของชีวิต (Great leaders use solitude to deal
with four aspects of their life)
2. ความกลัวที่จะพลาด (FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out) เป็นกับดักอันตรายสาหรับทุกคนที่จริงจังกับ
ความรับผิดชอบของตน (FOMO is a dangerous trap for anyone who is serious about their
responsibilities)
3. การอยู่เพียงลาพัง สามารถช่วยบรรเทาอารมณ์เชิงลบและสิ่งกระตุ้นต่าง ๆ (Solitude can help
you alleviate negative emotions and triggers)
Lead Yourself First is a book on leadership that highlights the importance of solitude, putting order in your mind and growing self-awareness before you lead others, and how to do it by setting strong goals which align with those around you, making them want to follow your lead and take initiative on those defined objectives.
Leadership is a skill that many confuse with authority or the power that comes with a certain social status. However, leadership is an emotion born into the mind of the leader.
It transcends all the way to those that follow their lead, making them feel connected under the same goal.
Leaders make their people want to follow and participate in accomplishing the common goal. And they do this by setting a prime example of great work ethic and confidence.
Unlike a boss, a leader doesn’t impose certain tasks, but defines them and then delegates them.
To become a leader, one must first learn how to deal with their own thoughts and insecurities.
Leadership is hard, and can often feel lonely.
It requires personal conviction, building consensus, defying convention, bucking bureaucracy, and usually bearing the displeasure of some in the service of the greater whole.
You’ll need to cultivate an ability to stay grounded in crisis, to be in the moment with others as you converse and consider a way forward, to have presence, and presence of mind.
Solitude yields to the clarity to know when the easy path is the wrong one. And solitude, through its fusion of mind and soul, produces within the leader the stronger alloy of conviction, which in turn braces her with the moral courage not to conform, and to bear the consequences that result.
Solitude, as defined by the authors, isn’t necessarily retreating into nature to contemplate —though it could be, “It is simply, a subjective state of mind, in which the mind, isolated from input from other minds, works through a problem on its own.”
Solitude in this sense is not merely physical separation from others or togetherness with nature, although for some people it might involve those things.
Solitude, as the term is used here, can be found as readily while sitting alone in a restaurant as it can on Mount Rainier. It is not an objective concept but a subjective one. It is, simply, a subjective state of mind, in which the mind, isolated from input from other minds, works through a problem on its own.
Or it can be intermittent, as it might be for a person who reads a book—which of course is a collection of someone else’s thoughts—and then pauses occasionally to think through a passage’s meaning.
But solitude is under siege today. Constant connectivity and collaboration is widely viewed as the ideal in the workplace these days. New networking technologies, project management and messaging tools, are being introduced into our organizations at a pace that makes them hard to even learn, let alone manage. Those who seek time to themselves are looked at askance, as if they’re not team-players, antisocial, wrong.
However addictive handheld devices that deliver immeasurable quantities of information and entertainment now have virtually everyone instead staring down at their phones, Kethledge and Erwin remind us that we can choose to put them down and make space for solitude in our lives. Leaders, they insist, have an obligation to do so.
The methods used for solitude and clarity differ, from meditation and running, to writing and quiet contemplation, but the result is the same: some time free from distraction and the direct input of others to let ideas synthesize and connect, to let your inner voice guide you and give you conviction, to connect to something both in yourself, and something greater than yourself.
It can provide analytical clarity, intuition, creativity, emotional balance, acceptance, catharsis, magnanimity, and moral courage.
The book’s structure is built on four fruits of solitude: clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage.
While the first two fruits are important qualities to in a leader, it’s the latter two that merit emphasis for they speak to a leader’s character and presence.
The lesson is clear. Make time for solitude. Unplug. Schedule white space. It will be worth it for leaders and for those being led. Creativity, clarity, emotional balance, and moral courage do not passively just appear. They ought to be sought after.
Clarity
Clarity is often a difficult thing for a leader to obtain. Compounding the difficulty, now more than ever, is what ergonomists call information overload, where a leader is overrun with inputs—via e-mails, meetings, and phone calls—that only distract and clutter his thinking.
Solitude offers ways for leaders to obtain greater clarity. A leader who silences the din not only around his mind, but inside it, can then hear the delicate voice of intuition, which may have already made connections that his conscious mind has not.
The most inspiring leaders are ones who find a clarity of meaning that transcends the tasks at hand.
Creativity
If clarity serves to identify which of the available options will be most effective for a leader, creativity serves to develop a possibility the leader was not aware of before.
Sometimes, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in his seminal book Creativity, a creative work or idea is one based on rejection of established norms in the relevant field. On other occasions a work is creative not because it rejects what came before, but simply because its content is new. And on still other occasions an idea is creative because it is based on horizontal connections between things that at first seem unrelated.
As with clarity, there is an intuitive path to creativity, on which much of the work is already done for the leader, if only he will pause to listen.
Emotional Balance
“An effective leader is the person who can maintain their balance and reflect, when a lot of people around them are reacting,” says James Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps General. “If I was to sum up the single biggest problem of senior leadership in the information age, it’s a lack of reflection,” he says “We need solitude to refocus on prospective decision-making, rather than just reacting to problems as they arise. You have some external stimulus, then you go back to your experience, your education, and you see what needs to be done.”
Today’s leaders at all levels feel the weight of external and internal pressures. Left unmanaged, these ever-increasing pressures could leave a leader emotionally weakened. The authors argue that solitude acts as “a pressure-relief valve.”
Moral Courage
Some leadership decisions bring consequences that are more than professional. Frequently those consequences take the form of moral criticism, where opponents criticize not only the decision itself, but the person who would dare make it.
The very point of these criticisms is to enforce conformity, and thus to prevent the leader from making these decisions in the first place.
Moral courage is what enables a leader to make them nonetheless. It requires not only clarity, but conviction. And to have conviction, and thus moral courage, the leader must get his soul involved.
3 lessons learned from the book
1. Great leaders use solitude to deal with four aspects of their life.
2. FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) is a dangerous trap for anyone who is serious about their responsibilities.
3. Solitude can help you alleviate negative emotions and triggers.
Lesson 1: Solitude is bliss if you embrace it and learn to control four essential aspects of your life with it
Solitude is one of the most powerful tools of a leader.
Why? Because it allows for unstructured time for the mind to recenter and run deeper cognitive processes.
Oftentimes, this leads to breakthrough discoveries and better coordination of activities, if we embrace it and choose not to respond to all external stimuli, or the tsunami of inputs, as the author calls them.
Lesson 1 (cont.)
From responding to emails to spot-checking notifications, these are all part of the super-human model that modern leaders are trying to achieve. Unfortunately, it leads to decreased productivity and creativity, and an increase in anxiety and frustration.
Therefore, the book suggests using solitude to gain leverage over four aspects: clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage.
Lesson 1 (cont.)
We’ll focus more on clarity, as the purpose of this book is to help you become a better leader. Clarity implies switching off your connection to the outside world once in a while to have time to recharge and gain a clearer perspective.
The constant input of distractions can throw you off your balance, and you can’t afford that.
Sitting in solitude and practicing introspection is what great leaders do. And doing so will facilitate great ideas coming to you.
Lesson 2: Get over your fear of missing out and focus on your work
The fear of missing out (FOMO) keeps many people in the same vicious loop they find hard to break and for a reason! The constant flux of stimuli rewired us to constantly check pop-up notifications, emails, news, and feel bad when we don’t.
How many of you can honestly say that if you receive a message, you won’t jump to check it out? Not too many! However, when we’re engaged in a task or we’re running some errands, FOMO can really distract our attention from work, which will likely result in a poor outcome.
Lesson 2 (cont.)
Hence, if you think you can multitask, you’ll have to think again.
The author is firm that you should focus 100% on your craft and not give course to external stimuli. Otherwise, your final product is going to be of lower quality.
In solitude, our creativity and emotional intelligence grow. And our brain has a “moment of respiro” to catch up on ideas and insights.
Lesson 2 (cont.)
Turning off our phones and banning distractions will be highly beneficial in the long run. Even though we feel that we’ll be missing out on important updates.
Make peace with the thought that you’re missing out by telling yourself that you can catch up any time.
And that it’s no big deal if you subtract yourself from the outside world for a few moments once in a while.
Lesson 3: Worldwide leaders use solitude as a retreat to heal and come back stronger, and so should you
If you look at the great figures in the history of humankind, you’ll notice a few similarities and common patterns. Above all, leaders are brave both in their thoughts and endeavors, are not afraid to speak their minds, and they often practice solitude.
In fact, decluttering their mind and allowing it to sync with everything going on, plus their body and spirit, is what gives them strength and courage.
As previously mentioned, it’s particularly important to detach yourself from the factors that interfere with your workflow. However, sometimes there’s something more difficult to let go of when you’re trying to practice solitude: yourself.
Lesson 3 (cont.)
That’s right! At times, decluttering our minds starts from within, and banning outside factors is just complementary.
Mind chatter, overthinking, and negative emotions, can all interfere with our minds and disturb us.
For this reason, meditation in solitude is highly recommended. In fact, any healthy approach to getting your mind to stop stressing and thinking all the time is beneficial.
Lesson 3 (cont.)
Breathwork does an amazing job, and so does unstructured time spent reflecting on your life and inner spirit.
Great leaders around the world and historical personalities have always been advocates of such practices. They allowed them to open up more creative sides of their brains. It also leaves more room for great ideas to emerge.
Conclusion
Lead Yourself First is a guide for leaders and those who are struggling with becoming leading figures, as it teaches its readers how to find confidence and perspective in solitude.
By learning how to shut down unnecessary noise from outside and within, a leader can tap into their own power and discover great insights, clarity, grow their emotional intelligence, and nurture their creativity.