Eugene Bible
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Exercise 14: The Model
This week’s exercise from Josh’s Leadership Step By Step was called The Model, and the assignment was to watch a few of Josh’s videos on The Model, which showed me a system to begin to analyze my own emotional processes surrounding something I’d like to improve at, then try to do the analysis for a couple things I want to get better at.
I could try to explain The Model here, but I don’t think I would do it much justice, so I will leave that to Josh and his YouTube channel and give a quick summary of my interpretation of it for those who don’t want to go that far. My understanding is that the basic idea is that our emotions are the primary driver of so many of our actions, and The Model asks you to analyze your behaviors through four lenses: the environment, your perception/belief that is leading to the behavior, the emotions you feel, and the behavior itself:
The idea being, that once you’ve identified these four areas, you can use his next process (“The Method”, next week’s exercise!) to change those situations, behaviors, and the emotions you feel – in other words, getting rid of situations you don’t like in your life and replacing them with ones that you do.
As examples, I’ll use the two situations that I wrote out:
Situation I’d Like to Improve: Have more meaningful relationships with friends and family.
Environment: Anywhere, mostly at home (phone, video calls, etc.)
Belief: Everyone (including myself) is too busy to talk, I will be interrupting them if I call them and bother them “just” to chat. Friends and family will get uncomfortable if I bring up “hard” conversations.
Emotion: Loneliness, sadness, frustration, emptiness
Behavior: End up not calling/texting/communicating, and if I do, limit the conversation to shallow topics.Situation I’d Like to Improve: Posting online content on a schedule and staying with it.
Environment: Anywhere (mostly at home?)
Belief: I am too busy with too many other priorities to get ahead on writing and scheduling content. “It is too hard or takes too much time to do right now.”
Emotion: Stress, frustration, helplessness, disappointment
Behavior: Avoid writing and posting, even though I know I have the time to do it.Writing these out was an interesting process. It feels stupid to say at this point, but it felt like I was taking the first step towards fixing two uncomfortable situations in my life! If you want to figure out how to fix a leak in a pipe, you first have to figure out where the leak is, how big it is, what methods you could use to fix it, etc…And this model just does the same thing for a disliked situation. I don’t like having conversations that are shallow and feel superficial. Now I’ve analyzed when it happens, what I’m doing, what shallow conversations make me feel, and what is the belief behind why I don’t just make the change.
The biggest help this exercise gave me was in just being introduced to the concept of a model for dealing with emotions, beliefs, and situations I don’t like. These situations can often feel powerless; that this is just how it is and it’s hard to change. I don’t like it, so therefore if it were something I could control, I would. It’s easier to just say “I don’t even know where to start with fixing this” and just give up. But this model made it pretty simple: break it down into 4 simple categories. I didn’t anticipate that doing that alone would change how I feel about a situation, but I was surprised at just how much breaking them up made it feel like I was taking control over them. It gave me some ownership over them. They began to turn ‘powerless’ into ‘powerful.’
There were times as I wrote the situations and categories that didn’t quite feel like they were complete – maybe there is another category that I could add to make the analysis feel more complete or satisfying to me, but I haven’t been able to figure it out yet. Something just felt like there’s a way I could make this model fit myself even better. However, now that I know a model exists, I will use this one as a jump-off point to start thinking about what my own model could be.
I’m looking forward to going into next week’s exercise when we will have to practice The Method, which is Josh’s model for taking this analysis and using it to create change and take control of these disliked situations.
Essay #2: What are motivation, emotions, and self-awareness?
[Going to preface this one with the same as before: it feels like the more I write, the more I want to go back and revise, add, or remove things I already wrote. In order to fulfill the homework requirement, I’m forcing myself to stop here and just post this. So again, I can’t say I 100% agree with all of my own writing here. Please think of this as a first draft. Enjoy!]
If you want to lead people, you cannot do so without understanding what motivates people. What motivates people? You could argue a lot of different things, but to me, they all boil down to one basic element: emotion. And if you’re going to understand your own motivation and awareness, you’re going to need self-awareness. So let’s talk about all three.
Motivation is the feeling you get that makes you want to work toward a goal. It is arguably one of the most important feelings you can have. Without motivation to do anything…Well…It’s pretty hard to accomplish anything. Almost by definition, someone without motivation is clinically depressed. It fuels everything from social connections to skill development. You can have many motivations at the same time (and we all do! Are you hungry right now? Are you feeling like meeting a friend? Do you want to clean that mess up in your room? Do you want to learn to play that one song on guitar?), and you can even have two opposing motivations at the same time (ever wanted to eat that chocolate cake in the fridge but also want to lose weight for the wedding coming up?). In leadership, it’s key to learn how motivation works since you need to learn how to use motivation to inspire and drive people to work toward a vision. I would argue that every time you’ve ever felt motivated to do something it was driven entirely by emotion. I don’t think I’ve ever logically led myself to feel motivation…To me they feel more like they are created by our experiences and desires, rather than being consciously decided. If I think back on some of the strongest motivations I’ve ever had, they were all driven by something emotional: a desire to look good to others, a desire to make money, a desire to be accepted by peers, etc. Motivation is emotional.
If motivation is emotional, then what are emotions? For me personally, this is a realm I’ve been learning to explore more in depth over the past year, so I wouldn’t call myself an expert in emotions. This of course isn’t to say I never felt emotions before, but I actively tried to suppress many of my emotions for a long time, as I used to think that logic was “good” and emotion was just something that served to get in the way of “clear” thinking. More recently, I’ve come to realize the truth: the way I thought about decision making was completely backwards – I thought everything I do is logical but it turns out…nothing I do is logical, and everything is emotional. Everything I decide to do is based on emotion, and after my emotional brain makes its choice, my logical brain justifies it with logic. Emotion decided which university I wanted to go to, what I felt like eating, who I wanted to be friends with, and what kind of hobbies I wanted to do. So what are they? I think if I had to define them, I would call them chemical processes in our body that have evolved to encourage or discourage various behaviors. They encourage us to create social connections, make us feel bad when we don’t have them, or tell us to do something more, or to do it less!
I feel that motivation and emotions are closely related. But I think that most people go through life just accepting them for what they are and never thinking twice about them. But I find that raw motivation and emotions on their own, while just fine, have power that is left unlocked. To me, self-awareness is the key that is required to unlock the power of motivation and emotions. For example, if I want to learn how to play the guitar relying purely on motivation without knowing why, when, or how you feel motivated to play will almost guarantee that you don’t keep up with practice. Or if I’m learning to make perfect free-throws in basketball but I feel frustrated and angry every time I miss a shot, but never take a moment to try to understand why, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to keep going. Self-awareness (coupled with curiosity and mental flexibility) is the only way to check your motivation and emotions and get both aligned in the same direction towards a desired goal. Motivation and emotions are powerful tools that, when utilized and directed well (good luck trying to stop or control them), can be the difference between success and failure at any effort you make.
I consider myself a ceaseless student of life. I’m always trying to push myself to be better than I was yesterday, and I’m always trying to understand myself and how I relate to the world and people around me. Leadership represents the next step for me – a way to take the experiences I’ve had and try to utilize them to help others. It forces me to think beyond just examining myself; A ‘zooming-out’ to see a bigger picture of the world and people around me and thinking about how I relate to and affect them. I hope that by understanding motivation, emotions, and self-awareness better, I can learn to lead not only myself, but others around me more effectively.
Essay #1: What is leadership?
[I want to preface this essay by saying I’m not sure I 100% agree with everything I wrote. This is one that, the more I wrote, the more introspective I got and started to second guess myself, or wanted to add more. I feel like given enough time you could fill a book with all that I write. Anyway, that said, call this a first draft. Enjoy!]
I can honestly say that prior to working with Josh on leadership, I had no idea what leadership actually meant. I think that this is probably similar to the case of most people: if you were to ask what a leader is, I think most people would answer that the leader is the person who’s the boss – they set the goals and make the rules, tell you what to do, and tell you what you’re doing wrong. My answer would have been no different.
But that has changed now.
Now, when asked what a leader is, my answer is similar, but is more nuanced. A leader may set goals, they may make the rules, they may also designate roles and help to solve problems, but what is most important is how they do it and why. A true leader is not deciding the direction of the group because that’s what they want and everyone must obey. A true leader is not controlling everyone just because they were hired into the authoritarian position. A true leader does not coerce or command. A true leader puts others before themself. A true leader listens and understands the other people in their group. A true leader does not assume they know everything already, and seeks perspectives and solutions from those they lead. A true leader guides a group towards a goal with all members of the group in mind. A true leader unites people.
A true leader utilizes empathy, listening, effective communication, and assertiveness in order to guide a group of people to a shared vision. A leader is adaptable, understanding, altruistic, courageous, composed, resilient, and has a drive to tackle problems head-on.
Unfortunately, true leaders are in short supply.
When I think of leaders throughout history, I think that many of those top leaders you already know come to mind: Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, or Mother Teresa. These are all leaders that strove to lead us to a better world. There were of course many leaders that did the opposite, but I think it’s incredible that some of the most famous historical leaders are famous because of the good that they did. Unfortunately, when I think of modern day leaders, or at least ones that most people consider to be top modern day leaders, people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates often make the list. While what they’ve accomplished may be impressive, whether they become top “leaders” by doing good deeds is debatable. I would argue they are more lauded for the unthinkable amounts of wealth they were able to amass, rather than the good deeds they have done.
Though nowhere near as famous as MLK, Gandhi, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, there are some modern people I very much respect for their views on leadership. One would be Simon Sinek, who I think has an incredible sense of empathy combined with an incredible intellect and strategy towards leadership. Another would be Greta Thunberg who, while I think has more to learn about leadership and some areas where her leadership abilities are lacking, she’s also had the courage to act under immense pressure, shown unabashed passion to her followers, and guided likely hundreds of thousands of people to her cause for good. For a final example, I’ll use Ramit Sethi, a personal finance coach who I listen to regularly – not only for his financial advice, but for his compassion, empathy, and genuine drive to want to fully understand the people he coaches before he tries to lead them towards appropriate financial goals that align with their values (not his!). There are many more, but these are the three that came to mind.
Sometimes it seems as though in order to be respected as a great leader these days, it can feel like a prerequisite that you need to reach the billionaire class. So what does success in leadership mean? I don’t think there is one specific definition of what successful leadership is. Even a quick internet search will turn up hundreds of articles and definitions of what successful leadership looks like. One way that I would define success in leadership is having guided a group to an achieved a shared vision with everyone feeling satisfied and that they contributed. Another way I would define successful leadership is to be leading a group where everyone is rowing in the same direction towards the same goal with a sense of duty to their shared cause. The one common thread is that in my mind, in successful leadership, the members of the group feel understood and motivated to keep going out of a sense of responsibility to the others in the group and to themselves.
On the contrary, what would failure in leadership look like? Again, there are many ways in which leadership can fail, and I doubt I’ll be able to illustrate all of the ways here. To me, any group that has sustained, unresolved conflict or tension shows a high possibility of failure of leadership. No group works perfectly together 100% of the time. If you are working with humans, there will be tension and conflict. The difference between success and failure is how it is handled by the leader and the group members. A successful leadership will guide members through conflict and the result will be members who have stronger relationships because of the conflict and a sense of resolution. Another way a leader can fail is to be unable to understand the members of the group and their vision, or a failure to tie it all together into a shared vision. This is one of the main reasons I think true effective leaders are few and far between: it is far easier to fail than it is to succeed in leadership.
Now that we’ve covered successful and failures in leadership, what is the strategy for effective leadership? What is an effective model for leadership? If I had to outline a model for leadership, I think it would be an iterative process like the following, incorporating adaptability through iteration and empathetic listening to engage members:
Define a vision for yourself (a “draft” vision) and present it to group members
Explore your group members goals, vision, and adapt the vision accordingly
Identify goals and clear steps towards achieving the vision
Establish clear roles and objectives for members
RepeatA vision is something that is fluid and evolves over time, and if your group is not reevaluating it’s vision and ensuring everyone is continually on the same page and that everyone is feeling heard and that they’re contributing, your group will begin to deteriorate.
Do I think this is the best model for leadership? Probably not, there are many who have far more experience in leadership than I do that will have much better models. But for where I am in my leadership journey, this model represents my current way I think about leadership. One of the reasons I’m taking this course in leadership is to improve on my leadership skills and the models I use to lead those I can. I hope that in future writings, I will be able to elaborate more on how my model has changed and grown.
Exercise 12: Feedforward
Exercise 12 of Leadership Step By Step was “Feedforward”, an exercise developed by Marshall Goldsmith to ask for advice instead of asking someone to evaluate something you did in the past (AKA “feedback”). In short, the exercise asks you to pick something you want to improve at, ask for advice using a specific script, ask some clarifying questions if necessary (NO evaluating or judging!), then thanking them for the advice.
For this exercise, I decided to select a project that aligns with one of my goals for 2025: developing relationships in my life. I decided I want to improve at nurturing meaningful, deeper relationships (with existing friends and family or new relationships).
After doing multiple rounds of Initiative exercises, this exercise felt like it wasn’t too much of a challenge. Within just a handful of days, I was able to contact 10+ people to ask for advice and was able to quickly fill my calendar with calls to friends and family to ask for advice.
Normally, I don’t post the actual advice that I got, but I think that the advice I got was so useful and valuable that for this reflection I would go ahead and post the advice I got:
– Ask others to help make introductions to people who are in the same situation as you (kid, married, similar work, similar hobbies)
– Connect more with the friends you have over holidays and special occasions. Make a point to send messages or call on birthdays, Christmas, July 4th, or any other holiday!
– Spend more time with people in-person. If not possible, phone calls can work as well, but try for in-person meetings.
– If it’s something you really want, prioritize it. Make it an active decision to use some of your time for friends/family.
– Even if you have a kid now, hold on to friendships (even if it’s just one call a year) because you will have time again someday.
– Find people who are in the same situation as you.
– Ask meaningful questions (open ended!), probing questions, layering questions.
– Find get-to-know-you games and memorize some questions. Ask others for questions that are effective at deepening connections. Seek people out one-on-one.
– To make new friends: find common ground and ask someone to connect.
– Use cadence/frequency to pace relationships (too frequent communication leads to nothing to say, not frequent enough leads to becoming distant). Each relationship will have its own cadence. Ask what a preferred cadence is!
– Make a rule for yourself to reach out whenever you think of someone and just say you’re thinking of them. If the desire is there, schedule a meet up and stick to it.
– Apply the 2-minute rule to connecting with friends. When you think of them, swallow any pride/fear/apprehensiveness and just send a quick text. Don’t overthink it.
– Identify hobbies and try to find communities to join.
– Find a local community to join or start volunteering.
– Don’t try to hang onto friendships just because they’re old. Nurture the valuable ones, let the others go.
– Go easy on yourself, relationships are orbits, sometimes close, sometimes far, there are natural cycles.
– Don’t be afraid to initiate. Be transparent (tell them you miss them and want to reconnect!). Get them on the calendar.
– Focus on THEM. Listen. Ask open questions.
– Recognize your own value and make friends with yourself too. Give yourself time to be with yourself too.
– Create a specific goal – rather than something vague like “make more meaningful relationships”, try to make your goal specific like “I will reconnect with every person on this list” or make it fun: “create deep connections with these 3, medium connections with these 5, then light connections with these 10.”The variety of “feedforward” I got was really fun and interesting to hear. Some of the advice were things that I already try to do or had already thought of, and some of it was really insightful and from a perspective I’ve never considered, but all advice was helpful and really made me feel ready to try to apply it to my life.
One of the things I noticed was a very clear distinction between male and female advice: whereas most of the advice I got from men was logical (get things on calendars, make lists, be proactive/assertive), the advice I got from women was empathetic (ask open questions, listen and try to understand them, tell them how you feel about them). It was really interesting to hear the difference, and I felt continuously appreciative that I had both perspectives.
The tone of the conversations I had were all light and fun – many of them ended with both of us expressing a desire to connect more in future, which really made me feel good for having reached out and asked for the advice. The people I asked for advice also seemed to really enjoy the conversations. Some explicitly expressed that they felt honored that I asked them for advice on this and genuinely seemed delighted to give advice, which also made me feel great for having given them that opportunity to share something that maybe they don’t often have a chance to express. And for me, I was having fun asking for advice! Using my skills that I gained from Initiative, I felt like the conversations were almost like improvisation – on one hand I felt in control of the conversation and that I was leading, but there is still always an element of unexpectedness from the responses that keep you on your toes (which sometimes you have to guide back to the question at hand).
Overall, I feel like all the advice I got was valuable and the conversations that came from the exercise were all amazingly positive and added to my life. In a way, the conversations themselves did exactly what I was asking for advice on: they deepened and gave meaning to 10 relationships that I have in my life. As I go into 2025 trying to build better relationships with the people in my life, I think I will have gained a new technique for connecting: asking for advice!
Avoiding Imposing Values
We’re at the halfway point of Leadership Step By Step’s exercises! This week’s exercise was to avoid imposing values on other people. What exactly does that entail? To start, avoiding using the terms “good”, “bad”, “right”, and “wrong”, but with a stretch goal of also avoiding “should”, “appropriate”, “better”, and “worse”, among a few others. Not forever, but just for the purpose of this exercise and seeing what comes of it.
The idea behind the exercise is to become more aware of your unconscious judgment of others – if you say a movie is “good”, what does that even mean? To some people, it might mean entertaining. To others, it might mean that it had subtle depth that requires comparing/contrasting studies against concepts in philosophy to truly uncover meaning. In the end, the term “good”, has no real meaning of its own and simply shows your own personal bias or judgment, which can very often be taken as demeaning. After all, am I in any position to tell you whether the way you dress, or talk, or make movies, or like your coffee is “good” or “bad”? Probably not. Is anyone? Maybe not.
This exercise is another that Josh had challenged me to do several years ago, when he was helping me develop my podcast interviewing skills, so it was not new to me. It has, however, become a skill that I consciously choose to keep in my day-to-day life. I think that I have gotten to a point where I’ve eliminated a great deal of my ‘value impositions’ from my usual speech.
In many cases, I find that this challenge is just a matter of finding a better way to replace these words: instead of using “good”, rephrase using “I like…” (i.e. instead of “that movie is so good!”, use “I really like that movie!”). Instead of saying “worse”, use more detail to describe what exactly you think has worsened (“The dialogue in the second book didn’t hook me as much as the first” instead of “the second book was worse than the first”). This not only eliminates your value judgments, but it also allows deeper, more meaningful communication.
Since being tasked with this exercise, I have become very conscious of my usage of the words “good/bad” and “better/worse”. I haven’t necessarily eliminated them from my vocabulary, but I use them far more sparingly and often make note of it when I use them. I will admit that some of the more difficult-to-eliminate words like “acceptable”, “appropriate”, or “should” still often escape my lips, and I often feel like I haven’t found a good way around using those terms yet. Even so, I feel like this change to the way I communicate has really helped in my ability to connect with others.
Since I removed many of these value-loaded words from my vocabulary (or at least got to the point where I only use them when I consciously decide to), the way people react to me and my speech changed dramatically. In general, I think that people naturally have an opposing reaction to value judgements. For example, if I say “the new Bruno Mars album is really good.”, then many will react immediately with “Yeah, but…” and tell me what isn’t good about it (even if they like the album!), whereas “I really like the new Bruno Mars album!” is generally met with agreement, or at least acceptance. It’s quite difficult to convince someone that they don’t like something that they say they do. This means that my conversations with others have become more thoughtful and meaningful, less adversarial, and have allowed me to connect better with others.
This exercise is one that I really think we should all do at some point (Gah…”should”…Another judgment). I want to re-emphasize that the point is not to eliminate these words from your vocabulary, but to use them consciously and intentionally – to think about when you’re being judgmental and be hyper-aware of when you allow yourself to judge and how it is affecting your conversation. It is a skill that, when mastered, can really help improve how you connect with others.
Reflection #10 – No, But, However
For the tenth exercise of Leadership Step By Step, I had a deceivingly simple task: do not start sentences with the words “no”, “but”, or “however.” The goal of which was to become more self-aware of how you interact with people and specifically, whether you are communicating in a way that is detrimental to relationship-building.
What does a good conversation involve? An interesting topic? A solid variety of opinions? Open mindedness of the people involved? I think there are many factors that contribute to an interesting and engaging conversation, but one of the most important is just having two people who are genuinely curious about the topic, specifically the other person’s opinions on it. When you engage in a conversation with genuine curiosity and a desire to understand someone else (especially when they have an opposing opinion to yours), it leads you to ask questions that “open the door” to deeper, more meaningful conversations. And more importantly, it starts to signal to the other person that you’re interested in them and as a consequence, starts to build trust – even if their opinion is polar opposite to yours. That is where the value of this exercise lives: it’s not just an exercise in awareness of speech, it’s an exercise that helps you to build better relationships.
This exercise is one that was actually recommended to me years ago by Josh himself, to help me with hosting a podcast and interviewing guests. And while I can’t say that I’ve completely mastered the skill, I’ve definitely become much better than I was back then. I have now gotten to the point where I catch about 95% of my sentences that might have started with no, but, or however. Over the years, I’ve also been able to see what happens when you start a sentence with no, but, or however: it immediately incites defensiveness, disconnection from the conversation, and also something personal – maybe a feeling of hurt? I can also tell that this exercise has really taken root in my social interactions since I now also feel the sting when others do it to me. When I hear someone respond to something I say with “But…”, I immediately feel like “They’re not even listening to me. They were just waiting for their turn to talk.” After being fed a “no, but, however” statement, I myself have felt the impulse to want to get defensive and tell them why they’re wrong before I’ve even heard what they’re going to say. It made me want to disconnect from a conversation and turn it into a “who’s right, who’s wrong” debate.
I think the people I talk to have also noticed a difference, if only subconsciously. When I avoid starting sentences with “no, but, however”, it almost naturally leads to a feeling of curiosity – if I can’t start with why they’re wrong, I start thinking about how to engage on details of what they’re saying, which in turn leads to the other person feeling cared for and heard. Once someone feels heard, they start to open up and trust, which further leads to deeper, more meaningful conversations.
I will say there are some ways in which I feel like I’ve cheated to get out of starting sentences with “no, but, however”. Depending on how invested I want to be in the conversation, I may just say “I see what you mean, but…” instead of just saying “but” from the start. The way I’ve come to think about it is pretty simple: if the person I’m talking to and the conversation I’m having are things that I appreciate, I make it a point to actually listen and try to understand them instead of negating something they’re saying, even if I disagree.
This exercise is one that I think everyone should do at least once, for at least a week. It’s a great exercise in self-awareness, working on your conversational skills, and developing better relationships.
Reflection #9: Adopt a Challenging Belief
For the 9th exercise of Leadership Step By Step, I had to do the exact same thing as in Exercise 8 (feel an unwanted emotion, identify the unwanted belief, find a belief to replace it with), but now with a challenging belief. The trick is…I feel like the two beliefs I ended up trying to change for the last exercise were both pretty challenging beliefs, and for this exercise I felt like I had to one-up myself.
In some ways, I feel like the belief I decided to try to change for this week was not the best choice for this exercise, partially because it was possibly too challenging, but also because I didn’t feel the particular unwanted emotions often enough that I had enough chances to try to change the underlying belief over the course of just one week.
The unwanted emotions I felt were discontent, disappointment, and frustration. The belief that was leading to those emotions was: happiness is something to aspire to or to achieve.
I actually identified this belief over the course of exercise 8, when, one very early morning, the sun hadn’t risen yet, and I was sitting in my darkened living room with my baby boy, both of us in a state of drowsy quiet and calm. I was doing what I usually do in my early mornings: being pensive, thinking about the coming day, thinking about my goals, and trying to meditate a bit. And as we sat there quietly on the floor, baby in my lap, both of us looking out of our glass sliding door, I happened to be thinking about the things that I’m not satisfied with – the goals I haven’t achieved or my lack of progress on some of my goals. I felt like maybe in some aspects of my life I haven’t come as far as I “should” have, and that I need to work on those things if I’m going to be happy in life, hence feeling discontent, disappointment in myself, and some frustration. After several minutes of pondering this, the sun started to come up, and I got out of my own head for a moment and thought “Look at the sunrise. That sunrise is completely unique to today. This is the only time this particular sunrise will ever happen. This moment will only ever happen right now with everything just as it is: me and my little baby boy just sitting here quietly watching the sunrise, with those pinks, purples, and oranges filling the sky filled with puffy clouds. If I can’t feel happiness in this moment, right here and right now, I never will.” That thought stuck with me through the rest of the week.
When I began to think about a belief I could attack for the challenging belief exercise, I thought, that sunrise thought could be perfect, and decided the belief I wanted to try to use to replace my unwanted belief was: “happiness is found in the now” as opposed to being something you wait for, or even work for.” With my life as it is right now, there’s absolutely no reason for me to be unhappy, and I wanted to challenge myself to find more happiness in the “now”. The emotions I wanted to feel were contentment, satisfaction, calm, and joy (happiness?).
As I alluded to previously, the difficult part of this exercise was that it was semi-rare that I felt unwanted emotions related to happiness. But they weren’t completely absent. There were a few specific times when I was doing something mundane like hand-washing dishes and was tempted to pull out my smartphone and turn on a video or podcast while I did it, but stopped myself and thought “Happiness is found in the now. Stop searching for happiness from something outside of you, find it within” and was instead able to just sit there, focus on my dishes, and feel how good it felt to just wash each dish and feel the satisfaction of knowing I did it well. It was a sort of meditation, and felt really good for the few times I was able to try out the new belief.
Thanks to this exercise and the previous one, I think I am starting to become more conscious of the beliefs of my inner monologue and noticing more when I feel unwanted emotions. Now it sometimes feels like I’m looking for opportunities to feel an unwanted emotion just so I can challenge myself to try to come up with a belief to combat it with. These exercises were a useful tool that I think is applicable to just about everyone and would highly recommend trying it. I can see where in leadership this skill would be invaluable: A person with the ability to change their beliefs at will has the ability to shift perspectives and in doing so alter their own reality – to create a world they want to see, first in their mind, and then in the real world.
Exercise 8: Adopt a New Belief
For the next exercise, I had to adopt a new belief, using the book’s methodology: identify a negative emotion that comes up frequently, name it, identify the belief that brings rise to it, then identify the new emotion you want to replace it with, and come up with a replacement belief to think of every time that negative emotion comes up.
Ever since I moved to Hawaii and then my baby was born, I’ve felt frustrated that I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want to do during the day. It felt impossible to schedule anything or know how much to put on a to-do list since, depending on whether the baby naps or not, or how active he is, I may have little or no time at all to do anything I want, much less decide on what time I will commit to doing something. Also, towards the end of the year every year, I get pensive about my goals and productivity in life, and have been reading the book Getting Things Done to try to revamp my productivity system and rethink my goals. It seemed only fitting that I try to change a belief related to these.
I decided on the following for my exercise:
My negative emotions: Frustration, powerlessness, and sometimes anger.
The belief that leads to those emotions? I don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do.
The emotions I’d rather feel: Control, confidence, and calm.
The new belief to consider: There are people who get a lot done in a day and still raise children, author books, maintain full time jobs, etc. I have the same amount of time as anyone else, and I can control how I use it.It’s hard to tell exactly whether it was purely this exercise or the combination of this and the productivity revamping I’m working on, but after I took on this belief, I started to see results within 2 days, and they were quite surprising: I found myself feeling like I had too much time and found myself having times during the day where I’d be trying to figure out what to do with my time, and not feel like I had anything in particular to do.
Part of it was the productivity revamping: due to the new system I’m working on, I’ve started to note down a lot of the thoughts and things I have to do in my head immediately when I have them. This meant that a lot of the stressing about “Oh no, I have to remember to do this later! Oh, and I can’t forget that! And I still haven’t finished this either!” disappeared, or at least was greatly reduced – now I was tracking all of those things and actively deciding when it’s reasonable to do which things. I wasn’t stressing about trying to remember things I can’t deal with right now anyway.
The change in emotions was also due to the belief change. Everytime I started to feel like “I don’t have time!!!” I would just try to tell myself “I have as much time as anyone else. You decide how you use this time.” and would find me asking myself “What’s the most important thing I can do now? What do I WANT to do now? Can I accomplish two things at once here?” and I started to realize that the negativity in thinking “I don’t have time!” was preventing myself from taking control and taking action. It wasn’t that I didn’t have time – I was convincing myself I didn’t have time. I had that feeling very strongly about twice throughout the week, and it did indeed feel empowering. And it felt like I had suddenly gained a lot of time.
Thanks to the success of the first belief-changing exercises, I really felt how useful of a skill this could be, and decided to try with another belief through the week. I am now trying to change how I feel about waking up early (From “waking up early is hard” to “others can do it, I can too”), though this one still hasn’t taken as well as I’d like, and will continue to try. It feels like it may require some adjustment, and that maybe I just got lucky with that first one being so easy. This one feels more like a challenge.
I’ve recognized how valuable it is if you can actually get your new belief to take, and now find myself looking for beliefs that I can try to change. If I were able to do this regularly and with more ease, I can imagine how a lot of stressful or uncomfortable situations in life could be turned around – it’s like the ultimate version of finding the silver lining and staying positive, but better, since it’s less focused on just “being hopeful” or focusing on the positive, and instead actively changing your own perspective and the belief that is leading to the negative feelings.
For the next exercise, I will need to find a more challenging belief to change, so it is the perfect place to continue to practice. I will most likely continue to try to change my belief about waking up early, but also am trying to find one more hard-to-change belief. This exercise is another that feels like it’s part of a neat set of skills I’m learning that are all leading up to something powerful, and am excited to keep moving forward.
Exercise 7 Reflection: Authentic Voice
The Authentic Voice exercise is a simple exercise on the surface: instead of writing your inner monologue like I did in exercise #3, this time you have to verbalize it, first alone, but then with friends, family, or anyone else.
The first couple of times doing this exercise on my own made it seem easy enough – it was just like when I sometimes talk to myself about what I have to do for the day, or if I’m checking to see if I’m remembering everything before I leave the house. I thought, “this exercise is going to be super easy, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of this.” It wasn’t until I tried it with others that I really started to feel something new.
The first time I tried it with someone else, I asked them to give me a topic and I just opened the floodgates from my brain to my mouth. I immediately noticed some things that are very different from my usual conversations with others. First, I became really self-conscious of how much I was talking without giving the other person a chance to talk. I felt voices in my head saying things like “I wonder what he thinks about what I’m saying? Does he have anything to say about this? I should ask him something related so he can talk”. Because of how fast these thoughts came to me, some I was able to voice, but others passed too quickly for me to verbalize.
Talking “without a filter” also brought some other feelings associated with speaking freely. In one way, I did feel like it was my “authentic voice” – I wasn’t trying to tailor what I say to the person I’m talking to, meaning I wasn’t saying anything simply to appease the person I’m talking with or to placate them. But other times, it also felt like having a filter is not a bad thing – I found myself asking “Is it a bad thing to be aware of who I’m talking to and tailoring my conversation for the person I’m speaking with? Does speaking in my “authentic voice” truly make the conversation better? For me? Or for the person I’m talking with?”
Another feeling that I really enjoyed during this exercise was a feeling of importance, or being special, if only because the format of the exercise made that artificially so. Speaking freely for a couple minutes without being interrupted or disturbed felt like I had a spotlight on me – like I was on a stage giving a speech, rather than having a conversation. It meant all of my attention was devoted to trying to speak in a way that was impactful, engaging, and “worth” the listener’s time. It felt exciting and almost like an improv performance.
I definitely felt the value in the exercise: I’m simply not used to giving speeches or speaking freely and the more I did it, I felt more confident and like a more powerful voice was slowly shaping up, for when the need arises. The exercise really made me feel like this is a new area I can work on and felt like a skill that, when developed, can become a really potent tool for leading and influencing others. For the first time, I felt why organizations like Toastmasters are so popular – learning to speak powerfully, from your heart, and without inhibition can be thrilling, fun, and in a way, addictive.
There was one area that I didn’t feel like I got to try enough: using the “authentic voice” unannounced in normal conversation. I tried to do it a few times, but during regular conversations, it was really hard to not just have my typical, ordinary conversations. I found it difficult to just trigger the same mental state as when I would “prep” my listener for the exercise, and found myself trying to figure out whether I was doing something wrong, or was there some kind of belief or self-consciousness that was preventing me from doing it. Sometimes it felt like maybe this “authentic voice” exercise just doesn’t quite suit regular conversation, though from the description in the book, it didn’t seem like that is the case.
Like the past few exercises, this exercise continues the pattern of being one that doesn’t feel like one week is enough. It feels like a skill that you could spend years developing and improving at, and I certainly would like to continue to do so. I hope that the coming exercises will continue to build on this and allow me to keep practicing it, but even if it doesn’t, I think I will probably continue to try to practice my “authentic voice” during regular conversations.
Exercise 6: Unwanted Beliefs
This week, the Leadership Step By Step exercise was to attempt to identify unwanted beliefs everytime you feel an emotion you don’t like.
This exercise felt distinctly different from the past two. Whereas when I was just trying to identify as many beliefs of mine or others felt like it was something I had to constantly remind myself to do, this challenge had a very specific trigger: feeling an emotion I don’t like. With a trigger, I found myself trying to identify not just beliefs when I feel disliked emotions, but I’d start thinking about other people’s beliefs and my own beliefs unrelated to the disliked emotion as well. I found myself going back and starting second pages for my “Write Your Beliefs” and “Write Others’ Beliefs” sections of my notebook. It could have just been that I’m improving at identifying beliefs, but having the trigger seemed to open the floodgates and I was able to find a lot more beliefs.
There were some new questions that arose from this challenge as well. Does a disliked emotion (sadness, anger, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, etc.) always mean there’s an unwanted belief? Sometimes it felt like my anger/frustration/sadness was coming from a perfectly reasonable belief. For example, I may have felt frustrated and disappointed when someone was late to a meeting because I have a belief that being punctual is virtuous and respectful. This is a belief that I rather like and don’t feel is unwanted at all. Other times, it was very clear that my emotion was coming from a belief that I clearly would want to change, like when I felt frustrated that someone else wasn’t doing something the way I would do it, and I recognized that my way is not necessarily the “best” way.
Some of the beliefs I wrote also still felt a lot to me like judgments. Sometimes it felt uncomfortable to write beliefs, and I would feel a need to write a second sentence to try to justify it (“I know this isn’t true!!!” or “I reflected on this and recognized I was wrong later!!!”) as if I was afraid of my own judgment of my past self. I never wrote those second sentences, but sometimes there was a very strong urge to.
I was also surprised at how often the beliefs I was starting to discover felt like they were uncovering bits of who I am as a person. In general, I think we all think of ourselves as a kind of amorphous being that can’t really be defined by concrete, quantifiable measurements, but in some ways, this exercise started to feel like it was getting as close as you can to doing so. Writing many beliefs felt like they were very “core” to who I am as a person – fundamental, basic tenants that I live by to define my everyday self. Very often the beliefs were ones that I’ve never really thought deeply about or put down on paper, and were often beliefs that I take for granted or feel like are obvious and common to everyone. This made the exercise feel very much like an exercise in self-discovery and self-exploration.
Another interesting result of the exercise was that identifying beliefs made me a much “cooler” thinker when problems or conflicts arose. Having this trigger to identify the beliefs of myself and the person I was associating with gave me a way of taking a step back in the moment and thinking, rather than reacting emotionally. It gave me a brief moment to forget the emotion and analyze. This ended up making the emotion itself feel weaker and have less of a hold over me, and allowed me to handle the conflict with a much cooler head. This was one of my favorite results of the exercise. Depending on the situation, identifying the possible beliefs associated with a negative emotion might’ve helped me navigate the issue and come to a better solution than I would have ordinarily.
I can clearly see how this exercise is going to help in the future for leading myself and leading others. Trying to control your emotions is hard. But if you can identify their source, it becomes a much easier thing to do. If you can successfully identify your own beliefs and the beliefs of those around you with a high rate of accuracy, you’re far less likely to overreact, far more likely to think clearly, and will be far more likely to start with a problem, and turn it into a solution that is not just a solution, but also a better connection to and deeper understanding of a person in your life.
Writing Others’ Beliefs
The exercise of the week was to write the beliefs of others (to the best of my ability, based on observations of behavior and words of others). I found the exercise to be more difficult than I anticipated it to be.
Observing others with the goal of trying to identify their beliefs is harder than it sounds. First of all, I would frequently just forget to do it while I was having interactions with people – it usually takes most of my focus to stay fully engaged in conversations and enjoy time with people, and adding an extra challenge of trying to analyze their behaviors was certainly pushing the boundaries of my mental capacity. Most of the time, I would have to take some time to try to reflect on conversations I just had, and then I’d find myself doubting whether my “beliefs” that I’m assigning to their behavior were right or not: “I mean they said this…But is it REALLY because they believe this? It sounds kind of like a stretch..I guess I’ll write it down since this is just to the best of my ability…” Most of the beliefs I wrote never “felt” like they were right. It felt like I was judging or assuming things of others, which felt slightly uncomfortable.
It was easier to do when I thought about entire groups of people as a whole, rather than individuals. With the recent election, I found myself trying to think about what Trump supporters believe, or what Kamala supporters believe. I thought a lot about if you take society as a whole, what do we believe? Oftentimes I felt myself feeling like I was judging people, which made me go back and rethink the belief I just wrote down. For example, I might have thought “Trump supporters are racist”, but after writing it down thinking, “you know, that’s not really fair…Not ALL Trump supporters are racist…I guarantee there are racist Kamala supporters somewhere in the country too…” and started to regret some of the things I wrote. This was one of the more interesting outcomes of this exercise: it forced me to think about what my beliefs of others are, and it opened my mind and made me less likely to quickly group people into categories and label them. In a way, the activity felt like an exercise in empathy.
Doing this exercise, identifying other people’s beliefs certainly felt like a skill that I had to develop. At the beginning, it felt very difficult (and it still does, a week later), but as I did it, I did feel like I was improving, albeit slowly. Making myself conscious of the beliefs of others feels like a difficult skill to learn that takes a long time – it almost requires an entirely different mindset, which is, maybe quite obviously, something that takes a long time to adjust to.
I can see why this skill of becoming aware of others’ beliefs is a useful one in a leadership course. Leading others requires first listening and learning about the people you want to lead – you have no chance of leading someone if you can’t identify with them or show them that you’re listening to them and that you understand them. I certainly wouldn’t be interested in being led by someone who doesn’t know me, doesn’t understand what I’m trying to achieve, or have dissimilar ideas as I do, so I wouldn’t expect anyone else to want to be led by me either, if I’m not able to do the same.
Much like the last exercise, I think this is one I’m going to continue doing for the next few weeks. I still feel like it’s a skill I’m weak at, at best. I can imagine a version of me that is able to identify beliefs quicker and more accurately, but I feel like I’m still weeks away from that.
Write Your Beliefs – Eugene Bible
The Write Your Beliefs exercise, much like the 2 previous exercises (3 Raisins and Inner Monologue), is an exercise in learning how to step outside of yourself and become an observer to your own being.
Whereas the 3 raisins exercise and inner monologue focused more on being a passive observer and just noticing what your mind is experiencing, the Write Your Beliefs exercise felt like I had to become more of an active observer. I had to get more meta about my thoughts and ‘think about thinking.’ I almost felt myself going back to the inner monologue exercise, as I frequently caught myself noting and hearing my inner monologue “talk” about what my beliefs are: “Wait…What’s the belief behind this? Why do I do this? What is my belief that tells me this is the right/normal thing to do? Do most other people believe this too? I wonder if this is a rare belief…Is this even a belief? Does this count as a belief? I’m not sure it does…” From that perspective of observing myself, it really felt like this exercise had built on the last two.
In general, as someone who has lived abroad for one third of my life, I taught myself to be hyper-conscious of my own actions and always question my own beliefs and whether they are typical for where I am. The smallest, almost insignificant beliefs or actions in another culture can be highly disrespectful, which I learned the hard way. Because of this hyper-sensitivity and always-questioning attitude towards my own actions and beliefs, the beliefs I wrote down were generally unsurprising to me, though I have never taken the time to write them down before and found the act of writing them all in one place to be really interesting. To have so many of your beliefs all just written out on paper made me feel somewhat exposed and self-conscious. I found myself thinking “What if someone reads this? What will they think of me?” It felt like I was really exposing a very private part of myself, and that was interesting to me. As fundamental as these are to my everyday life, there is probably not a single person on earth (other than me) that knows all of these about me.
The most compelling part of spending a week writing my beliefs was that the sheet I ended up with ends up representing the core fundamentals of who I am as a person, at least in the present moment. As far as I can think of, there isn’t anything else I’ve ever written, including journals, daily to-do lists, or life trackers that could come close to encompassing all that I am as a person, but I feel like my list of beliefs came close. The beliefs described who I am, the ideas that motivate the actions I make, and even revealed some of my flaws. Some beliefs were ones that were only temporary and felt just because of a particularly emotional moment. Others felt like they were core to who I am and never change. All were, in some way, me.
One lesson that this exercise imparted on me was the difference between values and beliefs. Before doing this exercise, I would not have been able to truly understand the difference between a value and a belief, but I feel like I do now. Whereas a value is a consciously made, fundamental concept that I aspire to embody, a belief is not always something that I have consciously chosen to believe. Whereas I always know what my values are, beliefs can be elusive and hard to identify. For example, I value kindness and respecting other people. That is something that is learned, but also something that I recognize is important and decide to embody. But a belief can be an unconscious, possibly dangerous, assumption, like a belief that classical music is good for you and rap is not (not an actual belief of mine, but a belief that I have heard). I might value and enjoy classical music, but if I believe that rap is bad for you and am not careful, my actions or words might easily offend someone. I recognize that beliefs and values are not necessarily mutually exclusive and can deeply affect each other, as well. I even found that sometimes my beliefs were opposite of my values, which was a valuable realization.
The value that I got from this exercise was surprisingly deep. Learning to recognize my own beliefs is a skill that, until now, I primarily used as a tool for navigating other cultures or interactions with other people, but this exercise has made me see the value of recognizing beliefs in the application of self-analysis. Only in being honest and transparent with yourself in your beliefs can you have any hope of growing – recognizing your beliefs, good or bad, gives you an opportunity to decide “is this the person I want to be? Does this belief accurately reflect my values and the person I am trying to be in the world?” It gives you a tool to analyze your own actions – to identify the reasons behind good actions in order to reinforce and encourage more of them, while identifying the reasons behind bad actions in order to block them from happening again.
This exercise is one that has felt so compelling, that after just one week of doing it, I feel like I haven’t done enough. I want to write more. I want to find every single one of my beliefs. It may not be realistic or possible, but there is something satisfying in the process of self-discovery and writing them down. I will certainly be continuing to write my beliefs for the coming weeks.
Writing My Inner Monologue: Reflection
The 3rd exercise of Leadership Step By Step is to record your inner monologue a few times a day for a week. Most days I recorded it at least twice, but I also managed to get to it 3 times a day from time to time.
Since it’s not my first time doing this, I knew it was coming, and I’ve already had some practice. I remember the first time I did this exercise, it was surprisingly hard to focus on the monologue itself. I would get too involved in the “thinking about thinking” instead of just writing what my mind was blabbering on about. For example, I’d end up writing “I’m thinking about how hard it is to write as fast as I think” instead of “Wow, it’s really hard to write all my thoughts. By the time I’m done writing a sentence, my mind is already thinking about the next one. Wait what was the next thing I thought?!”
This time it was much smoother. I knew to just relax, stop “trying” and just let the mind wander. As before, my mind would do a lot of commenting on whatever was happening in the moment. “Hey, there’s a red car passing by. They don’t live here. I wonder where they’re going.” or “There’s my dog. She’s looking for food again. She’s putting her head on my lap. Should I give her something?” Another trend I noticed was that my mind would almost become self conscious about itself “recording” itself. A lot of times I just would feel like “I don’t know what to think about. My mind is blank. Well…Not blank. Since it’s thinking this right now…But not thinking of anything important or significant. Is this really worth writing?” And I did notice that sometimes my mind would go blank for longer periods of time. Times when there was no inner monologue, not even a “Blank! Blank! My mind is blank!”
I often tried to give myself a topic to think about so I wouldn’t just be writing the exact same narrations of what is happening around me: “Let’s think about that thing that happened today…It really made me feel disrespected. I don’t know why they had to say that like that, and why I couldn’t just speak up and tell them so…” I almost felt like I didn’t want to waste “thinking time” and be sure it was “productive”, which was an interesting realization in itself, and possibly speaks to an unnecessary desire or habit I have to try to “optimize” everything, sometimes to a fault.
Overall, I feel like the thoughts I had during this exercise were probably pretty typical. I think that most people would be inclined to just think about what’s happening around them, or about how they can’t think of what to think at the moment, but I will be really interested to read others’ essays.
The exercise didn’t feel profound or lead to any incredible realizations, but I think the exercise is a great practice to have regularly. The ability to just open the fire hydrant of your mind and let it just release all of its thoughts onto a piece of paper and clear all the messy, disorganized, and rambling thoughts out is almost a form of therapy. For this exercise, I never wrote more than 10 sentences or so each time, but in the past, to relax, I’ve taken an entire 8.5×11” sheet of paper and just filled the whole thing with exactly these kinds of thoughts. My mental state afterwards is always more focused after I’ve let all the random thoughts out.
I also hope that doing this exercise leads me to higher levels of self-awareness – by being aware of what I’m thinking, it gives me a meta look into my own brain. It allows me to step back from myself and almost look at my own thoughts from a distance and evaluate whether I agree with what I’m saying or thinking. In a way, it creates a second layer of “me,” which I think can be a very useful tool for staying calm and level-headed. I anticipate that in future exercises when you must learn to lead yourself, it will become a critical skill to have.
3 Raisins
The next exercise of Leadership Step By Step was to eat 3 raisins. This seemed simple enough, but there were a few conditions that made it a deeper exercise than it seems. The exercise required that you turned off your phone, and then fully engage all of your senses to focus on the raisin and eat it as if you’ve never seen or eaten anything like it before: touch it and focus on the feel of the raisin, take in it’s aroma, even listen to how it sounds as you squeeze it or as you chew it. When I really engaged every sense to experience the raisins, eating just 3 raisings became a whole new experience that took me about 20 minutes to finish!
For this exercise, I chose a unique way to approach each raisin from the start. For the first, I would consume it in miniscule bits. For the second, I would put the whole raisin in my mouth at once. For the last, I would put the whole raisin in my mouth, then hold it for as long as I could before breaking the skin.
I sat down at my dining table, phone on airplane mode and silent, with 3 raisins set in front of me. I picked up the first raisin and felt the bumpy texture on the outside, gave it a small squeeze, and started rolling it around in my fingers, noticing how crisp and flakey it was at first, but as I rolled it around between my fingers, it softened into a small juicy morsel. I then took the tiniest bite from one end and started to chew the tiny bit between my front teeth. I noticed how the texture was a little grainy, but the taste was sweet and tangy and I could feel the sourness hitting the back-right side of my tongue. The piece was so tiny and after being chewed I barely had to swallow. I went for a second tiny bite, searching and trying to find if there are more hidden experiences within the raisin that I hadn’t noticed yet. What could I experience that I haven’t yet?
If I were to write the experience of each bite and each raisin, this essay would probably end up being about 10 pages, so I’ll just give a short list of thoughts and things I noticed from my raisins:
The depth of flavor – I felt like in different bites, I noticed something different. Sweetness, fruitiness, a spiciness (cinnamon maybe??), and a tangy-ness that really outlasts the raisin. Half an hour after finishing, I still had a sour tang on the back of my tongue!
The feel – raisins can be solid, hard, flakey, crispy, dry, or juicy, plump, soft, and tender. And sometimes all at once, after enough gentle massaging!
The sounds – as I chewed on different bits of raisins, some were more grainy and I could hear crunching in my ears, sometimes slightly unpleasantly, but other times, very satisfyingly.I’m sure there were many more thoughts I had as well that I can no longer remember. It really was surprising how many things you can think about just 3 little raisins.
Not all of the experiences I had were directly from the raisins either! There were a few things that happened during the exercise that really had me thinking about how we experience the world every day. During my experiencing of the second raisin, the air raid alarm in our neighborhood went off (they test them about once a month). Normally, I don’t bat an eye, but as I was so focused on my raisin, trying to activate all of my senses, the moment the alarm went off, it felt so loud and so disruptive my whole body jumped! It made me think about how often I am usually just kind of sleepwalking through my days, not 100% focused on what I’m doing.
The last significant thing I noticed during the experiment was how much I started paying attention to my own body, in particular my own heart rate. As I focused hard on my experience of the raisins, suddenly I could feel my heart pounding throughout my body. In my arms, in my chest, in my neck, and in my ears, I realized that if I’m calm and focused on the present, my heartbeat is this powerful, ever-present life-force in my body that I couldn’t believe I don’t notice in my usual life.
The value I gained from this exercise is more than you’d ever think you could get from simply eating 3 little raisins. It was an incredible, meditative experiment in sensory exploration, self-awareness, and living in the present.
My SIDCHA – Eugene Bible
I spent the week coming up with as many SIDCHAs as I could. I asked many people for suggestions as well! In the end, I brought it down to a list of 3 SIDCHAs that I think would be personally very satisfying if I were to accomplish:
I will do one piano exercise every day.
I will read for 10 minutes every day.
I will compliment one person every day.Doing any one of these would be an amazing improvement to my daily life. It’s almost impossible for me to pick one, so I think I’m going to just let it happen naturally: choose one at random and see how it goes, knowing I can always switch later! Here is my SIDCHA statement:
I am doing a SIDCHA in personal development and emotional health: I will do one piano exercise every day.
Despite knowing that playing the piano or violin makes my whole day feel “right,” I too rarely take the time to practice, especially piano. I think this SIDCHA will help center me emotionally every day and balance out any stress in my day.
Personal Essay – Eugene Bible
The term “leadership” means different things to different people. To some, it’s merely a position at work, granted by some higher authority. To others, it’s the first step to changing the world.
Most (if not all) of the major changes that have come to modern society happened at least partially due to having leaders who were able to rally people to a cause and effect change. Leadership done poorly looks like coercion, compulsion, oppression, intimidation, or harassment (I actually don’t think of this as leadership at all really, but to some, that is what it can mean). Leadership done well leads to progress, people feeling supported and empowered, and true growth and change. Some of the greatest leaders gave us basic human rights, equality, freedom, and much more. To me, leadership is the first step to changing your world for the better.
As a young boy, to say I was shy would be a grand understatement. I couldn’t talk to anyone I didn’t already know well and feel comfortable with. I certainly couldn’t talk to girls, and as a burgeoning teenager, that just wouldn’t do. In my mid-teens, I spent years learning how to be “well liked.” I read books on body language, having conversations, relating to others so they feel like you’re listening, and how to make them feel understood. I studied stand-up comedians tirelessly, figuring they are a group of people who have to go up on stage, seem down-to-earth, and make everyone in the crowd feel comfortable enough to laugh at jokes within seconds. After years of practice, I achieved my goal. By 18, I could be the life of the party. I could be surrounded by 10 people listening to me ad lib on whatever I felt like talking about, with everyone laughing. I can still recall the voices of friends telling everyone else “Eugene is SO funny!!!” I loved the attention and being in the spotlight.
At some point, the excitement of knowing how to steal the spotlight died – I no longer felt any need to be so attention-seeking and I had gained a lot of confidence from that experience. But 20 years later, I realize that recently I don’t want to just be likable. Being likable and having lots of friends is fine, but having lots of friends doesn’t change the world. I want people’s lives to be better for having had me in it. I want to have more of an impact on those around me than just being a nice person to talk to. It’s time to focus instead on leadership.
I’m now reading Joshua Spodek’s Leadership Step By Step with a new goal in mind: to gain the skills in leading others – to learn how to help people search within themselves and motivate them to want to change for the better. To help them realize their vision and help guide them and show them the path to achieve. To help them make their world better.
In my current life, I have several semi-leadership roles in my life. I work as a project manager for water utility projects – I need to be able to lead field crews, engineers working for me, administrative assistants, all with a goal to complete a project. At home, I am a husband and a father – I need to be able to offer direction, stability, guidance, and partnership to my wife and children. I am a podcast host and advocate for sustainable living – I need to be able to help others find their reasons to live healthier and happier lives through sustainability. There is no area of my life where improved leadership skills wouldn’t help.
My current leadership skills are not non-existent – there are certainly some parallels between leading and connecting with others and being likable, but my leadership skills are certainly not as strong as I want them to be. I find that in leading others, empathy, assertiveness, and strong listening skills are key, and I try to remember that at all times. On the contrary, telling others my own opinions, telling others what they “should” do, and trying to “prove” I’m right are all prime examples of things I’ve learned not to do when trying to lead, though admittedly, I find myself doing them all-too-often anyway and thinking to myself that it’s time for change.
So this has brought me here. The value I hope to gain from these exercises is a new abundance of tools to help me communicate better, guide others, and become a person others want to follow.