As I read Donna Farhi's Bringing Yoga to Life, I've reflected on how much my yoga practice over the last 18 years has helped to shape my leadership practice. Also, I've reflected on how much leadership is about setting goals and celebrating when we achieve these goals. But vision setting seems to miss the opportunity to celebrate and enjoy the day to day work and how much this work impacts our potential to reach these goals. During the change process, I wonder if it is too easy for us as leaders to keep our eyes set on the end and we avoid what is hard about focusing on the process.
Embrace what is uncomfortable:
My yoga practice has taught me to embrace the positions that are most uncomfortable and hardest to pay attention to. The best way to remain in an uncomfortable position is to breathe. We can learn a lot from this concept of breathing into the most uncomfortable situations during a change. Find those places where resistance exists--listen, engage and BREATH!
Stay in the moment
In yoga, it is easy to focus on the challenging posture that we just accomplished or worry about the difficult posture we are about to do. When I'm distracted in my yoga practice, my current pose is messy, or I fall out and get frustrated with myself. It is so easy to worry about the past or the future, and then we disrupt our focus on the present. Similarly, in leadership, it is so easy to become distracted during our individual conversations and lose the opportunity to use those conversations as an opportunity to strengthen trust, talk about the change, or improve a relationship. It's common to avoid hard conversations with those who are most resistant to change. While it is essential to support earlier adopters, we need to engage with those who are ambivalent, resistant and undecided. Communication is as much about listening and acknowledging feelings as it is adjusting and tweaking based on
We learn when we fall
Just this morning as we were in airplane pose, my yoga teacher commented, "you should get extra points for falling." Now obviously there is no such thing as point scoring in yoga, but I appreciated the comment to continue to grow our pose and not worry about tipping over. In leadership, there are so many opportunities to pull back our values and avoid specific topics, and then we look back and wonder why the change was not as successful as we hoped. When we are in the middle of the change, it's important to stretch ourselves and others. We need to be fearless to make mistakes.
As leaders, much our work is to keep our eyes on the future, but focusing too much on the future can prevent us from enjoying the pleasures of the process. Just as in gardening, as the quote describes, there is so much to celebrate in the work that we do to reach our goals.
