What if leading well is really about learning and behind learning is unconditional love?
‘Love’ is a word that can mean everything and nothing, a word that can be dismissed as soft, abstract, hippy and woo woo, especially when it comes to leading. What if it is the most vital ingredient for us living and leading well?
If really leading and living, is about acting on what matters most to us — be it with and for people, purpose, principles or a combination of all of these — that requires courage, which often involves choosing what feels right over what would feel easy.
That courage to live and lead for the sake of what really matters for us involves a leap of faith that we may not always land. And when we don’t quite land or the decision we made did not go to plan, we are presented with the option of learning and going again (or not going again depending on what we learn) or withdrawing. To choose to learn is another act of courage and behind that courage is love.
Not the Hollywood love but the love that is the fuel for learning, that recognises our worth and dignity if we fall as much as our worth if we fly.
Carl Rogers used the term unconditional positive regard. For him it was one of the three key ingredients to a relationship that enables someone to grow (genuineness and congruence were the others).
For me this is unconditional love.
The unconditionality required to really allow us to learn, to accept things will not all go to plan, that we are human, or in the moment to accept we got it wrong, we are scared or it is difficult and painful, but amid all that we are still worthy of positive regard. It echoes the performance principle of blaming the problem and not the person, which builds on the idea of positive regard: we have unlimited potential so what are the conditions that enable us to realise that?
Learning, which is core to the process of living and leading well (learning from the steps we take, reflecting on what went well, what we would do differently, how did what we do compare to what we hoped it would achieve?), benefits from the openness that comes from love, from unconditional positive regard.
The more open we are to both what is not going well as well as what is (and we often have a bias to the negative, hence the importance of positive in unconditional positive regard) the deeper and more effective the learning as we see what is really getting in the way.
In fact love can be seen in Tim Gallwey’s famous formula
Performance = potential - interference
We have written about the 2 selves that Gallwey talks about, how the Teller Self 1 interferes the natural, non-judgemental potential of Self 2, who intuits, learns and refines. Self 1 is characterised by judgement and in doing so acts not from a space of unconditional positive regard, which is essential for Self 2 to learn, to intuit, to be allowed to be in flow.
Love strikes me as something we all long for in life and something we can give ourselves, and in doing so enable us to live and lead for the sake of what really matters to us and to be our best.
However the abstractness of love can make it hard to know where to start. Perhaps this is where the idea of unconditional positive regard is most useful. What if to lead well is to start by loving ourselves, bringing unconditional positive regard to how we see us and what we do, and to act from a place of unconditional positive regard?
Brene Brown talks about how she learnt the value of considering us and others from the perspective that we are doing the best we can. In holding this perspective we will see others with unconditional positive regard. If we had unconditional positive regard for ourselves what would that enable? If we had it for others, what would then be possible?
All this is not to say that challenge is not part of love. Kim Scott’s idea of Radical Candor comes to mind: care personally and challenge directly. Unconditional positive regard is seeing the positive potential in ourselves and others and challenge us to be that potential, to take responsibility, and with taking responsibility we come back to learning and back to love.
For to learn is to take responsibility and it is easier to take responsibility when we regard ourselves positively and unconditionally, that is with love.
When we take responsibility, we can ask ourselves the challenging questions and be open to the honest answers: If we are holding ourselves with unconditional positive regard, what do we really need to thrive, to live and lead in a way that enables what matters most to us?
Why not just call it unconditional positive regard then?
If you told yourself, with real meaning and conviction, that you loved yourself, how would you feel?
What if you said, with equal meaning and conviction, I unconditionally positively regard myself?
While unconditional positive regard offers a useful blueprint of where to start and an approach to take love is a feeling and an experience that carries a weight that unconditional positive regard cannot. Embracing the idea of love strikes me as an act of unconditional positive regard and love, it is to know that it is okay to lead with love, to live with love, that I do not have to use a technical term because the concept of love can mean and invoke so much from others.
So what if to lead is to learn to learn which in turn is to learn to love unconditionally, starting with ourselves?
If you unconditionally loved yourself, what becomes possible?
How would you be living and leading?
What is the thing you need to learn that unconditional love makes possible for you to learn, that will make the biggest difference for what matters to you?
What world would we create if leading was seen as an act of unconditional loving?
References
Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
Carl Rogers, Becoming a Person
Tim Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis
