A Tale of Three Breakthroughs
You only lead as powerfully as you live. What if you don't need to know the answer, you just need feedback? How shifts in language become embodied shifts.
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I.
Maybe how you show up as a leader is mostly determined by how you show up in your life.
A mentor recently shared what he tells new clients as they kickoff coaching: “most of the coaching happens in between sessions.”
What he means is that the benefits of coaching aren’t earned in coaching sessions. The benefits come from how you show up in your life as a result of coaching. If you really want a coaching engagement to be a 10/10, you’ve got to commit to showing up fully in your life outside of sessions.
What if the same is true for us as coaches and leaders?
I recently interviewed my friend Elisa Haggarty on her podcast, and I played with this idea: “Our coaching is as powerful as we are honoring our aliveness in our lives.” The video below starts at that section:
My experience is that if I show up to coach and I haven’t been honoring truth and aliveness in my life, the coaching almost always suffers. But if I walk into a coaching session and I’m in integrity and have been honoring my truth and aliveness, the coaching is reliably magic.
I believe this is true for most things in life, especially leadership. If you show up to lead from a life where you are wildly out of integrity with yourself, your leadership will suffer. Things will be hard and results will be sub-optimal. But if you show up to lead from a life where you are living in integrity, truth, and aliveness, I’m willing to bet you are naturally and easefully showing up as an inspiring and empowering leader.
I’m not one for overdone quotes, but I think there’s something to “How you do anything is how you do everything.” Or put another way:
You only lead as powerfully as you live.
II.
What if you don’t need to know the answers, you just need to reach out for feedback?
For most of my life I’ve hated feedback. Or rather, for most of my life I’ve been terrified of feedback and avoided it like the plague, then put on a brave face when it was thrust upon me.
Feedback seemed to exist solely to ignite my inner critic and send me into a ball of defensiveness, self-loathing, and shame.
Recently, that all changed for me.
I was catching up with a new friend who just went through the Conscious Leadership Group’s integrity bootcamp. As we wrapped the call, she asked: “How can I support you?”
I surprised myself with the first thing that came up. An inner voice whispered, “ask her for feedback.”
Surprise! Fear! Was I going mad, thinking to ask a new acquaintance to exchange feedback on our first meeting?
Well, I did. Amidst the fear, I outed myself: “I’m scaring myself with this, and, would you be willing to exchange feedback?”
She agreed, and her feedback rocked me in the best way: “I’m averse to the uncertainty. I see you orienting toward all of the uncertainty instead of moving ahead in your power.”
It hit me, and a bubble burst. There was curiosity, and also surprisingly: Joy. Excitement. I could see the truth in her statement, and the simplicity of what I needed: orient toward what I want instead of fixating on the uncertainty of it all.
Such a gift.
Since then, I’ve been in a love affair with feedback for the first time in my life. I’ve been asking for it from friends, clients, new acquaintances. And I’ve got a theory as to why.
I deeply value freedom. And one of the biggest experiences of freedom for me is momentum. It’s to be moving toward what I want in life, unburdened and unstuck. But I get stuck, a lot. And the feedback from that conversation got me unstuck so quickly.
Which brings me to an idea that’s been forming for me around stuckness, feedback, and the belief that we’re supposed to have all of the answers:
I’d guess that about 98% of the time I’m stuck, it’s because I don’t have an answer and I believe that I should. As a result of that belief, I get stuck in inaction and self-criticism.
These recent experiences with feedback have illuminated another possibility: what if every time I feel stuck and believe that I should know the answer, what I actually most need is feedback? That there’s a possibility that instead of sitting in inner criticism and shame, I could just reach out to a trusted partner for their perspective and quickly break through?
There’s a pervasive myth that when we become leaders, we’re supposed to have all of the answers. But do great leaders really have all of the answers? Or is it that they ask for support and feedback when they feel stuck?
III.
There is a world of difference between “have to” or “should” and “want to”.
It’s pretty common in coaching to flag language like “should” or “have to” and explore shifting to “get to” or “want to”.
For many years I appreciated these simple shifts, and also judged them as linguistic tricks with minor, if varying, effectiveness.
Two recent experiences have shown me that these shifts can also operate in a deeply embodied way.
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First. I was on a coaching mastermind call. I was celebrating some wins and lamenting the impatience I felt as doors were opening but moving slowly toward my desired end.
My mentor Dave Kashen challenged me with two simple questions:
“What’s wrong with impatience?”
This wasn’t unexpected. I had already explored this to some degree. I knew there were gifts in my impatience. But there was still something I didn’t like about it.
“Ooo, I’m suffering. That’s it! The suffering is the problem.” I thought.
Now we were getting somewhere good. Suffering is the enemy! We need to dissolve that suffering, of course! That’s what we’re here for!
I shared with Dave, “I’m causing myself suffering with it.” To which Dave responded:
“And what’s wrong with suffering?”
Woah. What? Of course there’s something wrong with suffering. Suffering is the enemy! We’re coaches on this spiritual path to end suffering, aren’t we?!
And just like that I heard an inner voice, sad and defeated: “I don’t want to suffer.”
I outed it, and just like that something released. My body softened. I felt spacious. The suffering was gone.
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Second. I’ve been asking for a lot of help recently. My business has gone through a downturn, and I’ve been using that to create a better business engine and expand my business to be even more aligned.
Some days this asking feels exciting and meaningful, and some days it feels scary, shameful, and a voice in my head tells me that needing to ask for help means I’ve failed.
As I was digging into it, I discovered a new root: in that moment I was telling myself that I had to ask. I felt like a victim of my circumstance, of my “failure”, and that I was obligated to ask, as if asking was a punishment for my shortcomings.
But also… I want to be asking. I want to be growing my business. I want to be connecting with people. I want to get and give support from my people and bask in the beautiful connection and partnership that creates.
As I felt through this wanting, my system shifted. There was still fear present, but it was quickly being overcome by a surge of excitement.
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For me, these stories demonstrate the embodied shift that’s possible by shifting from “have to/should” to “want to”.
Sure, it can be a simple linguistic trick. And it can also be an embodied shift, a move from victim, to-me mentality to creator, by-me mentality.
In the first story, making suffering a problem was actually keeping me suffering. I was in resistance, believing I needed to fix something. The moment I ceased to make it a problem and faced “I don’t want to suffer”, I was able to let go of all of the ways I was making myself suffer. It happened nearly instantly, all from shifting from “I shouldn’t be suffering” to “I don’t want to suffer.”
In the second, “I have to ask” was coming from obligation, victimhood, and generated feelings of shame and stories of failure. Acknowledging the fundamental reality of “I want to” allowed me to drop all of that and tap into an embodied sense of vision and excitement. All from changing a couple of words.
Which has me thinking:
Maybe the difference between fear and excitement lies in the simple difference between “have to” and “want to”.
With love and until next time,
Justin
If you enjoy reading the Leadership Lab, consider clicking the ❤️ or 🔄 button above so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏. It would mean the world to me.
I completely agree with your thoughts! Thank you for sharing this piece!