Manage to Engage

Having a vision as a leader is one thing, but successful leaders need to inspire others to invest in that vision as well. To do that, you need to prove to them – through words as well as actions – that your vision serves their own best interest. Feeling as if you know what’s best for others can be uncomfortable at first, but it must be embraced. As long as you believe in what you are doing (and al...

Life has a way of putting us right up against the change we require, but it doesn’t make us any less resistant to adopting it. You have a choice: resist or learn. In order to become who you want to be, you have to look hard and realize who you are not. When we see the stories of great leaders, it feels as if they knew what they were doing all along – why else would they take such crazy risks in th...

What’s holding you back from making the change necessary to step into your truest expression of self? Being our true selves sounds great, but most of us don’t live that way. Making change requires parts of our current self to cease, and those parts will fear and resist the change. Facing your destiny can be a scary prospect, but we often see the biggest growth on the other side of fear. I’d love y...

Leaders tend to want their outsides to change without having to change themselves. But the truth is you cannot become a leader without change. Being a leader – the kind that truly inspires people to follow – requires becoming a better version of you. And part of that change is creating a different relationship with authority and instruction. I’d love your feedback. Click here to leave a rating &am...

The first step of personal growth is the willingness to look at anything (and everything) within yourself. Anything you refuse to look at is only going to create internal division. Facing your weaknesses is a very difficult thing to do, but it’s something you become better at with time. Look for opportunities in your everyday life to reveal parts of yourself, and you’ll only grow stronger for it....

Some types get a bad reputation due to the worst parts of them, especially in certain cultures. We have to look at the shadow side of ourselves and realize how those actually become our strengths. But that takes finding the courage to closely examine those shadows, deeply understand them, and find out where you stand. Most of the problems we face in life – regardless of what our enneagram type is...

We’re going to delve back into the enneagram this week. We started this journey by looking at and identifying the best parts of ourselves. Then we took an uncomfortable look at the dark, shadowy parts. The truth may set you free, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be difficult to look at. That’s why we’ll be exploring courage – the courage it takes to embrace emotional discomfort, and how we’re condit...

 Hiring the right people means beginning with the end in mind. You have to work backwards from the qualities you want in an employee and create questions that will reveal those qualities in your candidates. This is where curiosity comes in. If you are not genuinely curious about who your candidates really are, you will never find the person you are looking for. This is a skill that takes practice...

The governing power of hiring is curiosity. It’s essential for finding out what drives people, and knowing that is critical in making the right hire. Part of being curious means being prepared to ask difficult questions. Interviews should be uncomfortable. When you’re hiring for someone who’s coachable, honesty is key. They need to be open about their weaknesses and their flaws, and driven to impr...

When hiring, we’re looking for qualities that you can’t get just by training. We subconsciously hire people who are less capable than us because we feel threatened, or we hire people who have the skills that we could train for, but that we just don’t want to. Ideally, we should hire those who could become equal to (or better than) us, but just haven’t been managed well enough to get there yet. Can...

I recently shared the difference between management and supervision. But how does that play out in the hiring process? Supervision is based on content; not context. You look at their surface level skills and rapport with you instead of the context of who they are going to become when they work with you. If you want to hire effectively you have to be present, and, in order to be present, you can’t...

What does it mean to live a spiritual life? Recognizing the fact that you do not always know what’s good for you. The spiritual path can often be confusing, but it’s pointing you in the right direction. We need to find the edge of where exact clarity and total abandon meet, taking your dreams, ambitions, and purpose and, at the same time, letting it go. The mind can’t grasp this – it’s a paradox....

When things get difficult, the ego will steer us away from our next step or halt us completely. Religion often promises spiritual experiences without the difficulties, but that ends up being a false promise. The path to spirituality is one that can only be experienced firsthand. It’s a journey into the unknown. It requires us to get out of our own way and to trust the outcome. I’d love your feedba...

Humans have the unique ability to live out of harmony with their own nature. We have free will, which allows us to deny our own needs – even though we can’t escape the consequences that come along with it. The downsides of repressing our own needs can come out in the form of resentment, anger, passive-aggression, or even cancer. This becomes even more difficult to manage when we realize that we do...

In this episode, we talk about spirituality – what it is and isn’t. One of the topics we are most conflicted about in life, spirituality sits right alongside money, sex, love, power, and death. And like those, it is widely misunderstood. Part of that comes from a misunderstanding of self-interest and the role it plays in our lives. We’re taught from an early age that self-interest is bad, and inte...

At the root of the conflict between supervision and management is the issue of power. People are subconsciously afraid of their own power and therefore want to be supervised. And those who are in management positions, knowing that the people below them can do everything they can become threatening to their sense of power. We all have those voices inside of us. But that’s just the ego, and we can’t...

Now we know the difference between supervision and management, and how falling into the trap of supervision prevents us from doing the strategic work that will truly grow your organization. If you catch yourself supervising, don’t defend the action—do something about it. It’s not hard to figure out what you need to do. It’s not even that hard to find the time to do it. What’s holding most people b...

The employee mindset—or default human nature—is to exert the lowest amount of effort possible to accomplish the task at hand. If you show someone that every time they drop the ball you’ll be there to catch it, then they’re not likely to get any better at catching—let alone stepping up for more responsibility. When you build a culture of supervision, the result is that you begin dragging down each...

Supervision and management are often used interchangeably, but I’m going to make the argument for why that couldn’t be more wrong. Supervision means, quite literally, to oversee. In action, that typically means making sure the people who already know what they’re supposed to do, do it. That’s not a great use of time, though it is occasionally necessary. Management, on the other hand, is about deve...

You have a choice. In every moment of your life, you choose how to react. That’s how we started discussing the idea of excuses, a few lessons back, and to some, that thought is terrifying. Even continuing to live every day is a choice. Instead of being terrified by the idea, let the power to choose empower you. If you want to, you can choose to make your life better. No more excuses. This episode...

Excuses aren’t all bad news. As we explored last week, the areas in which we make excuses are likely the areas we don’t want to look at. If we use that to our advantage, tracking what we make excuses around can be one of the most powerful tools we can use to reclaim our power. This episode was originally recorded as part of the Claiming Self-Authority course , available at ClearandOpen.com . I’d l...

What is an excuse, really? Making an excuse comes down to denying your role in an outcome. If you had the ability to respond to a situation in any way, whether you did or not, you had a hand in that outcome. To deny that is to make excuses. We always have a choice. And if we’re refusing to acknowledge our choices, there’s likely a choice we’ve made that we don’t want to look at. That’s where the o...

It’s quite easy to say “don’t make excuses.” Obvious, even. But it’s one thing to say something, another to know how to do it, and something else entirely to actually apply it to your life. Knowing something is not being something. Making excuses (or not) is a moment-to-moment decision – one you have to make every day for the rest of your life. You never stop deciding, but you can get better at no...

Gaining mastery is a slow process. As much as we’d love a hyper-focused training montage across a week or a month that leaves us at our goal, in reality, mastery requires slow, methodical application of curiosity. Curiosity is essential no matter what it is you are striving to achieve. The downside – or so it may seem – is that curiosity can often lead to discomfort. But you can’t grow without dis...

Clear communication could solve the majority of problems business leaders face every day. Imagine how much time would be saved if you asked your team to do something, took the time to make sure they understood it effectively, and they got it done on the first try? When you don’t take the time to confirm that something has been properly understood, that time gets wasted exponentially on the back en...