Anyone can be great when life is going smoothly. Anyone can bring a great attitude when things are going your way. But what are you like when things are deteriorating, when plans aren’t going the way you anticipated, when you find yourself on a losing team?
If you’ve never been on a losing team before, you should try it, if for only just one time. It is the most character building, resiliency producing experience you may ever have.
If your marriage is always smooth and life is always good, not much is required of you. Real leaders are developed in moments of difficulty, in determining who they are when things don’t go the way they want them to go.
High school volleyball season is my current teacher on this topic. My daughter is currently on a losing high school volleyball team. It’s been rough, really rough. She is a young woman that has gotten quite accustomed to playing at a very high level of sport. Being on a team that does not share her level of drive to compete at the level she values has been humbling. It has required her with curiosity and purpose to make sense of why she has found herself on this team, at this time, with the gifts, talents, commitment, and determination that she possesses. Watching her experience feels so incredibly familiar to me.
As someone who has a profound passion for the work that I do, I am rarely met by people who can match my level of intensity, drive, commitment, and leadership in the places and spaces that I play. That dissonance is precisely where I get developed. The spread between where I am and where I want a team to be exposes my edge—my edge of patience, my edge of leadership, my edge of discernment, my edge of attachment.
If everyone surrounding me could match me, it would require very little growth, evolution and expansion on my part. It would not require my leadership.
If you find yourself on a losing team and in moments of tension, friction, frustration, and irritability, welcome to the perfect path for your evolution, your growth and your leadership development.
Life is not designed to be comfortable for us all of the time. In fact, comfort leads to gluttony, and gluttony produces very little.
You’re on the planet at this time in the evolution of humanity to rub up against that which feels uncomfortable, such that you expand and grow and extend your capacity into far greater paradigms and far greater influence than you ever could have imagined.
Go beyond feeling comfortable. Get uncomfortable. Find yourself on a losing team, rub up against resistance. You’ll then determine who you really are as a leader.
You don’t need to do it alone—Find out how I support leaders and their organizations through transformational change. Schedule a call with me to talk about how we can wake up and shake up your team
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