INsight/ The Leaders Journey

Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash

Manila, 9 September 2020 —  Are you walking or talking?

The leader’s journey is long and challenging. It changes how you look at yourself and the world around you. 

People have their own reason for joining, seeing it as a journey worth taking. What they share is an expectation to learn, grow, and level up. And also to bring others along and generate better outcomes together. 

Some people describe the leader’s journey as a marathon, and others as a game of golf. There’s value in both those metaphors. 

As for me, I like to describe it as a pilgrimage. Here is how that looks.

Preparing

You want to go somewhere meaningful, so you choose a pilgrimage that others have taken before you and have written about.

Your preparations matter. You know that you can take only a small backpack. For sure, you will bring all-weather travel gear, a notebook, and a pen.

You know that preparation, while important, contributes only a small part of what you will learn from walking the journey. Let’s say it’s 10%.

Practice 

Starting off, you realize that the journey is going to be a special experience, yet you don’t know how it will work out for you. You will only find out by doing it, by entering into the daily practice of walking.

The practice is the reason why you do the pilgrimage. There is no other way. You want to discover new realities, expand your mindset, and your experiences.

After a few days, as the initial enthusiasm fades, the pains start and the going gets tough.

You keep going…

Eventually, you challenge your beliefs about your limits, about what you can and cannot do, and about what is truly worth doing. 

As you make progress, you realize how your views of your world change. It’s what you see around you, and what you learn to see in your mind.

What’s really important to you changes, and some of what you thought was important fades to the background.

You keep walking. And you realize that it’s the challenge itself that contributes most of what you will gain. A full 70% of it.

People

At the rest stops along the way, you meet other people. Discussions with them help you make sense of your experience. Your personal reflection time helps, and so do the conversations with others.

With every passing day, you learn to discern who is merely interested in the journey and those who are actually on the journey like you: those who have taken on the challenge and walk every day. 

It’s a joy to walk together with others who have the same commitment to practice as you have. Sharing experiences turns out to be a fountain of insights to learn from. Unexpected wisdom is found in the words of some.

From time to time you also meet people at the dinner table who have been on the journey longer than you. You develop a habit of asking them to share a story from their experience.

Frequently, they oblige, with a smile. And often you find nuggets of gold to reflect on.

On the other hand, you find that you’re devoting less of your precious time and energy with people who just talk about the journey but aren’t doing the daily practice of walking.

Then you find that some of the people you’ve met along the way are turning into positive and negative role models for you and your leadership growth.

And each day, early in the morning, the ones you meet at breakfast are the walkers who, Iike you, are getting ready to start the next stretch of the journey, the next challenge.

End and Beginning

Every day on the journey, you rediscover how important it is to make time to reflect on your experience, and to share experience and feedback with your fellow travelers.

This helps you make sense of it all, of what it means for you to be on the journey. That contributes the remaining 20% of your growth from being on the journey.

By the time you reach the endpoint, you have realized how life itself is a daily pilgrimage. Your journey isn’t over. Rather, it has just started.

Every morning, the journey continues, and every evening it’s time to reflect. The essence is how you walk as a leader every day, how you practice.

It’s my privilege to coach and train leaders who decide to walk this journey, this pilgrimage. Almost often, their journey is to navigate a challenging transition in their career.

Additionally, #Grow3Leaders, our international and cross-generational community of leaders, offers leaders a place to experience a pilgrimage. To walk the leader’s journey every day, focused on practice and learning together with others.

The choice to walk — to practice effective leadership behaviors and share our experience out loud — is the challenge each of us faces every day.

In a world full of busy people who are overwhelmed with information, it’s reassuring that knowledge and training will only contribute 10% to your leadership growth. And there are many places to go to get knowledge.

What matters most, and contributes 70%, is learning from practice with a challenge. We offer that, for exactly that reason.

Finally, it’s by Collab-orating with fellow ‘walkers’ on your self-selected challenge — to influence a positive change in your workplace — that you get the remaining 20%.

As the saying goes, there is a difference between talking and walking the talk.

In that regard, #Grow3Leaders is definitely not for everyone interested in growing their leadership. It’s for those who are prepared to start and keep walking, in good company.

Like on a pilgrimage, joining is free of charge—not free of commitment. Check out the link or message me on LinkedIn.

Postscript: In describing how you grow as a leader in the pilgrimage, I referred to the 70-20-10 rule of leadership development. What book or story about making a pilgrimage has inspired you most? For me, it’s The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho.