Journaling - the leaders vital friend

Leadership is simple, but it is rarely easy. 

Simple because, in Gardner’s words it is, “the ability to create a story that affects the thoughts feelings and actions of others”1; simple, in that it’s about getting from ‘here’ to ‘there’ in any area you want to see change, but challenging in that

it requires all of you to do it. Leadership is for everyone, but it also requires everything from you. 

So, how do you bring everything to the task of leading? We need friends, mentors, therapists, coaches

and books, but we also need ‘inner’ friends as well - friends like meditation, and the regular

making of space in the day. One of the most helpful, but less spoken, friends to the leader is

their journal....that simple book of empty pages, with a cover that makes you want to write

inside it.

Why is a journal such a crucial part of a leaders team, a leaders resourcefulness?

“That’s how the light gets in”

Leonard Cohen says “there’s a crack in everything, that how the light gets in” and the leader is

in constant search of light. They need to see and they need to see clearly. When a leader

writes each day in their journal they are looking for the cracks, tiny openings to give them a

window into clarity. It may start by just writing the narrative of what happened yesterday, or

what is going on in this phase of the leadership, but the leader is looking as they write. As they

write they hear themselves talking and suddenly ‘ah ha…I hadn’t noticed that before…I keep

using the word “weary”…what is it that seems so wearisome when everything is going so well

right now?’

1 Howard Gardner Leading Minds 1995

This article started in my journal. I was working hard and making sense of what is going on in

our organisation right now. It’s maybe the third time in a week that I have written about the

same things. It doesn’t matter. As I write and rewrite I am organising my thoughts, putting

some shape to the chaos each time, trying out whether this perspective is the most accurate

way of seeing things today. Like working the piece of grit in the oyster shell, I keep on

working the narrative of my leadership life to find insight, to find clarity, to find the crack of

light that may illuminate where I’m feeling stuck but just cant properly name right now.

When we lived in South Africa we lived on the edge of a mountain full of vineyards. Each day

that we could, we would walk up that mountain and at certain points we would stop to take in

the view, to get perspective. That’s what journaling is for the leader, a walk up a mountain to

get perspective on their day, this phase of their leadership journey, that meeting this morning,

this oh-so-difficult decision. When we are down in the valley of delivering our leadership

each day is crowded out with so many things, so many emails, decisions, challenges, requests,

tensions, conflicts. The journal acts like a table where we begin by pouring out absolutely

everything onto its surface so we can see it, just as it looks and feels in all its complex

messiness. Journaling is then a process of beginning to sort through what is there and what

belongs where. A good piece of leadership wisdom is “get clear and get others clear” and

journaling is the place within a leaders life where they can invest in searching for clarity.

The hard work miracle

I remember a book I once read about personal and relational transformation - it had this eyecatching

subtitle - “the hard work miracle”. Leadership is a constant search for the

‘miraculous’ in terms of breakthroughs but miracles don’t just fall off trees, they are the result

of much hard work and the leaders journal is one of those places that the hard work is done.

The leader can write out their questions, what’s bugging them, what they know and what they

don’t know. In their journal they can write out everything they are thinking right now, they

can write down what they are feeling, they can write out what they are doing. As they lay out

these narratives and questions and musings they can look at what they are writing and can

hunt down the patterns or spot the assumptions or note the leaps and the omissions in their

logic.

Forging wisdom out of experience

It’s one thing to get a day’s worth of experience, it’s another thing to get a day’s worth of

wisdom. Wisdom is the result of processing the experiences of our leadership journey and

seeking the wisdom from it. Writing down what I did, what went well, what could have gone

better, why did I react the way I did in that situation, what did I learn, is the way to find out

where the wisdom lies. “If we don’t change history, then it will repeat”. This is as true for the

leader as for a nation. Journaling out my history and seeing whether it achieved what I hoped

it would and if it did ‘why’ did it and if it didn’t ‘why’ didn’t it. Socrates said, “the unexamined

life is not worth living” and journaling is how a leader carries out that examination. We often

think of therapy as the place for serious self-examination, and it is, but what lies between

todays experience and paying a therapist to process it? Truthfully, however helpful therapy is

(and it most definitely is and at times is most vital for a leader) the reality is that people aren’t

in therapy for long, generally speaking. So what do we do on a day-to-day basis to live an

examined life? Journal. Journaling is open to every leader every day.

Turning into the wind

You can be sailing along nicely in your leadership journey but you know that you are avoiding

the hard things that have to be addressed. That staffing issue, that attitude issue you bumped

into in someone on your team, that funding issue……you know they need to be faced but its

just more comforting sailing with the wind. Journaling is a way that a leader can turn into the

wind and begin to address the rough waters. By writing down the fact that you are avoiding

something and naming what it is that you are avoiding and why you want to keep on avoiding

it, means that you have actually begun the process of turning the boat into the wind.

Journaling helps you make the turn and it helps you stay tight on the tiller while you address

rough waters. Journaling is a discipline that forces us into a process of self-reflection and a

way of developing some leadership muscle.

Teasing out the threads

When your grandmother wanted to unpick your old sweater she had to start somewhere. The

best place to start was looking for a strand hanging down, a loose thread. Once you pick up

that loose thread then you can begin the slow process of unpicking the rest of the sweater.

Journaling serves the same function. It allows us to pick up a random thought, or concern, or

comment and anxiety, or intuition and to then follow it through to its conclusion. I caught

myself saying to my fellow leaders yesterday that my intuition tells me there was one-piece

missing from our vision planning. A comment like that is a loose thread. It may lead

somewhere or nowhere, but writing the ‘thread’ down and then asking myself “what makes

you think there’s more?” and then jotting down any random idea that comes to mind will lead

me to unpick what else may be hidden. It doesn’t matter if the thread leads somewhere or

nowhere, but it needs to be explored and the journal is an immediate place to begin that

exploration.

Reality testing

All good leaders are realists as well as visionaries and strategists. Regular journaling is a

confrontation with reality. Starting an entry with “so what is actually going on right now?” and

then naming the facts, the feelings and the behaviors that the leader sees in front of them.

“What do we know and what don’t we know” is another testing of reality. Today I wrote out a

quadrant with 4 headings – “delivery”; “sustainability”;” governance”; “opportunity”, so that I

could write down the facts of what was actually going on. How many people had we actually

trained since January this year? Writing down the reality is often sobering, sometimes

difficult. Even noticing how hard it is to confront reality tells me that I’m in danger of avoiding

the truth of a current situation and if I avoid the truth then everything that follows will be

inaccurate. Journaling is also great for reality testing our own thinking. You might start an

entry with “everything seems to be coming apart right now” or “nothing seems to be moving

forwards”. Journaling allows you to then reality check those statements by asking yourself in

your journal “so what exactly isn’t working out?”….and then list them. What this writing down

of reality achieves is it stops the leader from making conclusions based on fear or pure

emotion rather than facts or evidence. Journaling is like doing one phase of CBT (Cognitive

Behavioral Therapy), on yourself.

Confronting the shadow

Every day it is likely that the leader will face unwanted or unexpected feelings. Waking up

with a sense of dread that seemed to come from nowhere, for no reason; a meeting where you

found yourself bored or irritated by a colleague on a subject that should have interested you

greatly, a surprising roughness in the way you answered a colleagues innocent question, a

fear of inadequacies. A journal is the first place for the leader to confront themselves, to look

themselves in the mirror. The one place that they can go to straight after that difficult meeting

and start journaling about what they were feeling. As the leader writes, they are facing their

own shadow. We all have a shadow and that shadow is never benign or innocent. That

shadow is exerting as much influence through us as leaders as the nicer, more welcome parts

of ourselves.

It is clear that a leaders insecure ego can have multiple effects on the people and the

organisation that they lead. Their need to lead, their need for praise, to be right, to be seen as

an expert, to be loved by all, to be macho, to be conciliatory, to be the best, the first, to be seen,

to be understood…..the ego is embedded in our shadow. The ego doesn’t want to be seen and

most of all it doesn’t want to change. But change it must if the leader is to continue to lead

with integrity. When I sat down after a talk I was giving the other evening I felt unhappy with

myself, the talk I’d given and the way I’d answered some questions. It was a prime

opportunity to wake up the next day and head straight to my journal. “What was going on last

night …..” I would begin to write. Facing down my own shadow was the necessary work

of that morning and that work could begin without waiting for any team or therapist…it could

start right there with my journal.

A free coaching session

A coach asks questions; lots of questions. The reason for this is to raise the coachees

awareness of what is going on in the situation they are exploring or the challenge they are

facing. Once they have some new insight they can then create some new options for action.

The most frequently used coaching model around the world is called the TGROW model. It

structures a conversation in five phases. A journal provides free coaching by using the

questions on yourself. 

Write down each question:-

“What is the topic you want to think through Trevor?” (T= Topic)

“What do you need from this exploration or issue?” (G= Goal)

“What is going on right now and what other perspectives could you get on this issue?” (R =

Reality)

“What are all the options you can think of to resolve this issue?” (O = Options)

“What are the actual actions you are going to take?” (W = Wrap up)

Whilst having an actual coach will obviously add enormous value, especially in making sure

you don’t collude with yourself, there are many issues where we can make some good

progress by ourselves by self-coaching in our journal.

Freeing up the bandwidth

Computers get stuck, freeze up, or simply slow up because there is too much going on at once.

Many of us experience the same feeling as a leader. Our ‘processing” bandwidth is so full that

we become slow and inefficient in our thinking. Using the journal as a constant downloading

process frees up our minds to work much more effectively on the main issues confronting us.

A car park for insights

A leaders reading and learning is vital. Why? Salman Rushdie said once that

‘Those who do not have the power of the story that dominates their lives – power to retell

it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it and change it as times may change – truly are

powerless because they cannot think new thoughts’

A leader cannot create a new story or get power over an old one using old thoughts, they need

new thinking. Where is the leader going to learn to think new thoughts if not their reading,

and their learning from whatever the source? The leaders journal is like a car park for writing

down those fresh thoughts. It maybe from a book, from a business magazine, from an

interview you read on the Internet, from a quote someone at work used in a presentation this

morning. Write them all down. And once they are written down you can return to them maybe

later that day, that week or that month. 

Once they are written in the journal you can then

journal about those insight and quotes. “That’s what Rushdie says but what do I think about

what he’s saying? What new thoughts does his quote stir up for me?

What’s your story? – in search of your bigger “yes”

I started this exploration with Howard Gardner’s definition of leadership “The ability to

create a story that affects the thoughts, feelings and actions of others”. A leader is someone who

discerns the story they want to write in any aspect of their life (vision) and then sets about

writing it (strategy) and ensures that the lives of others are positively impacted (influence).

Someone once said that the only way you can say ‘no’ to the distractions and negatives in our

life is to have a bigger ‘yes’, a vision, a clear and growing picture of the story you want to

write, whether that’s in your life direction, your family, your work sphere. Journaling allows

us to keep on exploring what this story is, what we want it to be, how to keep that bigger ‘yes’

fresh each day of our lives. “Where am I heading in this project? This organisation?” or “Who

am I becoming as a person?”, or “what really matters to me in my life right now – what’s my

bigger story?” or “what is the legacy I want to leave”. Journaling allows us to explore and

enlarge that very real story for our life.

Spend it all

The great thing about journaling is that it is entirely original – its just you, with your fresh

words, today. It is entirely unrehearsed and it’s only written for an audience of one – you; you

aren’t trying to shape a talk for anyone else. In the words of Brene Brown, when you journal,

you are just writing your own “first shitty draft”, of what is going on for you right now. It’s a

naked journey, its just you as you are, uncensored, as honest as you dare to be with yourself.

You don’t have to spell check it, grammar check it. It can be random words, bullet points, half

finished sentences – it doesn’t matter. What matters is simply doing it. Write it all down. 

In the words of Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard – “Spend it all”. Get it all out and

then more will be given to you. That’s how it works. I wouldn’t be without it and I commend it

as a vital friend to every leader every day…..or as often as you can each week. 

Go and buy yourself a journal and make it an integral part of your leadership….and your life.

Trevor Waldock March 2016

“Just One More Stroke”

“Just one more stroke”, said Adam Walker (see left), who went from novice water-lover to extreme ocean swimmer. These were the words of Adam in an interview with Richard Cole yesterday on BBC 4’s Saturday Live.  
How did he keep himself going when everything within him wanted to give up? Swimming in open waters for 11 hours, vomiting up because of ocean sewage, being stung to paralysis by a Portugese Man of War, unbearably cold temperatures with no wet suit 

- he say’s to himself, “Just take the next stroke…that’s all you need to do”.

This resonated with me so much, because I started Emerging Leaders as a total novice and after 10 years it has often felt like one of the intrepid swimmers Ocean swims. I have often thought that that is exactly how we have got to where it’s got to.  One stroke at a time. The days when you are working so hard to get these trainings up and running – the funding, the organising, the partners not answering your emails, the agreements made - followed by the agreements being ignored……oh, and did I say “the funding”?  Each stage has challenges – starting something, getting it moving, finding funders, getting on and off planes to deliver the training to make it happen, creating enough evidence of the impact of the training to draw other partners in, managing those new partners, finding the right team members, getting them on board, bedding them into their new roles, creating new programmes and tidying up old ones.

The wild ocean off the S.African coast of the Western Cape - home to hundreds of whales

Tim & Maz Walker

This morning I was moved to some very real tears as I watched on a Facebook video two of our team, Tim & Maz Walker (not related to Adam the swimmer!)  delivering an Emerging Leaders programme to a group of people under a bamboo tent in the middle of Madagascar!  I’ve never been to Madagascar but Emerging Leaders training is there. I can’t describe to you how wonderful that feels. I’m sure it’s the kind of feeling that Adam feels when he’s completed another Ocean swim.  What did my tears tell me? Never forget what it is that gives you joy in this ocean swim that we call Emerging Leaders. It’s easy to forget and when you forget, you lose your joy and when you lose your joy you lose your way.  

https://www.facebook.com/tim.walker.1441?fref=ts

My tears reminded me where my joy is and that I must have lost it in my business….but the tears reminded me where it is. Thank God for tears. The joy of seeing people who would never otherwise get a chance to learn - whether in their mud hut, bamboo tent, crumbled classroom, local tree - learning how to LEAD their own life and how to change the world around them.  

How can seeing someone’s life change, not bring you to tears?…….so as I head into another week and will inevitably need, at times, to say to myself “one more stroke”, I can do it with the joy of having reconnected with my own sense of mission in life. And that is precious.

- TW

When Scaffolding Over Stays its Welcome

Potential: Trevor’s translator in SA. After 8 years in prison, this guy is now running a group of young entrepreneurs

“I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier…..about your book and how you feel about its seeming failure and how hard it is to have the confidence to write again…….”

I waited for Judy’s conclusion with the delighted expectancy of someone who has been offered a key to some hidden treasure of wisdom. What came next wasn’t what I expected.

“I think it’s your ego. That’s why you’re struggling to write again”

 What could I say? She wasn’t attacking me, she wasn’t scoring points, she wasn’t trying to cut me down to size. She said the words from a place that I knew was free of her own ego, so I could only receive it and take it to a place within myself where I could process it. And I already knew she was right.

No one wants to admit to their ego being the obstacle. Ego, that provisional self that is so useful in the way that scaffolding is useful in building a house, but so unhelpful when it gets so attached to itself that it thinks it is the house. Ego, that self that demands to be comforted when it feels bruised, protected when it feels attacked, kept on its pedestal when it’s feeling diminished and fed when it feels hungry.

 

Miles from her roots in the Eastern Cape of S.A, this young girl is full of awesome potential

So why am I writing about ego on this eve of a new year? It’s linked to a book Jane & I are reading, the latest by Elizabeth Gilbert (she of Eat, Pray, Love fame) and it's all about creativity and fear. 

And it’s gently opening – or should I say re-opening - our eyes. We realised as we read, that we hadn’t blogged for a long time, that Jane hadn’t been drawing for a long time and that I hadn’t been writing or working up new ideas. We are both very creative people who had stopped being creative. Not totally, but largely, especially in the ways that are core to who we are. Did we stop because we decided to stop? No, it was because of…..well…..life. Life just demanded its daily work to be done and the work of creativity got put the bottom of the pile. And of course the problem with things that go to the bottom of the pile is that you never get to the things at the bottom of the pile.

Potential: beautiful, talented, beach artists in Kenya

 I have been reflecting a lot in the past month about potential. The place where all our programs with Emerging Leaders begin is with calling to young peoples potential.  I think I have always been passionate about potential and always sought to face down my own self-limiting demons, in order to allow myself to become as big as I can be. How big am I? How big can I be? I have no idea, but I’m sure there is no limit to that journey of discovery while I am willing to continue to take it.

So many things are coming together in my mind. Huge reservoirs of potential that need unlocking. Sleeping potential that needs waking up, needs someone calling out, to wake it up.  A brain that is hard wired for something more, a bigger story, a story of being an answer to the world’s issues not part of its problems. A life that needs some one to model a way of living that fulfill its potential, that breathes life and hope (inspires), into others that they might possibly be able to do the same. 

Potential waits to be set free and we hold the key (Kenya training@Simba farm)

Limiting mindsets keep us small, like scaffolding that hides the real but fragile building, protecting it from exposure to unkind weather or the gaze of people who might not like the unveiled house.

So, on the eve of 2016 let me recover the full practicing of what I preach, the exploration of what I feel passionate about, the mining of that creative jewel inside. 
Let me not just ‘do’ 2016....let me live it, explore it, sail it, mine it, run with it, fall over and scrape my knees on it and get up a little stronger to drink it more deeply and eat it more voraciously. 

Joseph and his street boys in SA - he sees their vast potential

Dawna Markova’s wonderful poem begins “I will not die an unlived life”. Let it be said at the end of 2016 that 'I lived'. That I wasn’t ruled by fear of failure or death or shame or looking stupid. Let me not be guilty of failing to discover more of my potential. Let me not be guilty of my ego being the reason why I didn’t try to write another book (real or metaphorically) because the last one quietly bombed. 

And let me not be guilty of failing to waste a moment where I can be modeling, calling out, and waking up many others to their own awesome potential this year.

- TW

Waiting for the Right Moment

“Waiting”

...I’m waiting, until I find the right words to write to my dear friend, who’s just lost her dad.

...I’m waiting for a free moment to go on line and send that money I promised myself I’d send to that Syrian appeal.

...I’m waiting for inspiration to arrive, so I can write a Blog, sign up for that Pilates class, invite my new neighbour over for a meal, shed weight or decorate the bathroom.

...I’m waiting for a perfect time-slot to appear, so I can read that article and watch that TED talk that I know will benefit me.

...I’m waiting, hoping that something will get me going, that some outside force will get my arse in gear. I’m waiting for the magical moment that will galvanise me into acting…waiting!

…I’m waiting too for new, life-giving thoughts to arrive in my head, for fresh, spine-tingling inspiration and I’m waiting for a shed more compassion and kindness to blossom in my life.

As I write these words, I glance back over my shoulder at the long-body of my life, with a slightly queasy feeling, as I vaguely calculate the amount of ‘waiting' that I’ve done over the years.

‘Waiting’ becomes the norm if I have no pressing sense of urgency to discover where I’m headed, or have no passionate purpose for my one beautiful life.

I was moved by a recent TED talk by the Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi. His talk, entitled, 

‘The Day I Stood Up Alone?’, picks open his epiphany moment, when he realises why he’s on plant earth - why he’s here. His passion and sense of deep mission & purpose is palpable and infectious.

https://www.ted.com/talks/boniface_mwangi_boniface_mwangi_the_day_i_stood_up_alone?language=en

If we’re honest, life has a way of reducing us to fretting over the mundane and pulling us into the petty and the trivial – although it never seems like it at the time.

I can easily loose my peace over my scratched kitchen tiles, the breaking of my favourite teapot, or a parking ticket (that gets me seriously hot under the collar). I loose my peace over the trivial and give away my equilibrium too easily.

Why? 

The honest truth is that these things have come to matter too much, but when I stop clinging to them, suddenly I feel free and I’m able to get on with the things that matter and that give me joy.

When I’m obsessing over the bloody parking ticket, that I unjustly found slapped to my windscreen, or the gouges in the kitchen floor that my tenants left behind, my mind becomes dull and my heart heavy and laboured.

And, I sense myself slowing down and losing energy as I get trapped on the hamster-wheel of negative emotions.

I end up WAITING for my rage to subside, WAITING for someone else to apologize, WAITING for the rain to stop, for jealousy to ebb away and for my peace somehow to return automatically.

WAITING = lost time.

What we really need is ACTION.

It’s when I get up and get stuck into the mess and misery, the complex and the challenging stuff of life…and when I write that letter, get myself to the Pilates class and feed my own hungry soul with TED talks and meditation, that I find my purpose and discover why I’m here.

Shalom

-JB