What is leadership?

Leadership means leading, i.e., going first, right? It means taking ownership or responsibility for a space in time and place, thinking ahead, and facing tough challenges with courage and conviction. It also means confronting the truth, even when doing so may be difficult or unpopular.

Most people assume this ability is given to only a handful of people. But my field studies over the last twenty years on the front lines of leadership suggest the ability is given to everyone — including you.

Unfortunately, few discover this gift. Fewer apply it. And very few master it.

The Leadership Gift is available to you right now.

You already have everything you need to discover, access, and apply it. I’m convinced about that, and so are many others who have studied this field.

When people discover, access, and apply the Leadership Gift, extraordinary things happen. Their ability to lead themselves and others increases. That does not mean it gets easy, but leadership become more true. And it also does not mean it become more authoritative, but it does become more authentic.

This article will describe this Leadership Gift, how it works, and what you can do to put it to good use.

The Leadership Gift is your innate ability to take complete ownership of any space, scene, or situation; to confront any truth; and to overcome any challenge no matter how big or daunting.

Yes, you possess an innate ability to do this.

I know this because of my research and experience over the past two decades about how the mind processes thoughts about avoiding or taking responsibility. Taking ownership of a situation — whether it is

• a task
• a child
• a project
• a relationship
• a business
• a war
• or the future of a nation

is an undeniable essence of leadership. Until one feels a sense of personal ownership for a situation and for moving yourself or others toward intelligent action, you can’t truly take charge of anything.

The Leadership Gift you have available to you right now, and anytime you want to call on it, is your on-board, ever-present Responsibility Process.

Your Responsibility Process

Over the last two decades I’ve learned much about how personal responsibility works in our minds. I’ve also learned that most people are quick to think I’m responsible — it’s all these people around me who need your help, Christopher!

However, consider this. Imagine being able to improve and master your own ability to

• take charge, change, grow, and overcome limitations of any kind (yes, any)
• teach and inspire the same (i.e., personal responsibility) in others
• and determine how to raise the standard of personal responsibility in groups and organizations?

Do I have your attention?

Regulating leadership

Discoveries show that both avoiding responsibility (i.e., not taking charge, changing, growing, or overcoming) and taking responsibility are regulated by a simple yet amazing mental process. This mental process has little to do with your intelligence or education and much more to do with your emotions and nervous system.

We’ve also learned that this mental process normally operates involuntarily, in the background (like breathing happens without thinking about it) but that you can also bring the process to the foreground of your awareness so you can work with it purposefully. That means that personal responsibility no longer needs to remain a mysterious character trait (or flaw) but can now be understood, taught, and inspired directly.

A predictable mental program

I’ll briefly describe the Responsibility Process.

Think of the Responsibility Process as a mental program that gets triggered each time something goes wrong in your life, large or small.

For example: Let’s say you arrive at your office building on a cold morning with many pressing issues on your mind. You grab your ID, which doubles as a key card, and hold it up against the card reader. Doing this usually unlocks the door so you can enter. Only this time the door doesn’t unlatch. Frustrated, you mumble to no one in particular, “I wonder who screwed up the card reader?”

This seems to be a perfectly innocuous comment, the type we say and hear everyday in a myriad of annoying circumstances. Not only that, but it’s also a perfectly reasonable assumption that someone screwed something up keeping us from our morning routine.

We say and hear such things every day. So regularly, in fact, that it can be predicted.

Our studies reveal Lay Blame as your and my first thought when things go wrong. Sure, we’ve been told our whole lives that we should not blame. Why? Because it isn’t resourceful, i.e., it doesn’t solve anything. But that doesn’t stop us from doing it. We are most likely hard-wired to do it. Lay Blame is the first of many stops in our Responsibility Process.

The logic of cause and effect

Psychologists tell us our minds are constantly making meaning out of our experience. The Responsibility Process is part of this process. More importantly, the Responsibility Process appears to feed us answers about the cause and effect relationships when things go wrong.

Lay Blame is just the first step in the process. Other steps include Justify, Shame, Obligation, Quit, and Responsibility.

Each of these positions have proven to be predictable, and you can learn very quickly to spot these positions of mind and to even anticipate (or predict) what might happen next.

You can get stuck at any step

When things go wrong in our lives (big or small), we can

• Lay Blame on others
• Justify the problem based on circumstance
• wallow in Shame that we did this to ourselves
• feel trapped in Obligation to do something we don’t really want to do
• Quit the situation hoping to escape it and leave it behind us, or

we can take ownership that it is our Responsibility to learn, correct, or improve in order to rise to the challenge presented by the problem.

Each of these positions is best thought of as a position of mind, a mental state, a mindset we adopt, or — a favorite of many — islands in the mind on which we camp out for awhile or a lifetime around any upset. We can address our problem from any of these positions of mind. And we do so, naturally, without thinking about it.

Only one of these mental states is a state of resourcefulness, of learning, or of leadership. All the other mental states are merely coping mechanisms.

What’s your comment?

Read Part 2: Do You Have The Leadership Gift Part 2: Cope or Grow?

Unlock and Unleash Your Leadership Gift

Request an invitation to Christopher’s next Leadership Gift free preview call now!

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Master leadership or build a responsible team (or family) with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

Focus on Elaine McNaughton

Interviewed by Christopher. Interview notes: a charter member of the Leadership Gift… Elaine is an unabashed child of God (comment: the Leadership Gift supports people of faith and science). Elaine offers an example to other leaders who may be examining their own faith in relation to the Leadership Gift… a project manager at American Airlines, Elaine has benefitted from many breakthroughs in her first 6 months in the Leadership Gift eprogram… “I’m able to recognize upset happening inside of me, and I’m able to recognize where I am in the Responsibility Process and get myself through the upset… and I can do that pretty quickly now.” Learn how Elaine is using and introducing the Leadership Gift with her teams, peers, and even superiors at work…

Click to listen or right-click to download the interview with Elaine MP3 (31 mins)

What is the Leadership Gift?

The Leadership Gift unlocks your innate leadership ability by helping you master, step-by-step, your mind’s Responsibility Process — your internal regulator for completely owning your life and generating ever more freedom, power, and choice, versus settling for less.

Get This Month’s Interview

Join the Leadership Gift now as a Free, Silver, or Gold Member to get access to my December 2009 interview with Dayan Douse, Audit Manager at DTE Energy as soon as it is posted. Here’s how…

Leadership Gift Links

Join the Leadership Gift eProgram and community as a Free, Silver, or Gold member

Order your Leadership Gift Toolkit to bring the Leadership Gift to your team and organization

Check out the next Leadership Gift free preview.

How to Unlock & Unleash The Leadership Gift in You

Date:  Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Time: 4pm GMT/UTC, Noon EST, 11AM CST, 10AM MST, 9AM PST

or

Midnight GMT/UTC, 8 EST, 7PM CST, 6PM MST, 5PM PST

Request your VIP invitation to attend this valuable webinar.

Who Should Attend

Leaders who

1. want to consciously grow and expand their leadership power and ability everyday, and
2. can appreciate a research-based approach to doing so that effectively leverages your most precious resources: your time, attention, and resources

Register now.

If you are wondering if you are a candidate for The Leadership Gift, think about this:

Are you doing something really important with your life?

Are you pursuing goals that matter?

Are you making a difference?

Do you wish there was a more humane, more productive way to live and work?Leadership gift

Would you like to be part of a community of bright and successful leaders and coaches who are mastering their ability to make a differece?

Register now.

Do you often feel trapped in a life you don’t want, and wish you knew the way to greater freedom?

Would you like to really take charge — not in a selfish and manipulative way, but in a way that honors your spirit and the spirits of those around you?

Check out The Leadership Gift preview call.

Focus on Curtis Verstraete

Interviewed by Christopher. Interview notes: one of the most giving and self-depracating people… I’m so pleased to call Curtis a friend, coach, teammate

and member of our community. Genius at helping service providers package and market their unique value (learn of his role in conceiving of The Leadership Gift e-program). Also hear how he freely gives qualified prospective clients up to 90 minutes of his coaching and doesn’t hold anything back (it’s worth many thousands of dollars). We talk about his initial response to the Responsibility Process, how he pratices responsibility in his life and work, how it’s like having an extra appendage or sense, and about his passion for motorcycles…

Download (right click) or Listen now (click) to Curtis’s interview MP3 (28 mins)

What is the Leadership Gift?

The Leadership Gift unlocks your innate leadership ability by helping you master, step-by-step, your mind’s Responsibility Process — your internal regulator for completely owning your life and generating ever more freedom, power, and choice, versus settling for less.

Get This Month’s Interview

Join the Leadership Gift now as a Free, Silver, or Gold Member to get immediate access to my November 2009 interview with Elaine McNaughton, Project Manager at American Airlines. Here’s how…

Leadership Gift Links

Join the Leadership Gift eProgram and community as a Free, Silver, or Gold member

Order your Leadership Gift Toolkit to bring the Leadership Gift to your team and organization

Check out the next Leadership Gift free preview call

Register now.

If you are wondering if you are a candidate for The Leadership Gift, think about this:

Are you doing something really important with your life?

Are you pursuing goals that matter?

Are you making a difference?

Do you wish there was a more humane, more productive way to live and work?

Would you like to be part of a community of bright and successful leaders and coaches who are mastering their ability to make a differece?

Register now.

Do you often feel trapped in a life you don’t want, and wish you knew the way to greater freedom?

Would you like to really take charge — not in a selfish and manipulative way, but in a way that honors your spirit and the spirits of those around you?

Check out The Leadership Gift preview call.

]]> http://www.christopheravery.com/blog/next-free-preview-call-scheduled-for-the-leadership-gift/feed/ 0 http://www.christopheravery.com/blog/leadership-gift-free-preview-call/ http://www.christopheravery.com/blog/leadership-gift-free-preview-call/#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:59:45 +0000 christopher http://www.christopheravery.com/blog/?p=454 Continue reading →]]> I’m prepping for The Leadership Gift free preview call tomorrow, Wednesday, September 30 (but if you are reading this later, there should be another one within a few weeks). This will interest what I call “enlightened” leaders—anyone in a leadership role of any kind who understands their consciousness is part of any problem they face, and who wants to be able to expand their consciousness daily as a way to grow as a leader.

There will be plenty of valuable content for you to soak up and chew on, and I’ll spend a few minutes telling you about The Leadership Gift Toolkit for those who are interested.

Claiming Wins

This feedback is gratifying. For instance Perfect Problem Breakthrough program member Tim, a business owner, sent me this note 43 minutes into the call. I’m sharing it with Tim’s permission:

“Your story about yourself jogging with your friend and having him ask you “have you gone past a win?”. This speaks to me. I’m married with a wonderful family. I have the home, automobiles, income, my own business, and all of the things that I imagined when I was younger when thinking about what my success would look like. But I’ve never felt like a winner. To this day – I’ve always felt like I’m still struggling to achieve something/anything in my life. I’ve never allowed myself to recognize a win. Recognizing a win has always felt arrogant or short sighted to me. What a huge mistake! I need to turn this around somehow. Again, I’m not sure how to change this chronic behavior. But I have to find a way.”

Can you identify with Tim’s Control Prison? And do you recognize his breakthrough (he called it an “epiphany” – an even better term)?

I bet you can.

What is the Perfect Problem Breakthrough?

The Perfect Problem Breakthrough is a leadership development program for individuals who long for a more productive, more humane way to lead, and who want to expand their leadership power everyday.

Learn more at Perfect Problem Breakthrough

The Perfect Problem Breakthrough program is for leaders seriously interested in:

• consciously expanding their leadership power daily,
• achieving their potential, and
• continuously expanding the energy of their team or organization.

It’s all explained in detail at the link (click on the logo here or the link above). If you find yourself wishing there were a more humane and productive way to powerful leadership, maybe the Perfect Problem Breakthrough is for you.

90 days AFTER returning to their teams following the October 2008 intensive, I asked participants “How likely is it for you to recommend a friend or colleague to Knowledge Team Leadership?” On a scale of 1 to 10 participants rated it 9.44.

“What would you tell them?”

They said:

- “This class has great content and great presentation. I’ve used the material over and over since the class and it has had a meaningful impact in how I approach team dynamics”

- “The course offers valuable insights into the concept of teamwork and shared responsibility and gives one valuable tools to achieve success in these areas”

- “Lots of good ideas and challenging thoughts condensed into a short time investment”

- “This course focuses on what the individual can do to help create responsible teams. Many other courses concentrate on how to get others to do things. This course recognizes the importance of changing your behavior. Everything in this course can be used throughout your life – work or at home. It can also be a great tools for your kids.”

2009 sessions scheduled already in San Antonio, London, Dallas, Santa Clara, and New York city. Check out the dates.

If you are considering attending, I urge you to claim your spot now. Don’t wait another day.