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.

Questions addressed on this segment:

Q: How do I recognize its my responsibility when it doesn’t look that way and I want to blame someone else for the problem?

Q: Some people (me sometimes) feel the ownership of some domain (in business, technology, etc.) in an exclusive way, so they don’t allow other people to take responsibility. What would be a correct thing to do?

Q: Procrastination is one of the biggest obstacles that we have to overcome to take 100% ownership. What is your advice on fighting against it?

Q: What about project managers or scrum masters who can’t give up control? Micromanage? Criticize in public? Get hostile in tone when things don’t go their way? How do you diffuse this type of person and allow one to be 100 % responsible for our work?

Q: How do you get past the rationalization (Justify) during an accountability session (i.e., what went wrong) and get to more of a Responsibility space? We are very good at rationalizing, that is understand why something went wrong, but we kind of get stuck there.

Q: Given the mental and emotional issues that affect weight loss, can the Responsibility Process be used to aid in successful achievement and maintenance of healthy weight loss?

Q: I am starting a new job in a few weeks at a large fortune 500 company. There is new upper management recently in place (board level). The “old” charismatic leader started some key programs. These programs are currently under assessment, but as the new regime lifts the rocks, they are seeing that it’s ugly underneath. I will be on an existing program that has two diverse camps – one that wants to stop and reassess (one customer is a 60% stakeholder and claims he “doesn’t want the program, it doesn’t meet his needs) and then there is the other camp that is driving the project to try to be completed (in 2010/2011). As a new leader in this organization, what advise would you give me.

I’m pleased to announce the educational DVD and workshop solution for making your business bubble over with personal responsibility is now shipping to customers worldwide.

What Can The Journey Do for You?

Finally, a breakthrough How-To system for filling your workplace with Personal Responsibility. And the best part is you Do-It-Yourself with this low-cost DVD-based workshop.

Experts universally name Personal Responsibility the first principle of success in any endeavor (and you know what a difference it makes when people you depend on at work take ownership). But no expert could tell you how to systematically understand, develop, and build personal responsibility. . .

…Until Now

Attention Leaders, Executives, Business Owners, Professionals, & Leadership Coaches:

Put this easy-to-use DVD-based workshop to work for you teaching fellow leaders, team mates, and every employee how Personal Responsibility works in the mind— the essence of leadership and success—so they can

	Take ownership		Solve problems at the source
	Engage		Be resilient
	Face reality		Lead
	Learn quicker		Get unstuck
	Respond with agility		and so much more

So you do well—while doing good—with less effort.

That’s a Win/Win/Win. Look…

But two blog posts caught my eye this morning.

In A Corporationless Society, a post on a prolific new blog devoted to discussions about designing role-playing games, the anonymous author (I’m sure insiders on the blog know each other but I spent 10 minutes searching for ID and gave up. They aren’t super-secret, they use names, I just did not get it unraveled.), suggests that corporate limited liability is the reason for too much greed and not enough responsibility. He/she has an interesting story-line for a game: Society restarts without corporations after being brought down by mega-corporations with mega-greed, no controls, too much power, etc.

It makes me wonder about the trendy supposed “greening” of corporations and the whole Corporate Social Responsibility movement. I’m absolutely certain that some leaders completely get the need to own up to their external interdependence. That’s a fancy term I learned in an organizational sociology class in grad school 25 years ago that simply means dumping your unwanted waste on others to take care of (think conveniently pumping your post processing chemical sludge into a river and sending it downstream, or strip-mining then abandoning the countryside after you have what you want, or even helping yourself to all of the natural resource under, over, on, or running by your property (remember some former societies did not believe in owning parcels of land) without regard to who else also depends on it.

The issue, in modern terms of value and quality, is whether you are truly creating value or if the supposed value your customers pay you for is offset by the destruction (i.e., think carbon-foot-print type analogies here) you cause in generating the product or service that produces revenue.

On this subject I speculated yesterday while answering a question on LinkedIn about the connection between personal responsibility as a cultural attribute and corporate social responsibility. I said:

What I’m finding is that the more highly developed one’s sense (and practice) of personal responsibility, the more aware we become of our interconnectedness, and the more socially conscious we become. So I’m interested in working with leaders worldwide who see a connection between personal responsibility as an organization-wide practice and performance, profitability, social responsibility, and sustainability.

So then I read Clarity, Honesty, Responsibility, and Accountability this morning by a spiritual teacher Rakesh Gupta who I assume is in India. I spent a few minutes attempting to determine what spiritual persuasion (Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) but it truly does not matter for purposes of this post as the lesson is universal. Rakesh Gupta said:

One takes Responsibility. One takes responsibility upon recognizing one’s relationships.

That’s very well put.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

I’m enjoying the Liberty Mutual personal responsibility campaign. It is a great message creatively produced. The message is good for business, good for employees, good for the industry, and good for customers. That’s a winning message.

I’d love to see Liberty Mutual include Responsibility Redefined™ in the personal responsibility campaign and help us educate the world about how personal responsibility actually works in the mind. I’m doing my best to connect with Liberty Mutual to make sure Liberty Mutual is aware of how much Responsibility Redefined could add distinction and true longevity to their campaign. If you can help connect me with Liberty Mutual, please let me know.

The Liberty Mutual personal responsibility campaign has grown beyond clever ads with a great tagline. Liberty Mutual has launched a blog titled The Responsibility Project, Presented by Liberty Mutual where they are offering up their videos and personal stories from readers answering the question “what does responsibility mean to you?” By all means, please go check it out, register, and then tell them what Responsibility Redefined means to you now that you know how your internal Responsibility Process™ works and how to use the Keys to Responsibility™ to master responsibility. And be sure to link or leave a trackback to this post so we’ll know.

What do you think?

How to Maximize Performance, Overcome Any Challenge, and Achieve Your Dreams With This Breakthrough Discovery About How People Avoid—or Take—Ownership!

Here’s the invitation I sent to folks who attended my recent tele-seminar on Master Personal Agility:

I’ll be spilling the beans for FREE about why some people seem to demonstrate responsibility while others don’t, AND what you cando about it. I’m calling it:

“Maximize Performance, Overcome Any Challenge, and Achieve Your Dreams With This Breakthrough Discovery About How People Avoid—or Take—Ownership!”

Part 1: “How The Mind Processes Thoughts About Responsibilty”

Part 2: “Taking Charge With The Keys to Responsibility”

Please feel free to attend and invite others you care about.

Duration: 70 minutes

Priority Access for the first 100 who Register:

Audio Replay: Everyone registered before February 21st will get FREE access to any audio MP3 replay made from the call. After that it will probably be sold for $49.

And here’s the ad we sent to the Responsibility eTips list yesterday:

Related Resources

Listen free to the audio replay of “Master the 4 Magical Skills That Activate Your Personal Agility”

Ask Christopher your question