Lead with kindness not cruelty
Kindness incorporated = Resilient workforce
Lead yourself with kindness through every aspect of your life and you will always lead others with kindness and not cruelty. Lead yourself with kindness and you can reform yourself, create your own dignity and foster the same in others.
So many leaders look back at their years of work and wonder why they were so harsh, so short tempered and sometimes cruel. When they get to look at the minutiae of the inner relationship with themselves it becomes clear. It becomes apparent that they are harsh, short tempered and cruel to themselves. It’s this inner din that dictates the atmosphere within which we live, and work.
When leaders give full regard to the inner workings of the relationship with themselves they realise that inner critics, and their inner agonies, are sapping them of their full vigour and enjoyment.
‘Lead yourself with kindness and you will be a resilient leader. Lead your life with a companionable relationship with yourself and you create resilience and mental healthiness in the workplace’.
This resilience means living with inner ease and personal power which gives you the energy, courage, and stamina to put vision into action without it breaking you or others down. That way they take responsibility and care for their own mental healthiness, and means they avoid the need to extinguish their inner stresses onto others. You avoid the urge to be cruel.
Our inner dialogue is often cruel, demeaning, torturous. Of course this is nearly always assimilated as normal, even expected and rewarded in certain cultures. Goodness knows what may be achieved if we were to go around this world with a sense of worth, inner pride and care for ourselves.
When we create and sustain a kindly relationship with ourselves we naturally create kindly relationships with others. This means being able to maintain hierarchy, management, and leadership qualities whilst allowing colleagues and staff to be fully human and look after themselves too. In this atmosphere you create a place where creativity, innovation and productivity can occur whilst everyone maintaining happiness and resilience at work. An environment which doesn’t make you sick.
Every day I work with people who have committed to end their inner brutality. Often because they have become sick themselves, and are now forced to pay considered attention. This is no easy journey; it’s so much harder to work through the depths of these agonies, habits and illnesses once they have got people to breaking point. The recovery is tough, everything in us and around us is suited to us staying the same. Deep in our neurology we are unconsciously destined to keep within known tram lines, pathways, ways of being, and ways of feeling. It takes courage, conviction and commitment to re-route everything we know.
Professionals are waking up to this all the time, sometimes too late to avoid their own breakdown, but never too late to harness this opportunity to restore themselves.
We must ‘create prevention’ it won’t show up by itself, the ‘carry on regardless’ forces are too strong. Let’s not leave it too late. Let’s on purpose do away with any cruelty whether internal or external.
Create a culture where it is seen as responsible and desirable to create inner companionability and therefore genuine power to lead, manage, and thrive in work and in life.
