Episode 10: Finding the Peace You Need to Lead

Finding the Peace You Need to Lead

In a chaotic world, finding peace is a crucial tool in the leader’s toolbox. And when it comes to the perils and trials of leadership, every leader needs a toolkit.

After a year of living in a global pandemic, finding peace is all the more important for leaders to take on 2021.

Quantifying your peace provides a lens for analyzing, identifying, and categorizing pain points in our lives. It seems simple at face value, but if you dig deeper into your responses and use them as benchmarks over time, you’ll find there’s a lot more to this tool than meets the eye.

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How is your Peace Index?

Answer the Questions for Yourself

  1. How purposeful do you feel?
  2. How well are you enjoying your connection to people around you at work and in your personal life?
  3. How well does the place you are living suit you?
  4. How well are you providing for yourself and your family?
  5. How is your personal health impacting your daily activities?

Find your Peace Percentage

It may sound silly or arbitrary, but once you’ve mined out a few sticking points for each of the areas of peace, you’ll be able to gauge where you fall in the 0-100% range for each category of People, Place, Purpose, Provision and Personal Health.

It’s important that you be completely honest with yourself and remove any sense of pride, aspiration, or shame from your analysis. This will become both your baseline for progress as well as your compass for personal development, gently guiding you to the areas that need the most attention.

Cultivate Peace

For each of the five areas – People, Place, Purpose, Provision, Personal Health – determine 2 or 3 steps you can take over the course of the next week or month to raise your level of peace in that area.

Do you need to make more of an effort to connect with friends and family rather than allow work and social disconnection to characterize your daily routine? Or maybe you need to look for a new apartment or some professional training to help you find the area of town or subject matter expertise you need to live out your dreams for living and working.

Full Episode 10 Transcript

In a chaotic world. Finding peace is a crucial tool in the leaders toolbox and when it comes to the perils and trials of leadership, every leader needs a toolkit. After a year of living in a global pandemic, finding peace is all the more important for leaders to take on 2021. Quantifying your peace provides a lens for analyzing, identifying, and categorizing pain points in our lives. It seems simple at face value, but if you dig deeper into your responses and use them as benchmarks over time, you’ll find there’s a lot more to this tool than meets the eye. Welcome to “Finding the Peace You Need to Lead,” Episode 10, on The New Generation Leader Podcast.

Welcome to The New Generation Leader. We’re giving you the tools you need to lead in the digital world. Ready to reach your true potential? Let’s get started. Welcome to The New Generation Leader Podcast.

Welcome back. We are taking a look at the foundational tools over the next few episodes that leaders need to build a strong, vibrant foundation of leadership. If we get these things right as leaders, if we build that foundation, get base camp all set and in order we can reach new heights and build a skyscraper on this foundation of our leadership. But we have to make sure the foundation is set.

You know, I heard this illustration a few years ago in a previous role, we had a consultant come in and they said you can’t put up the wallpaper before you build the foundation. So what are those systems? What are those processes? What are those details that you need to have in order in order to lead effectively? And we can’t give what we don’t possess. We cannot lead others to great potential. If we haven’t gotten a strong foundation ourselves to be able to bring our best, we’ve got a cultivate an awareness about the things in our lives that make us tick.

What motivates us positively? What corrupts us negatively? What elevates us each and every day? It’s about what brings out the best in who we are and the relationships that we need to create a healthy atmosphere to thrive. This tool that we’re going to talk about today gives us an avenue to be more effective, more empathetic as a manager, as a leader, as a leader of people, it helps us to bring our best and not just one time, not just a one time assessment, but this becomes a rhythmic process that we can benchmark. Here’s where I am today and we can check back in next week, where has this improved? Where has the pressure come off?

As I look back with my clients with myself over the past year, the 14 or so months of the pandemic that we have experienced throughout our world. This is not a local, a local effect. This is truly a global effect in this pandemic. And as I look back at the client’s I’ve worked with and I look back in my own life over these 14 months, there are various people, there are various times and places and markers where I see that this tool, these five things we’re going to talk about today had a significant impact on our outlooks, on our motivation, on our ability to think and dream and problem solve effectively. So we’re going to dive into these because I want to help you unlock your potential, but to unlock your potential, we’ve got to start with a strong foundation.

So this tool is about finding our peace. And this might sound like an odd question to some, but: how much peace do you have in your life right now? The question we typically ask each other, our friends, people passing on the streets. We start a call, we ask one question, how’s it going or something like how are you? And our response is usually something along the lines of doing fine. Doing great. I’m okay. But what does that really mean? How much are we truly understanding what’s going on under the surface and on the surface?

There is an issue of peace, of contentment, where your heart and mind are aligned in bringing your passionate energy each and every day, the various components of our life and our routine are pushing and prodding and pulling us in different directions. And sometimes those factors have significant impact on our outlook. If we are drained, our energy cannot respond in the midst of this pandemic as we’ve been. What we’ve seen is continued research and reporting about how we are struggling to bring our best, how our energy is waning. We’re having a hard time thinking and seeing and processing information clearly. What if there was a way to do a quick self assessment to find out what was going on today?

This isn’t a quick fix. This isn’t, like I said, a one time assessment tool, but this is a tool to help us understand some of the hidden anxieties, some of the things that covertly sabotage our contentment, something that you can identify, that you can find a target to shoot at and begin taking back a measure of peace in your day to day routine.

So let’s talk about these five factors of peace and what they mean and why they can bring us down. So number one: purpose. How purposeful do you feel? Are you satisfied in the work that you’re doing every day? Do you feel like you have a sense of direction, A sense of calling or mission in your life? Do you know what you’re going after? Do you have a personal vision, mission values, goals for yourself that you are driving after? And do you feel like you’re aligned with those and, put simply, are you energized or passionate about what you do?

Here’s what we’re doing with these five factors, Is we’re going to give each one of these five factors a score 1-100. So for your sense of purpose, give yourself a score 1-100, where would you rank yourself today?

Now second is: people. How well are you enjoying your connection to the people around you at work? In your personal life? The people you spend the most time with? Do you have close meaningful friends that you spend time with? Are the people in your life – from friends, family, work colleagues -bringing you down or calling you up to the best version of yourself? Do you feel like you can depend on your friends and family? Are you connecting with them often? Are you connecting with them deeply? Are you able to have those connections with the people closest around you that you feel you need to have a sense of peace in your life? So think about the people in your life And give that a score 1 to 100.

And the third factor is: place. And you can download a graphic of this tool in the show notes at newgenerationleader.com/10. Download this and keep it as a quick handy reference for you. So the third one is place. How well does the place you’re living suit you? Does where you live suit your lifestyle preferences? Are there places to hike or walk places to go eat close by? Places to enjoy the kinds of recreational activities that you enjoy? Whether it’s walking, biking, hiking. Are you close enough to the beach or close enough to the mountains? Are you close enough to the city? For what fits your personal temperament and personality, what drives you? And then think about the actual place where you live, whether it’s a house or an apartment. Does it suit the needs of you or your family, your roommate, whoever you are living with, whatever your preference of life is. You can also think about traffic and the commute. How does that have an impact on your sense of peace? So all of that. There are lots of factors to place. But give a score to your sense of peace in your place right now 1-100. Yeah.

And then provision. How is your sense of provisions? Are you earning enough money to take care of yourself? Those closest around you who rely on you? Are you making what you need to take care of your basic necessities and some of your wants and needs here? How is your provisions caring for you? Do you have what you need to put a roof over your head, food on the table, enjoy the kinds of recreational activities, shopping, travel, vacation, everything else that you enjoy doing? Do you have what you need to take care of those basic needs? So 1-100 on that one.

We’ve been through four and now our last one is personal health and there are lots of components to our personal health from diet, exercise, activity and our sleep habits. One of my favorite quotes is from Kerry New Hoff, who reminds us that we spend ideally a third of our lives, a third of our lives sleeping, so we should make sure that we are getting the best sleep we possibly can. And he is constantly preaching this to the leaders he is coaching, investing in speaking to on his podcast and and wherever he goes, reminding leaders to focus on getting good sleep. All of these factors and components of personal health are so impactful. And the one other component that I have found comes up in conversation with people I’m coaching is substance use alcohol, tobacco. How are those impacting your life right now? Are you able to bring your best in every facet of life or is some factor of your personal health weighing on you?

So 1-100 on each of those five and then we average them. And the beauty of this exercise is that it helps you categorize these five, foundational, influential elements of life and how they might be impacting for better or for worse. The degree of peace and contentment you’re experiencing in your life right now. So take a moment to write down each of these five numbers, 1 to 100, then average them together. And that’s your overall peace number. It’s not perfect. It’s also not rocket science. But spending a few minutes going through this exercise provides a helpful ballpark snapshot of where you believe you are at the moment.

We often find that this simple, personal reflection serves as a wake up call when one of these numbers is low or if something is high, we can give thanks and be grateful, express our gratitude and contentment or it can alert us to an underlying discontentment, especially when the significance of that discontentment has flown under the radar. For now, we can identify things that have otherwise gone missing. And once you understand what this overall number means for you, then you can look at each component separately and ask what’s the specific driver that’s dictating these numbers for you? What do you need to work on? What areas do you need to focus on?

So here are a few examples that I’ve seen over the past year or two. One client talked about the physical place where he and his family were living. They were in transition having moved from one region of the country to another region of the country and they were in a temporary housing situation. Their large family was in an apartment. And not only was the space not ideal for the family to have their own space to spread out, to regroup, to recharge individually, but the geographic location wasn’t ideal for the commute of this client or anyone else in his family. It wasn’t close to the community that they wanted to be part of. So every factor of that impacted his overall sense of peace and probably the overall sense of peace in the entire family. And so the stress increases and and he may have felt as well that the people part was an issue, but the root cause was the place and I talked to him months later, after they had found a new home to move to, they had settled in. It was an ideal location in between his work and his spouse’s workplace. They were able to set down their roots to find comfort and peace at home. The commute wasn’t weighing on them. The small confines of the overall space for their large family that was not weighing on them. Place was now a place of peace for him.

Provision is one factor that has been significant throughout the pandemic. As you look at business owners, employees who have experienced losses or decreased revenue and income. Maybe a job loss maybe a loss of clients, maybe a slowing down of pace and business and work. And that affects provisions. If we are worried about putting a roof over our heads, feeding our families, taking care of our basic necessities, we are going to bring that stress and that challenge to every phase of our lives and then personal health, substance abuse, a nagging health challenge. Maybe it’s a an episodic illness. Maybe it’s lingering recovery from COVID. All of these factors pile in for us and can affect our personal health if we’re not eating well, we’re not sleeping well. We’re not energized by what we’re eating. We’re not energized coming out of our sleep. We’re not getting the exercise that we need to keep our bodies moving. All of those factors pull us down and when these factors pull us down and our peace decreases, we act then out of our stress and we can feel we can sense that we are not in a place of peace, but what we need to do is identify where that lack of peace is coming from, so that we can make a conscious change.

So I ask you this closing question: which one of these five areas needs the most work from you right now? Which one do you identify with? And what’s one activity that you can change? One pattern you can shift? One adjustment you can make? What can you put into practice to change your rhythm to make a difference here? And then set a timeline on this. Set a timeline to come back to this activity in a week, two weeks a month and then tell somebody else, here’s where my sense of peace is today. You can even teach them this tool and share this with them. Allow them the privilege of walking through this exercise themselves and out of their sense of peace and their number. The two of you together can look to that next assessment in a few weeks. Come back to this, have another checkpoint and see how is my peace today compared to where it was a few weeks ago and have these changes that I’ve made increased my sense of peace?

One last closing thought. If any of your numbers are really high, don’t push passed that. Don’t let that go by without a sense of gratitude. Give thanks for that sense of peace for that overwhelming peace that you are finding in one of these areas. Express your gratitude for that, share that with someone else as well. And if your peace index is really low, I mean below 50 and there’s something just weighing heavy on you, please please please don’t hesitate to reach out for support. Someone in your circles of influence is standing by ready to help and don’t hesitate to reach out.

This has been Episode 1: Finding the Peace You Need to Lead on The New Generation Leader Podcast. Download the show notes, get all the resources you need at newgenerationleader.com/10 and join us on the next episode, Episode 11, as we continue laying this foundation of The Tools You Need to Lead in the Digital World. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to The New Generation Leader Podcast. Subscribe today on your favorite podcasting platform. Ready to reach your true potential? Join our network of like minded leaders in The New Generation Leader Mastermind Group. Find all the tools you need at newgenerationleader.com. Thanks for listening today, and we look forward to seeing you next time on The New Generation Leader Podcast.

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