Leader Skill Series: Becoming

This might very well be my favorite addition to any list of leadership skills. Becoming. Most competency lists will include something like "learning" or growth mindset," but becoming is so much more. It's part science, part art, and part magic. It's about intimacy, trust and work. It's about knowing when to hold on tight, and when to surrender. When people have it, you know it because it is palpable. It's almost like they have an otherworldly tranquility about them. And leaders need that now more than ever. 

I define becoming as the awareness and practice of being in motion and relationship. It's wayfinding - the locating, following and discovering a route through any given space. In the context of intrapersonal skills, it's your ability to find your way through yourself and your experiences. More concretely, it's about being able to demonstrate the following:

• familiarity with your life cycles  
• flow through organizing and disorganizing experiences
• an application of time, history and context 
• grace and compassion for your process
• mystery and magic

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Familiarity with your cycles, routines and rituals. Whether they are daily, monthly, yearly... Whether they follow the moon, the seasons, schools or the stock market... we create, are shaped by, and reinforce cycles that become habits or rituals. 

• What rituals did your family or ancestors observe and why?
• How do you know when you're at the beginning, middle or end of a cycle? 
• What practices do you use when you want to end a relationship with a cycle you have been loyal to?
• How are your rituals or cycles helping or hindering you?

Organizing vs disorganizing. Most literature in organizational development and leadership refers to behaviors and experiences that are healthy/unhealthy, or functional/dysfunctional. This places an inherent good/bad judgement on the situation. Instead, I've been learning to reframe things as organizing (something that encourages harmony or alignment) or disorganizing (something that encourages disruption). The practice here is not in one's ability to manage and correct anything, but rather to have an awareness of and flow between organizing and disorganizing states of being. 

• What is your relationship to harmony and disruption?
• How do you sense when it's time for a change vs time to rest?
• What does it look like when you are able to flow instead of manage your experience?

Time, history and context. Who you are right now is a result of time, history and cultural context unfolding. You have a generosity for the road you've taken, where you currently are, and a vision for your ongoing journey.

• When you look back at your life, what might you tell your younger self about who you are becoming?
• What is the multifaceted history of the land and community you currently live; your job position and organization; your family tree or friend group?
• What is special about who you are right here, right now and how it converges with others, the land, your community, etc.?
• How do you belong to this exact moment in time and space?

Grace and compassion for your process. We are all fallible, messy and fumbling our way through this world (trying our darndest to look like we know what we're doing). Take a breath, pause and for a brief moment just be who you are instead of trying to hard to be someone or something else. 

• Under what conditions do you give the most grace to others?
• Practice giving grace to yourself. 
• How do you know when you should give yourself more or less grace or compassion?
• What might happen if you gave yourself unconditional compassion?

Mystery and magic. I can't tell you how many times a coach or a therapist has told me, "maybe that's not for you to know." There is a small stack of things in life we know we know. A marginally bigger stack of things we know we don't know. And an infinite stack of things we don't know we don't know. Mystery and magic are about two things. First, giving up the need to know everything or be certain about something. At any given moment, we could be invited to give up something we thought was 100% true.

Second, that we expand our ways of knowing. We cling to our ways of knowing so tightly. When we evangelize (or only deem acceptable) narrow ways of knowing, we limit ourselves from becoming. Us humans have often thought our intelligence is superior. Our current political climate reveals a desperate need to redefine and clarify our shared reality. How do we know what we know anymore?

• What are your primary ways of knowing and how did you learn them?
• When was the last time you experienced a deep unlearning - where something you knew was turned inside-out?
• What are some things you know but can't explain? 
• Where have you experienced a little bit of magic or mystery lately?

We are all in a constant state of becoming - of departing, arriving, meeting, returning - of being in motion and turning that which is potential into reality. When we're really "in it" it is hard to see the forest from the trees, but leaders still need to lead. Leaders are called on to find additional ways of knowing, give grace,  and learn how to belong (and return to belonging) to themselves and the world around them. 

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