I am almost finished in redesigning my Leadership Self-Assessment Tool that supports leaders in understanding their style of leadership. I have developed Thought Leader – Team Leader – Supportive Leader – Visionary Leader & Organizational Leader. Each with different strengths, vulnerabilities, beliefs, and stress patterns, along with the diseases and disorders those of each style are predisposed to, based on their patterns of stress. It is going from a pdf to a digital graphic format with immediate response and analysis. Always with an option for a more in-depth personal consultation.
In creating the questionnaire, which is now with the editor, I have been told repeatedly, by others who have seen it, “I have never been asked that question before.” If they have never been asked that question, why would they have ever spent time on understanding the answer? Our questions, especially the more outrageous or unusual ones, have the power to cause people perhaps for the first time to stop and think about themselves at a level they have never approached before.
Our questions, if we are willing to go there, allow the depth of our conversations to increase massively. They can support a wonderfully intimate conversation that calls someone to truly own who they are, who they have chosen to become. Questions can call people to see how powerful they are. They can call people to recognize who they are and how they are living their lives are simply the results of past choices, based on past beliefs.
If we find we don’t like who we are, or we don’t like the life we are leading, we have just as much power to recreate our lives.
We can transition into one that supports who we want to be at this or any stage in our lives. It only takes a question to cause someone to think about something or to think about it from a different perspective.
Stop and think for a moment, if someone asked you a deeply personal question, “Are you truly happy with the life you have created?” would you have an immediate response with no thought, just the answer you “should” have, the “simple” answer, or would you slowly review your life and life choices, realizing they have created this life you are living. Would saying “Somewhat” call you to review and make changes to have a life that is excitingly feeding you and calling you to more?
Would you then judge yourself for not having the illusionary “perfect” life at this moment? Could you simply see, with compassion, the areas where you are merely surviving? Where you are “tolerating”. Would you be willing to claim freedom to thrive and have passion? Would you be afraid that may require changes, even major changes in your life?
What questions have you avoided asking yourself? Asking others in your life? Telling yourself you don’t want to make the “other” uncomfortable is a safety net. Can you see that not making yourself uncomfortable also had a big piece in that resistance? Safety isn’t bad, it just doesn’t allow for passion, vibrancy, outrageousness, OR difficult questions. Find the ones you want to ask and risk coming alive, enlivening the relationships you are in, and opening the door to our future. All because of a question…
Call or write to me if you need help, as a Business/Life Coach & Confidant who can easily support you in asking those questions of yourself and others. Why not, they are just questions!
