Ep 422: Being Reliable for the Hard Work

You can attend a retreat, leadership seminar, workshop, or have a conversation that completely changes the way you see things. The work is real, and you come home seeing things differently, only to find that the Monday meeting goes the same way and the people around you still show up as they always have. This is where integration comes in. It is the renegotiation between the new shape you created during that work and the world you left behind, which was shaped like the old version of yourself. That's where the bulk of the work happens when you come back.

Your life has precisely enough time and space for everything inside your current life. Yet, creating something outside of your current range requires more than finding spare time or rearranging your schedule.  The way you spend your life is connected to the person you've learned to be, and the temporary things that keep showing up can prevent you from making a real change. People grow the capacity for what matters most by doing so in the face of not yet having the capacity for it.

Getting better at something doesn't necessarily mean we've changed. In fact, the more competent we become at solving problems, the easier it can be to avoid the discomfort that real transformation requires. In this episode, we'll explore how leaders can become increasingly skilled at addressing feedback while continuing to operate from the same underlying patterns. We'll also examine the difference between solving a problem and changing who we are in relationship to that problem, and why our greatest strengths can sometimes become the very things that keep us from growing.

Leadership often begins with our assessments and judgments about other people. Yet, when we assume someone is selfish, egoic, or poorly intentioned, we can let ourselves off the hook from exploring what's actually happening. When we begin to see people as well-intentioned and innocent, we have to get curious, give them the benefit of the doubt, and look below our reactions.  

A threshold is not simply something difficult. It is the boundary between what the person you've learned to become can reliably create and what requires something different from you. Crossing a threshold means taking an action that is aligned with who you need to become, even when it feels irresponsible, dangerous, inefficient, foolish, or unjustified.

Hyper self-reliance can feel like safety. Yet becoming someone who does everything on their own can also be lonely, protecting us from vulnerability and intimacy while keeping out the very things that could make a difference.  When our strategies are designed to avoid the experiences we don't want to feel, we can study and describe why and how we're stuck without getting beyond the threshold.  Creating something new requires us to be willing to let go of control, be supported, and come back again and again to that which would set us free.  

Being reliable for hard work can be an incredible strategy for success. But when hard work becomes the answer to everything, it can leave us untrusting of our own intuitive wisdom.  The work is to notice our tendency to push over our intuitive sense, notice ourselves picking up the tools and getting ready to do the work, and to the best of our ability, let that go.

Leadership is about meeting the moment. Yet, when people speak from a place of "what is authentic to me," they may lose sight of how their words impact the group. In this episode, Adam Quiney explores how leaders can create a context for people to practice speaking, become alive to the impact of what they say in the space, and discern what the room and the moment most require.

Leadership can be an incredible experience. Yet being a leader is not just about supporting other people to move forward; it also demands that you seek out support, face your own fear, and be willing to take the courageous step beyond your threshold.

Work slop is a new term that Harvard Business coined for AI output that looks polished but has no substance. It looks good enough, passes inspection, and carries very little weight, quietly transferring the actual work to whoever's downstream. But work slop is not new. The same thing has been happening in leadership for a long time through active listening, feedback meetings, and "candid conversations" that take the form of something real without actually touching what matters.