Day #679 - Shadows

The shape of your shadow

This morning, when I came down for breakfast, I noticed that the Christmas Tree casts a shadow across the wall. The notion of shadows is one that we explore in the Quiet Leadership work: if you lead in the light, then you cast a shadow. Not because you are a bad leader, but because you lead.

In the conversations on the Quiet Leadership programme, people always explore the tension between the shadows that we need, to shelter from the sun, to find sanctuary, and those that silence us, that are cast upon us and that we cannot escape from. Shadows that steal your voice.

Use your sixty seconds today to consider the shape of the shadow that you cast.

Does it fall by your feet or stretch into the distance?

In Quiet Leadership - which considers leadership in the very smallest of actions - we talk about how our challenge is not to try to avoid casting a shadow, but rather to understand how we see into it. To be mindful of the fact that our impact occurs both in the light, and in those spaces that we cannot see through our own eyes. We can only truly understand our impact and effect through the eyes of others.