We talk about ‘wrapping things up’ before Christmas: presents, projects, work. Whilst not everyone shares and celebrates this festive break, for many it is at the least a holiday and forms a natural chapter break.
These chapter breaks are important: across out lives and through each year. Birthdays, anniversaries, state and religious holidays, all of them mark out the familiar tempo of the year. Graduation, retirement, these form bookends of sorts to our working lives.
Our favourite television programmes are marked out in Seasons, or sequels, trilogies or remakes, each carving out a new story, a new adventure, and each consigning the previous to ‘old’.
But our leadership does not come in chapters, holidays, or blocks: it’s more likely to be defined as ‘how we turn up’. Which is odd in someways, because it implies that what we have now is good forever, and does not need a reboot.
Use your sixty seconds today to consider how you would mark out the chapters of yourself as a leader.
For example: would it be your twenties (stumbling between jobs, saving up, the odd mistake), thirties (settling, ‘doing your time’, progressing), forties (a setback, a refocus) etc. Or would it be marked out by degrees and qualifications (undergraduate, industry, interest).
Or would you mark it in a different way: satisfaction? Effectiveness? Reputation? Money?
Chapters give us a chance to pause and reflect: Seasons allow us to introduce new characters (or recast old ones) - the chances are that you are a different leader today than you were ten years ago, but can you spot the breaks?
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