Today, as a change from my voice, someone else’s – demonstrating the mind’s ability to see what isn’t there a lot better than I could say it.

Please follow this link for a  6.29 video clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bG7EFhMw8w&p=431E402B4A28DC29&playnext=1&index=61

So there’s YES and there’s NO and as Peter Block points out

Without your ability to say No, your Yes means nothing.

It’s the fact that we can and do choose to say No – clearly, cleanly, authentically – that gives power to those times when we choose to say Yes.

That’s not instinctive to some people. They think No is a problem. They worry how the other person might hear it. They worry they might be thought less of – weaker, or more difficult, for example – by the other person. So they keep saying Yes – or if not Yes, then all the creepy variants of “the No that tries not to sound like No” – to try and maintain an image of being, well, what is that image they are trying to maintain?

‘Yes’ all the time from our mouths is the equivalent – in terms of use of our power, integrity, ethics, however you want to label it – of those small plastic dogs you used to see in the rear windows of cars, their heads on springs so that the movement of the car produced a constant nodding. Yes, Yes, Yes…

So given the understanding that our choices matter, our words have power, then it follows that we have to be careful of the promises we make.

We’d better be clean on our Yes and our No. All the time. Every time we say them.

Why does this matter?

I watched a TV reality show the other day. The Colony. A group of volunteers are put into a pretend post-apocalyptic world and we tune in each week to see how they are surviving. On the show I saw, they made some soup, and, not having access to fridges any more, decided to store the considerable excess in a container and bury it a few feet underground. The trouble was that they did not make the seal airtight, and so when they came to retrieve the soup in a few days, it had spoiled. And the ants had got in.

My coach always challenges me to be airtight. ‘Plug the leaks’, he says. Am I living in alignment with what I espouse? A large chunk of that is being in integrity. Do I keep my word? And where I don’t keep my word, do I honor it – by warning people in advance if I am not going to be able to keep my word. My coach isn’t interested in my reasons and excuses when I lose my integrity. Because integrity is black or white, and because the world is awash with explanations and justifications. And he certainly isn’t interested in the conversations for confirmation of my friends, loved ones and allies who will be complicit with me in keeping me off the hook: “that’s OK David, I know we are all really busy!” He values my word higher than my stories.

I won’t speak of myself, but I do believe, in my being able to look at someone else and believe that they are a leader, then that assessment comes from how much integrity they have. Integrity – the power of the WORD they give and honor – is the foundation of everything else we value so much in leadership. It’s the source of inspiration, presence and vision-making; it’s the source of how powerfully they can listen; it’s the source of how honest they are (and are perceived to be). Because they don’t have any leaks. They don’t have any gaps to protect or defend. They are themselves, whole and complete (see the Latin, integer).

This is one of two essential principles I stand for in my work.

Nothing else works without this principle in place.

Many people I meet who are in leadership positions have mistakenly separated themselves from the source of their problems or challenges. They think that they are ‘in here’ (ie inside some sort of ‘self’ held by a physical body) trying to impact some sort of ‘out there’ world. The problem they have is not what they think it is: that the ‘external world’ is ‘wrong’ in some way and needs fixing or changing. The problem they have is that they’ve lost their essential relationship to this ’external world’.

When they tell me about their ’external world’ –  good, bad, and indifferent – they mistakenly believe that they are describing it to me. They are not. They are creating it.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves here.

As true as it is to say your own physical life was created – if we are going to look purely from a physiological perspective – by the symbiotic actions of your biological parents on one morning/afternoon/evening/night some years ago – so it also true to say that the Life you say you have now is also created.

Is being created.

This thing you call your LIfe (in other words the results you are manifesting) – not just from a narrative perspective over time but each moment to each moment into the ‘future’-  is/are being created by what you:

1. THINK – your focus, your beliefs, your principles, your mental frames etc etc

2. SAY – what you commit to, promise, declare, refuse etc etc

and

3. DO – your actions and behaviors.

One of the perniciousness results of traditional leadership development over the last 25 years is to embed as a cliche the traditional assumption that DOING is the most powerful of this triumvirate. Which is only true if you want to make yourself look good by saying “Enough talk, let’s take action!” in a meeting.

“Actions speak more loudly than words”, we say to each other, nodding, as if that is wise. It is of course not wise at all, because Actions are merely the children of Thought, via Speaking. Sailors staying in port because they felt the earth was flat were not heroic, but deeply flawed.

So you Think, Say and Do (TSD is my contraction of this) your life – your results – into being. And, equally true, your life is also created by what you don’t think, don’t say and don’t do. The beliefs you couldn’t hold about yourself or others. The conversations you for some reason decided never to have. The actions you didn’t take. That has created your life too.

Take some time to map your life and its future and you will see that there is nothing in that matrix, that web, that tapestry, that is other than some combination of TSD.

Which is wonderful, because if we want to create change, any change, all we need to do is focus on the TSD which are producing the current reality and the possible future.

So this essay asks you to reflect also on the truth that if you are only used to thinking in one way, you’ll exclude yourself – without even feeling anything is ‘wrong’! – from a whole other universe that suggests other possibilities. And it asks you to anticipate the central idea of the next essay, which will claim that some people use their language to describe their reality, and others use it to create their reality.

That words matter.

That – as if to challenge the traditional idea that actions are most important – all in fact you ever have as a leader is what words come out of your mouth. Or don’t…

[all in fact you ever have as a leader is what words come out of your mouth]

As an exercise, consider what happens in the instant after I ask you the question “So, how do you think [your company’s] doing at the moment?”

Or anything else you are asked, by anybody, about anything.

Overloaded, overwhelmed, busy, busy, busy.

The opposite of overload, the cure for being overwhelmed, the solution to too much busyness, is not more effective time management. It is clarity of purpose.

Imagine waking up in the morning. Maybe the snooze alarm has gone off once already and you are in that wonderful state between sleep and waking.

Imagine that your consciousness begins to voice itself in you with questions…

“Today…who do I want to be in the world, how can I show up as that more powerfully, how can I be a contribution in my society, am I willing to declare in my words, and demonstrate through my actions, what I believe I am here for?”

(I suggest these questions would be an amazing way to start the day because these are the biggest questions in our lives. So why not ask them today?)

Then, on this fictitious morning, your mind wakes up more. Out of the depths of slumber and into the bright, light world of action. “So what am I going to DO today?” But because it is the best of you speaking – from higher up your Ladder of Consciousness – it’s not the usual ‘Oh no, what’s got to get done?’ talk, that draining talk of how busy you are before you’re even out of bed. This voice is bigger than that. The conversation is bigger than that: “How can I help the people I meet today, what needs need to be satisfied? How could the world (or the business, or the family, or my health – whatever the focus is) be improved by how I serve?” That’s the next level of questioning. “How can I be of service today?”

Only then, later, when you power up the laptop and open the organizer software, is it time to manage time. But the context has already shifted, because you chose to speak from a different place. Now, having become present again to purpose, you can ask yourself from a place of power and authenticity:

“How shall I spend my time today? GIVEN THE TRUTH OF MY DECLARED PURPOSE, what, today, will I do, moment by moment, that is in alignment with that purpose, and in what spirit will I do it?”

And what will you choose not to do, because it is not in alignment with who you intend to be?

And if you are faced today with actions you agreed to carry out because you felt – yesterday – that you ‘had to’, then what agreements will you make today, what conversations will you have today, so that tomorrow is less encumbered by those things?

One more powerful YES today, one more committed NO today, will always move us into our true purpose.

So that’s one way to wake up in the morning, one way to live a life. To do a job. To be a leader.

The alternative is to try and get lots of stuff done, lots of actions taken, in the hope that eventually that amounts to something, in the hope that eventually, at that place called Later, you’ll be given time off – because you pleased enough other people with your ability to Get Stuff Done – and you’ll be able to live a life on purpose then. Later.

When I lose my purpose over a long period of time, when my life gets divorced from its direction and velocity, stuff turns up to fill the void. There’s always the stuff of Busy. But other things happen to me, too, as a consequence. When I lose my purpose, I get tired more easily, not simply because there’s a lot of things to get done, but because many of those things have lost their purpose too. How do I know what impact this Action Point is going to have? Why am I doing this To Do? What’s the use of this? Doesn’t matter, just get it done.

And that’s draining.

The other thing that happens is that I find myself more easily able to resent, judge, condemn or generally be upset with the people who I believe to be the cause of the actions I am taking. So I get more problems.

So now I need to go on a course on how to manage difficult people as well as a course to manage difficult time (time’s problem is that there isn’t enough of it, you see).

A purposeful person doesn’t necessarily do less – isn’t necessarily less “busy” (although they’d probably strike that word from their vocabulary, seeing the concept in all its true victim-nature) – but their relationships to their actions would be transformed. “I am doing this because I choose to…I am doing this because it contributes … I am doing this because it helps me be Who I Am more fully.”

A purposeful person doesn’t necessarily have fewer difficult conversations, doesn’t have fewer challenging situations. It’s just that the conversation allows the service, the situation is a landscape (however the landscape looks or feels) in which the contribution happens.

Purpose is made.

You are not born with it, it does not descend on you from a cloud. You make your purpose. It’s created, and then it creates you. And if you don’t create it, everything else creates you. You in that place of stress and conflict and too many things to do for the time available. Some people tell me that’s “the Real World”, but I think that’s created too.

So, you make your purpose – you think it and then you speak it into being.

And it can be as huge as a Life Purpose, or a You as a Leader purpose, or it can be a collective Team purpose, or it can be Unswerving Commitment to a Strategy purpose, or it can be You as Parent purpose – it all works the same in taking you up the Ladder.

And purpose erases busy.