Chapter 57.
Wake Yourself Up

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death.

—James F. Bymes, former Secretary of State

Change will scare my people to the degree that it scares me.

So another way to consciously build my inner strength as a leader is to increase my awareness of what life is like, what the world is like, and what the business community is like. As I become more aware of that, I become a better leader.

I don’t want to just put my head into the sand, and say, “But we’ve been doing it this way for 20 years.”

I don’t want to always be heard saying, “I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to be aware that anything’s changed. I just want everything to be like it used to be; I want people to be the way they used to be.”

But if I don’t want to have a real understanding of what people are like today, especially younger people, and how they’re perceiving life, my leadership skills will decline over the years, and pretty soon I’ll become almost irrelevant.

As Nathaniel Branden writes in Self-Esteem at Work:

We now live in a global economy characterized by rapid change, accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs, and an unprecedented level of competitiveness. These developments create demands for higher levels of education and training than were required from previous generations. ... What is not understood is that these developments also create new demands on our psychological resources. Specifically, these developments ask for greater capacity for innovation, number one, self-management, number two, personal responsibility, number three, and self-direction.

It used to be that leaders were led by other leaders, managers were managed by other managers, and there wasn’t that much wiggle room in between. We were told what to do, then we told other people what to do, and it was basically a hierarchical, military-type system. A topdown silo.

But now, things are so complex and ever-changing—it’s like calling audible plays at the line of scrimmage every single time, instead of running regular plays. That’s what global business life is like right now. Life has changed profoundly. And it will continue to change even faster as time goes on. That’s good news for a leader committed to being more and more awake to it.