#1: Accept the Moment

The first letter of A in ACT stands for acceptance. A first step toward greater peace is seeing and accepting that life and leadership will always contain a range of seemingly opposing experiences. Life can bring happiness, joy, learning, growth, and achievement, and it will also bring its fair share of sorrow, grief, pain, hurt, anger, and sadness. Even things your mind deems as positive—such as getting a promotion, closing an acquisition, or making that lucrative sale—can just as easily bring feelings of stress and vulnerability. All new things bring both a level of joy and a level of uncertainty.

Name the Resistance: What Don’t You Accept? Part of cultivating a best self includes being able to ride the wave and stay in flow even amid that mix of experiences and emotions. This requires increasing your capability to manage resistance within yourself. Resistance may be a good sign to pay attention, or it can be a cue to trust your intuition that something is wrong. However, know the point of diminishing returns with resistance—when good worry becomes rumination or becomes unproductive.

Taken to the extreme, the instinct to run from what feels adverse can burn up a lot of unnecessary and unproductive time and energy. When we continually avoid and resist what we should be paying attention to, we stall out or even regress. Especially when we’re faced with the unknown or hit a setback, it can be easy to fall into the downside of resistance. This kind of resistance usually looks and feels like this:

• In your mind: I WISH THIS WEREN’T HAPPENING.
• In your heart: I WANT AND EXPECT SOMETHING ELSE.
• In your body: I’M SO TENSE (OR IN PAIN, OR TIRED).

Physicists define resistance as “the degree to which a substance or device opposes the passage of an electric current, causing energy dissipation.”¹ The greater the degree of resistance, the more energy is lost. Think about that in terms of your development as a leader—the more you resist or oppose what’s happening, the more energy you lose. How often do you experience resistance and the subsequent energy drain that comes with it? See if you’ve found yourself experiencing any of the following forms of resistance in the past month:

• You miss “the good ol’ days” and want things to be like they were before the company reorganized.
• You can’t stand the things you have to work on while you’re in the process of making a key hire.
• You wish the colleague who annoys you most would change their ways or just resign.
• You really wish that someone could give you reassurance that you’ll get promoted.
• You hate that you caught a terrible cold right at the worst time during the quarter.
• You are resentful that you had to leave behind the more leisurely pace you had during vacation.
• You feel jealous that your classmate from business school makes more money than you do.
• You look at pictures of yourself from another time, annoyed that you are not as fit as you once were.

All these feelings are entirely natural. But when you’re caught up in resistance, you’re not present to what is happening right in front of you. You’re wasting a lot of energy in feeding your resistance and feeding Leader B—which keeps you from addressing the issue that’s bothering you.

What’s the opposite of resistance? If we turn back to physics for just a moment, we find that resistance’s opposite is conductance. Conductance is “the ease with which an electric current passes” through a conductor; a conductor is a substance through which electricity flows.² Let’s again think about this in leadership terms. If you’re not resisting—if you’re accepting—you’re gaining energy and allowing energy to flow. Therefore, for greater “leadership conductance” and flow, acceptance is the doorway to gaining energy and change.

Be Honest: What’s in Your Control? What Is Out of Your Control? Acceptance is not giving in, giving up, or being passive. In fact, acceptance is all about being honest and facing your situation head-on so you can take constructive action. When you are in Leader A mode, you are more quickly able to separate what is out of your control (e.g., “I can’t change that annoying colleague’s personality,” or “I can’t stop the reorg from happening”) from what is within your control (e.g., “I am going to have more difficult conversations,” or “I’m going to more proactively figure out how I fit into this new structure”). Once you’re clear on what you can’t control, you can stop wasting time and energy ruminating about it.

All of this awareness requires a certain level of wisdom and discernment, and that requires that we allow ourselves to fully see and own up to what’s happening, even if it’s a situation we don’t like or that doesn’t feel good. Remember that one of the chief values of self-spectating is to see reality as it really is, to be fully aware of the present moment, in whatever form it arrives. As my son’s volleyball coach tells the team, “Sometimes you have to embrace the suck.” “Embrace the suck” is a wonderful mantra from Brené Brown’s book, Dare to Lead, and the coach uses it to help the team when they have to get up early for tournaments and are tired and hungry and generally unhappy.³ But it’s a good mantra for anyone who is struggling with acceptance. I’ve certainly used it to help me get through some difficult weeks of travel and intense work.

Let’s say you really don’t like that extra fifteen pounds you put on. What’s the first step in doing something about it? Acceptance. Without acceptance, you stay stuck in either attachment to the past (when you weighed less) or somewhere in an imagined future (when you will weigh less). Acceptance brings us to a more truthful, open state. It’s only from there that we can take purposeful, helpful action rather than avoid a situation or take a toxic or negative action. This applies to anything in life, whether it’s losing that stubborn fifteen pounds, making a clear and direct request of our annoying colleague, more proactively finding opportunities in the reorg, or just getting into bed to get over that cold more quickly.

If you find that your resistance runs especially deep, then a lack of acceptance may be the issue. One leader, after weeks of self-spectating and writing down her observations, noticed a pattern: any time she found herself “endlessly complaining,” it was a cue that she was in a state of high resistance. As she continued spectating and became more present to the moment, she noted that the weeks she had virtually no white space on her calendar and an overflowing inbox made her feel “nagged and bombarded from all sides,” which in turn left her irritable and frazzled and far more apt to complain. This leader learned to accept that an empty inbox wasn’t realistic—and that neither was it realistic that all those meetings she was saying yes to tapped into her highest and best use. She realized she’d drifted off into extremes—I want an empty inbox; it’s imperative that I attend every meeting—and that accepting the reality of the situation and aiming more for the middle way was her path to far greater peace and less resistance.

Let Go to Accept. Letting go of old patterns and areas of resistance can sometimes happen in an “aha moment,” especially for everyday matters such as resistance to working on that expense report, to coming back from vacation, or to our email inboxes piling up. In cases like these, just being able to recognize that the expectation to have an empty inbox is not reasonable, for example, especially during a busy season, can ease the resistance.

But we all have areas of resistance that are deeply embedded, such as an attachment to an idealized image of ourselves, or the expectation of how we want something to turn out. When resistance is strong, coming to acceptance and being present is a much slower process, and sometimes, frankly, it’s never-ending work.

When we find ourselves in a transition or change, we often go through several stages that can look like this:

When you look at the stages noted here, you can see there’s a process involved in moving from resistance to acceptance, and ultimately to a new way of being. I don’t think we can sugarcoat or be naïve about the work and time that’s required when we’re not at peace and when resistance is getting in the way of taking on larger roles or of being effective, present, or satisfied. Getting to acceptance often means having to get real with yourself and experience difficult emotions such as anger or resentment, or the underlying sadness, grief, or vulnerability that comes with it.

I know for me personally, one of the hardest things I’ve had to come to peace with is being a full-time working parent. On my Leader B days, my lens is cloudy, and I feel resistant and resentful. I see work and my family as an “either-or” problem, as competing commitments rather than parts of myself that compose a larger whole. I end up annoyed that I’m on the road or frustrated that I’m working late again, or guilty and sad that I’m missing out on being with my son. The inner critic in my head is louder than ever, and I end up wasting a lot of energy resisting the fact that I’m in a busy period. Left unchecked, I telegraph the repressed and denied emotions as stress to my team, bring a subpar self to clients, or, ironically enough, am distracted and not present when I finally get to be with my family.

I recently read a Time magazine profile on Serena Williams that powerfully and poignantly captured the pull between the desire to be our highest and best as a professional and our highest and best as a parent. No stranger to the limelight, Serena found herself the subject of a different sort of media coverage after getting back to the courts following a birth that brought life-threatening complications, multiple surgeries, and a difficult recovery. While the world marveled over her extraordinary athletic ability, Serena agonized over missing out on time with her infant daughter while she trained. What carried her through the low moments, she said, was knowing moms around the world were rallying around her. She dedicated her return to Wimbledon, where she made it to the finals, “to all the moms out there who’ve been through a lot.” Which didn’t necessarily make it any easier: “Some days, I cry,” she said. “Some days I’m really sad. I’ve had meltdowns. It’s been a really tough 11 months. If I can do it, you guys can do it too.”⁴

Even for Serena Williams, who is at the top of her profession and whose success has afforded her ample resources, including help with childcare, finding balance between being a full-time professional athlete and a parent is a struggle. Even Serena Williams must make the conscious effort to be present and see the moment for what it is, and then make a choice to act from a Leader A mindset. Sometimes that means hitting the gym, sometimes that means protecting her processes so she can perform at her best, and sometimes that means adhering to a strict time limit on her workouts so she can protect time with her daughter. Like all of us, she’s learning as she goes and making decisions in the moment. “Nothing about me right now is perfect,” she said. “But I’m perfectly Serena.”⁵

Some areas of acceptance are easier to get to than others. They all need to be handled with self-compassion and self-care, and when we find that our resistance is running especially deep, part of living out of Leader A mode is knowing when we need to reach out for help—and having the courage to do it.

EXERCISE

Leadership Conductance—Move from Resistance to Action

Own and Embrace All Parts of Yourself. The A in ACT is also about accepting all the parts of ourselves and the full range of our experiences.

There are parts of ourselves we feel pride in and that define our leadership identity: “I’m a good person. I’m a strong person. I’m a visionary. I have a huge capacity for work and tons of grit. I achieve many great things. I’m a fun, optimistic person. I can see across the horizon faster than others can.”

Likewise, there will always be parts of ourselves we wish we could tuck away and ignore: “I’m overly ambitious. I can be petty. I feel overwhelmed. I am vulnerable. I’m impatient. I do need others. I naturally worry a lot.”

For Mark, coming to greater peace meant that he needed to come to accept and integrate the parts of himself that didn’t feel like his idea of a leader. He didn’t like the times he felt overwhelmed, unsettled, or “not at peace.” These experiences made him feel vulnerable, which didn’t square with the image of the strong, decisive, visionary leader he prided himself to be.

But as Mark became more willing to be present to his feelings of worry and vulnerability, he realized there was actually a positive side to some of his angst and that spending so much time and energy resisting it was doing himself a disservice. On the upside, his angst kept him humble, kept him on his toes, and pushed him always to reach for excellence and high quality. His worry propelled him to dig a little deeper to get to the best outcome and solution. Mark was naturally a creative and visionary person, so he came to see that part of his process would always bring with it some amount of “inner artistic turmoil.” He’d always felt a degree of anxiety when he was on a new learning curve or in a new situation—but he realized that every time, he got up and over that curve.

As Mark came to see and make peace with the unpeaceful parts of himself, he started to accept this part of his experience with less resistance. This new self-acceptance did not mean complacency. He was always going to be someone who wanted to get better and grow. But self-acceptance did help Mark release himself from the pressure to uphold some idealized image of a mythical “superman,” and to more compassionately see he was both an excellent leader and also a leader who could still improve. With this vision in place, he could begin letting go of the judgment of the parts of himself he didn’t like and direct his energy toward improving.

Acceptance doesn’t mean we resign ourselves to a negative situation or give up on an area that needs improvement. Acceptance is ultimately about truth-seeking—the way you might conduct diligence for an acquisition or when trying to get to the best answer on a business problem. Only when we accept the truth of a situation can we take any meaningful action.

#2: Be Content in the Moment

The C in ACT stands for contentment. Before we delve deep into contentment, let’s first look at its flip side, dissatisfaction. There’s a lot of talk about attaining satisfaction in your life and in your career—indeed, we’ve spent considerable time on it within these pages. I certainly want career satisfaction for myself, my colleagues, and the leaders I work with. But paradoxically, dissatisfaction is often what you need to find contentment.

Keep the Value of Dissatisfaction. Take a look at Mark. Some of his feelings of dissatisfaction and angst kept him motivated and on a continual quest for improvement. This makes perfect sense; if you’re fully satisfied with your development and your performance, there’s little incentive to grow and improve.

Dissatisfaction, rather than being a sign of failure or viewed as a shortcoming (“If I were on the right track, I wouldn’t feel so dissatisfied”), should be seen as a powerful message. It can tell us we’re ready for a next chapter in life, or it can be a signal to a team that the organization is ready for its next transformation. As with Quadrant II in the purpose quadrants, dissatisfaction may be the cue that it’s time to expand your role or move on altogether. Or maybe it’s a signal that you need to upgrade or realign to one of the Ps. Whatever it is, dissatisfaction is a signal to pay attention, and it is almost always a harbinger of progress or change. Innovation and progress are born from dissatisfaction. If you’re like many leaders, including myself, you’re wired to experience dissatisfaction more easily than most—and this is partly because you like to achieve, take things to the next level, and strive to push past your own perceived limits.

All of this said, when there is no contentment to temper our dissatisfaction, we become mired in constant negativity, like the leader who found herself “endlessly complaining.” We see the glass as perpetually half empty, and we get stuck in that gap that led Mark to return to coaching—that space where we’re neither really here nor there. It’s a common experience, actually, to get stuck longing for the past or living with an eye toward some promised land where we convince ourselves that everything will be perfect. Our brains are wired to move toward pleasure and away from pain—or toward the easy route and away from that which takes effort. The goal is to keep the creative and transformative benefits of dissatisfaction while also being able to taste the contentment of what is occurring right now.

Set an Internal Barometer for “What’s Enough.” In a world of countless choice and everyone telling you that more is better, the next part of finding contentment is setting an internal barometer for what is enough. This is a completely subjective question with no single, concrete answer, but I think it’s something that every leader must consider. Almost every pitfall noted in chapter 1 stems from a loss of connection to an internal barometer of what is enough, and to an inner self-confidence and humility that knows that we already are enough.

With all things—even our strengths and our greatest pleasures—there is a tipping point when the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Self-awareness helps us understand when the upsides of any given thing hit a plateau. Tap into your inner spectator to simply observe, without judgment, all the places in your work and home life where you can identify a tipping point. Here are some examples to get you started:

• Organizational or functional scorecards: What are the top three to five items that are most material?
• Last deliverable or work product: What was the right stopping point?
• Last networking event: What was enough?
• Last meal: At what point were you physically satisfied?
• Last vacation: What was the ratio of activity to rest? What was enough?
• Home: What activities reflect who you are today and are actually necessary? What is enough?
• Kids’ schedules and activities: What is actually enough? What is too much?

What’s enough is different at different stages of life, and even from day to day. Only you know where that line is for yourself. But the practice of asking yourself what is enough is critical, as it is far too easy to allow our comparing minds to find external barometers for that answer. One of the most heartfelt writings I have ever read on this concept comes from my dear colleague Stephen Blyth, a professor at Harvard University and former CEO of Harvard Management Company. In an article for the Boston Globe, Stephen explained how his journey with cancer led him to understand what is truly enough. “Months earlier I had been a chief executive overseeing 275 people and billions of dollars,” Stephen wrote. “Now the prospect of the electricity bill overwhelmed me.” His lowest point arrived near the end of chemotherapy treatments as he was scheduled to return to teaching. His oncologist had assured him he was physically ready, but Stephen felt so overwhelmed that “the idea of lecturing seemed utterly fanciful.” A social worker at Dana-Farber helped him accept the moment for what it was—and then take appropriate action. In short, she helped him see the one thing that needed doing in that moment. She helped him see what was enough.⁶

Namely, all he had to do in that moment was arrange a meeting with his teaching fellows. And to make that happen, he needed to send an email. “It’s all you need to do this week,” the social worker pointed out. “She knew it was all that I could do,” Stephen wrote. “It was enough. I sent the e-mail, and felt the first stirrings of self-compassion, a word whose meaning I was only beginning to grasp.” That was the beginning of Stephen’s total recovery—physically and otherwise. After his first lecture he found himself thoroughly exhausted. But again, someone arrived with just the right word: “You are teaching with chemo?” a colleague said. “That is … unbelievable. That is way more than enough!” That became Stephen’s mantra: “teaching and chemo is More Than Enough.”⁷

While you may not face a life-threatening illness like Stephen, it’s safe to say that we’ll all reach points where we wonder if we can go on, and wonder what’s enough. We can all learn from Stephen’s wisdom of being fully present to ourselves, calibrating what is enough with self-compassion, and living life as fully as we are able. When life seems to be coming at us from all sides and we feel we’ve reached our maximum capacity, it can be a lifesaver to remember that what’s truly enough is simply the one thing you need to do next.

Add an Attitude of Gratitude. Just as much as it comes from knowing what’s enough, contentment comes from being grateful for what we have. Even if you have big goals you still want to achieve, working toward them shouldn’t come at the exclusion of being grateful for what you already have now. In fact, research has consistently shown that gratitude is good for our physical and mental well-being and also has tremendous benefits for accelerating and enhancing performance. People who feel grateful are more willing to help others, are more patient, and have greater reserves of willpower.⁸ Experiments have shown that when people feel grateful, they are twice as willing to forgo an immediate smaller profit so they can invest it for a longer-term gain. Gratitude even has a beneficial social effect: people who feel and express gratitude tend to show enhanced feelings of social connection and relationship satisfaction.⁹

Researcher and bestselling author Shawn Achor has written and spoken extensively on the topic of gratitude. Achor’s team found that the brain simply works better when we’re feeling positive and optimistic—and that one of the best ways to feel positive and optimistic is to cultivate gratitude. A practice “as simple as writing down three things you’re grateful for every day for 21 days in a row significantly increases your level of optimism, and it holds for the next six months,” Achor said.¹⁰ And increased optimism and positivity even translate into better performance and better bottom-line results. Achor summarizes some of the research: workers who scored low on a life satisfaction test stay home an average of 1.25 more days per month, which translates to a decrease in productivity of fifteen days per year. Moreover, Gallup researchers found that retail stores whose employees had higher life satisfaction scores generated $21 more in earnings per square foot of space than other stores, adding $32 million in additional profits for the whole chain.¹¹

One of the most powerful descriptions of gratitude I’ve ever read comes from Alan Morinis, author of Everyday Holiness. A participant in a leadership development program introduced me to this book, and it’s one that I’ve really come to treasure. Says Morinis on gratitude and its power:

Practicing gratitude means being fully aware of the good that is already yours.… Gratitude can’t co-exist with arrogance, resentment, and selfishness.… Yet gratitude doesn’t come easily to us, and it usually takes some effort to develop this quality through practice. When we practice gratitude, we make an effort to heighten our awareness of the gifts we already possess and so relieve ourselves of the exhausting pursuit of the ever-receding targets of those things we think we lack. No wonder gratitude satisfies the soul. It frees us from compulsive grasping, and so gives us back our lives.¹²

As I have considered how to cultivate more contentment in my own life, I’ve created a mantra to use whenever I start to feel overwhelmed, stressed, or tempted to take on more than I should. In those cases, I try to bring some self-compassion and say to myself: “Let me have the humility to know what’s enough, the gratitude to see that it’s all enough, and the peace within to know that I am enough.”

#3: Trust in Self and Life in the Moment

The third part of ACT is meeting the moment with a greater trust in yourself and in life. The reality is you’ve been successful in the past, you’ve met incredible leadership goals and challenges in the past, and as long as you understand your own success cycle, you’ll do it again. In the midst of being in Leader B mode, it’s easy to lose sight of the wins of the past as well as the fundamental capacity you have and will always have to learn, grow, and adapt. Trust in self and life is part of tapping into Leader A, who can see this bigger picture.

Get Updated to Who You Are as a Leader Now. Let’s look back to Mark. While part of his DNA was to be a bit anxious about performance and improvement—and he could leverage that unease to fuel and support core values such as humility, hard work, and the grit to keep going—he had gone over the tipping point. What was previously helpful was now hindering him from being the leader he wanted to be. Mark needed to update his understanding of who he was and where he was as a leader now. It almost felt like there were times when Mark still saw himself as that younger banker he was from years ago instead of fully embracing and owning the seasoned executive he now was.

I was recently with a group of fifty executives at a retreat. Their boss opened the retreat by asking the group to share what they would change from the previous year, without remorse or regret. To my surprise, over half the executives said they wished they had trusted their gut and intuition (or as this group called it, their “belly barometers”) more. Many described knowing it was time to let someone go, or knowing it was time to make a certain investment, and rather than pulling the trigger, they dragged their feet on it.

One CEO I worked with pointed out the importance for leaders to embrace what he called “the paradox of paranoia and trust.” He described how he and his executive team always held “a healthy level of paranoia” that kept them on their toes as well as a deep level of trust that they had hit major milestones before, and they would do so again.

As with all things, balance is necessary. What this CEO meant by “healthy paranoia” could be described as vigilance, focus, and attention to detail. But in excess, it’s hypervigilance, obsession, tunnel vision, or getting lost in the details. At this end of the spectrum, unhealthy paranoia shifts us to a Leader B lens and a “mindset of scarcity” where we don’t trust that the next sale will come in or that we’ll reach the next goal. We don’t trust our colleagues, and we don’t trust that others will think we’re adding value or know that we are capable. We telegraph to the world that we’re in it for ourselves at all costs and become preoccupied with trying to prove that we’re the smartest in the room. Or, we telegraph our insecurity and become preoccupied with grasping for some kind of acknowledgment or nod that we’re okay.

And while perhaps the majority of driven, ambitious leaders don’t find themselves going to the other extreme with trust, it’s certainly possible. Trust taken to the extreme—or assuming that things will somehow “magically” work out—can lead to complacency, stagnation, and underperformance. This end of the spectrum may not be as common, but it’s a great reminder than anything in excess can go awry.

The bottom line here? Building more trust to balance our self-doubt and our self-preservation requires that we take some time to stay updated on who and where we are now as leaders. We can look back to our results and our experience and know that we did well—and trust that we will do so again.

Engage in a Chapters Review. One exercise I’ve developed to help leaders look back and gain a wide-angle, Leader A perspective on their leadership journey is a tool called the Chapters Review, which is where I began with Mark. Like a business that does a quarterly review, we sit down together in a safe and private space and look back on all the chapters of the leader’s life and career.

We rarely take the time to really examine each chapter of our lives, and we miss out on fully integrating the role that each chapter has played in shaping who we are, what we know, what values are important to us, and who we are as people, professionals, and leaders. Given the lightning speed at which most organizations operate, it’s not surprising that we seldom pause for such a comprehensive retrospective. But slowing down and making time to look at what has transpired to date is invaluable. If spectating yourself is cultivating self-awareness in the moment, the Chapters Review is a concentrated exercise in big-picture self-awareness. It gives you the opportunity to look at all the pieces together and see how each has informed and amplified the rest.

Harvard Business School professor Lakshmi Ramarajan says that the process of learning, growing, and developing an integrated self is one of construction and meaning-making. As leaders explore their life stories and process their experiences, they develop a deeper understanding of themselves—of who they are and how they came to be that person. Ramarajan says that this is a lifelong journey in which we are always discovering the next layer, “much like peeling an onion.”¹³

Chapters Review Exercise

Remember Who You Are. For some professionals, the Chapters Review reminds them of who they are at their core—beyond what they’re producing. We can become so focused on results that it’s easy to forget who we are at the level of being versus the level of doing—and that we are complex individuals who are so much more than our current job.

One leader named one of his chapters the Soccer Chapter and shared how important soccer had been in his life from childhood through college, and how those early experiences defined so much of who he was now and how he viewed things. He realized that with less time now, he had lost touch with the athlete part of himself, and it was a part that he wanted to tap back into. We discussed how to add that back in—from joining an adult soccer league to attending local matches or even getting together with friends to watch soccer on TV. Anything that would take him back into that realm that had been so life-giving and energizing was a positive step.

For Mark, the Chapters Review exercise was liberating. The best thing to emerge from it was realizing he truly wasn’t interested in being anyone other than himself. He gained a great deal of energy from describing each of his chapters and recounting the skills and knowledge he’d gained from each new role, the results he’d delivered, and the contributions he’d made to others’ careers. He realized that the common denominator throughout every chapter in his life, from as far back as middle school, was his natural curiosity and capacity to learn. He had, as he put it, “a healthy compulsion” to figure things out.

In fact, the Chapters Review highlighted for Mark that he was someone who thrived on new learning curves—he really needed them to feel meaning and fulfillment in life. So rather than come at the next challenge with the same level of stress or worry, he had greater confidence that as he had before, he’d figure out this next role and challenge just the same. He said that after doing the Chapters Review, he could ease up on the need to prove himself. It showed him he actually had a great track record, and he had every reason to believe that he’d continue on his current trajectory of success. Free of that worry, now he could concentrate on areas where he felt he could make a deeper, more lasting impact, such as mentoring others in his organization, or spending more time with his family.

See the “So What.” The Chapters Review also widens our Leader A lens by helping us see how former jobs, negative experiences, or even great disappointments that may not have made sense to us at the time actually have a greater purpose. A recent client who just completed his Chapters Review shared his excitement about an upcoming business opportunity. He said he could now see how everything that had previously transpired in his career and life seemed to be preparing him for this exact moment in time. This is the kind of realization that simply isn’t possible without taking the time to pause and reflect on the totality of our experience.

A leader who started her own successful business recounted how one of the lowest points in her life was actually the springboard for her current successful, happy career. Previously, she’d worked for a terrible boss and in a toxic work environment. Before the Chapters Review, she’d looked on that chapter of her life with regret—as wasted years. But now she had a new lens and could see how those experiences planted the seed for the work she does today. “It took that level of pain in a job to spark the courage I needed to become an entrepreneur and start my own business,” she said.

A deeper knowing and peace arise as you realize that every job, every experience that preceded where you are today, whether good or bad, has value. What you once viewed as a negative experience can, through a fresh lens, reveal itself as the stepping-stone that got you where you are today. When someone says to make the most of life or the moment, I’ve increasingly come to think that this means embracing and accepting the full lot of it. When we numb out and avoid one side of the equation, invariably we lose out on the other. When we avoid our pain, we dull our joy as well.

The Chapters Review brings leaders fully up to speed on who and where they are. As leaders recount the chapters, most often they are floored by how much they have grown and expanded. They see how often they have redefined and realigned their Ps at many different stages of life. And the exercise infuses some additional trust and faith in yourself: you always have the capacity to keep growing and learning and aligning and realigning to your Ps as often as necessary.

Transition from Striving to Greater Meaning and Purpose

As I’ve seen others work through the parts of ACT, it’s incredible when I start to sense that their tight grip on things begins to loosen. They move from self-protective, defensive plays to more offensive plays, where they can be both focused and relaxed. They come to better understand that leadership development is about becoming the next best versions of themselves.

Give Yourself Permission to Thrive. Once our grip has loosened, I think it’s easier to give ourselves permission to enjoy the ride and to make decisions for our lives based on who and what gives us meaning, what feeds us, and what is true to the larger path and purpose we are called to. It’s okay now to rest, to play, to love, to feel joy, and to make choices based on what gives us meaning and a deep sense of fulfillment. The loud “should” voice that has pushed us along at earlier points has done its work and can now fall silent. As Mary Oliver said in her incredible poem “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.¹⁴

Have Principles Drive Leadership Action. As Mark worked his way through ACT, he was excited to consider how his leadership actions going forward could now more consistently stem from a set of core principles instead of the historic need to prove or outdo himself. Less pulled by the whiplash of extremes, Mark wanted to be a true steward of the resources he had and the role he was in.

While his leadership actions might not have looked different to outsiders, Mark now found himself regularly pausing to consider the purpose driving his behaviors and to what end he was engaging in an action. As Eiji Toyoda, the Toyota Motor Corporation’s former president, once said about wise leadership: “To do what you believe is right. To do what you believe is good. Doing the right things, when required, is a calling from on high. Do it boldly, do as you believe, do as you are.”¹⁵

Table 6-2 shows the distinctions between leading from a place of striving and leading from a place of core principles. There is a thin line between the two, and of course we won’t always have the perfect batting average. But being aware of what differentiates the two helps us know when we are operating from our highest and best Leader A mode and when we are not.

Accept the Ultimate Paradox: Honor Self to Transcend Self. As we come to the close of this chapter, let’s look at the ultimate paradox I’ve observed in working with leaders. As they work with the five Ps, what begins as an exercise in self-awareness and self-care in order to understand the conditions that help them be more effective, present, and satisfied leads them to a place where they feel ready to be in service of something bigger than themselves. Here is what happens each time we align to a P:

• With purpose, we reset the compass and point to where our passions and contributions lie now, cultivating a greater courage and conviction to prioritize the highest and best use of our time and energy.
• With process, we honor our natural rhythms and routines, setting up structures and rituals that align to what matters most to us, and protect our time and energy for those things.
• With people, we surround ourselves with good people, raising our game while raising the game of others, and ensuring that we and others have the support we need to keep growing and flourishing.
• With presence, we stay focused and embrace the full range of emotions within us without running away or indulging in excess, and instead are more present to the full range of our experiences.
• With peace, we come to see that we have developed the capacities to evolve, adapt, and respond to whatever comes our way, and we see and accept that we have enough and are enough, deepening inner confidence and strength.

Cultivating and understanding who we are as Leader A and the underlying conditions that support our highest and best creates the foundation to transcend the self and be in service of a purpose or mission greater than ourselves. It’s this kind of foundation that enables servant leadership and leaders who are truly paying it forward. By regularly choosing to cultivate our best selves, we grow into the leaders we want to be.

At some point, like Mark, we find that we no longer need to lead from a place of deficit or striving; rather, we hear more clearly the beat of a drum that comes from a wider perspective and the understanding that our unique, authentic path is a gift we’ve been given. When you’ve attained a certain level of external and internal power and success, the question then becomes, how will you use what you have responsibly and in service of something beyond yourself?

Leadership development and growth will always include some dimension of adding more technical skill, increasing one’s knowledge of the business or industry, and improving the softer skills, such as interpersonal or communications skills. However, as one becomes more seasoned and competent, and as one achieves more success, space opens for broader questions to come into play. Research has shown that leadership development tends to move from self-focused questions such as, “What’s in it for me, and how can I achieve my goals?” to “How can I create a shared vision that will transform myself and my organization?” all the way to, at the highest (and rarest) levels of leadership development, “How can I effect society-wide transformation?”¹⁶ Leaders move beyond an individualistic stance that concentrates on power and self-benefit to a far more expansive view that considers existential questions regarding life vocation, purpose, meaning, and giving back.

At the most advanced stages of leadership development, we find visionary leaders who are calm, focused, and peaceful within and without, even in the face of immense responsibility and enormous demands on their time and energy. These are the leaders who, according to researchers and authors David Rooke and William Torbert, possess “an extraordinary capacity to deal simultaneously with many situations at multiple levels,” and “can deal with immediate priorities yet never lose sight of long-term goals.” On a daily basis, though these leaders are engaged in multiple initiatives or even multiple organizations, they aren’t “in a constant rush—nor [do] they devote hours on end to a single activity.”¹⁷ These leaders—whom Rooke and Torbert call Alchemists—are living examples of wu-wei, the concept of “effortless action” we learned back in the introduction.

Fascinatingly, leaders at this stage of development exhibit paradoxes at every turn. They are extraordinarily productive yet rarely appear busy or rushed. They can inspire change on an organizational or even societal level yet still connect with and inspire individual employees. They are equally at home in a grand vision and the granular level needed to make that vision a reality, yet they never get lost in the clouds or bogged down in the details. And they tend to be, despite their incredible achievements, humble.

Pioneering leadership expert Jim Collins calls the kind of leader we’ve been discussing a Level 5 executive, and one of their chief characteristics is this “powerful mixture of personal humility plus professional will.” Level 5 executives (like Rooke and Torbert’s Alchemists) possess enormous ambition—but, as Collins points out, first and foremost, it’s ambition on behalf of their organizations and causes, not themselves. They are leaders so successful they have scaled the ranks of their companies or industries or even society at large, but they prefer to lead from a relative place of obscurity. They aren’t in the game for money, power, fame, or anything else that is merely self-serving. They are motivated by big-picture impact; they have become successful individually, to be sure, but for the good of the whole.¹⁸

Research further shows that the rising leaders of the millennial generation—an educated and culturally diverse group expected to compose 50 percent of the workforce by 2020—are asking the big questions at an earlier stage of career than their predecessors. Trends show that “[m]illennial workers are more likely to look for meaning and impact in their work and aren’t satisfied simply punching a clock,” and that they place a higher value on helping someone in need than on a high-paying career.¹⁹ In some ways, then, they’re beginning their careers with the bigger questions of service, meaning, and purpose—and good thing, as employees who feel inspired and deeply engaged in their company’s mission are more than twice as productive as their counterparts, and derive far more meaning and satisfaction from their jobs.²⁰

No matter your age or generational cohort, at some point in your career, these deeper, big-picture questions will eventually come up, and they are crucial to contemplate as you think about your well-being, sustainability, and long-term development as a leader.

What makes work meaningful? The answers are unique to each of us, but the results of one recent study found five characteristics that are common to meaningful work:

1. IT’S SELF-TRANSCENDENT. It benefits and is relevant to people other than oneself.
2. IT’S POIGNANT. It taps into our emotions, and not just positive ones. Researchers found that it was dealing with the challenging moments that tended to make work more meaningful.
3. IT’S EPISODIC. A sense of meaning arises from peak experiences. While the peak experience doesn’t last, the memory of it does and is incorporated into a person’s life narrative.
4. IT’S REFLECTIVE. Meaningfulness is rarely experienced in the midst of a peak experience but rather later, upon reflection (such as in a Chapters Review).
5. IT’S PERSONAL. While things like impact and effectiveness tend to be relegated to work, a sense of meaningful work goes beyond the office doors and connects with one’s personal life (for example, when a family member is proud of what you do or you become aware of how your work helps people in the community).²¹

How do we create the conditions that make meaningful work possible? We come full circle to our first P, purpose. We come back to the deeper, more aspirational aspects of work that tap into our highest and best use, and to our passion that contributes to meaning and to our long-term sustainability as a leader.

What to Remember:

• As we reach a certain level of success, the fifth P, peace, helps us to relax and give ourselves permission to feel a greater satisfaction in the leadership experience. Rather than holding on so tightly and being defensive, we shift to the offense, loosening our grip just enough that we can enjoy the ride along the way.
• Peace doesn’t need to be an abstract or soft concept. You can use the acronym of ACT as a reminder to incorporate peace into your leadership experience. The A is about accepting the moment so you can save time and energy by taking constructive and effective action for what’s within your control with more ease and acceleration. The C is about being content in the moment, knowing what’s enough and bringing more of an attitude of gratitude. The T is increasing your trust in yourself and life, knowing that you’ve achieved, learned, and grown, and you will again.
• As you increase your acceptance, contentment, and trust, your leadership actions stem less from a need to prove yourself, self-preserve, or one-up others or yourself in some way. Leadership actions are then able to flow more consistently from a set of core principles that benefit not only the leader but their teams and organizations as well.
• Leaders at peace have the humility to know what’s enough, the gratitude to see that it’s all enough, and the peace within to know that they are enough.
• As leaders develop a strong and healthy internal sense of self, they find that all the focus on honoring oneself shifts to the ability to transcend oneself. At later stages of leadership development, the highest-functioning leaders begin to ask not just “What’s in it for me?” but also questions such as, “How can I transform my team, my organization, or even society at large?” Paying it forward and servant leadership move to the forefront at this stage of development.