Doing small actions everyday have a compounding effect. This term is widely used in the financial sector to describe what happens to every dollar you put as investment at a certain interest rate which keeps being reinvested and accumulating earnings over every dollar invested over time. We can apply the same concept to the small actions we are investing everyday in the fulfillment of our goals. Derren Hardy, author of the book “ The Compound Effect” defines it as a strategy to reaping big rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions performed consistently over a period of time.
Every day we are confronted with the choice of what to do with our 24-hours we have at our disposition. Most people do not go consciously choosing what to do at every moment in their waking time. Sadly, some people just pass through the day without ever noticing in which activities they are investing their precious time and where is it taking them to.
But what if you knew that those little, apparently insignificant things that you do everyday accumulate over time and end up being the result about who you are at the present moment? And who you will be in the future? What we call our past, is nothing more than the result of the accumulation of all the small choices we have been doing up to now.
Taking advantage of the compounding effect, we could plan our day in a way that every activity that we perform goes in relation to fulfil our goals and the kind of life we want for ourselves. Success is not a result of one single action, or a lucky event that happens randomly. Success is the result of a consistent set of actions performed over time in a way that keeps you moving forward.
Think about the endless hours of training that elite athletes invest everyday for years, to prepare for a single event, like the Olympic games or a world championship. Think about the mother who invest restless nights over several months in order to keep breastfeeding their babies as long as possible so they can grow healthy and strong. Every great effort and achievement comes from the seeds of action, consistency, perseverance and a unwavering focus on what is being done in the present.
Observing the nature can also give you great insights of the wonderful way the compound effect works. An Oak tree takes around 30-40 years to grow. At the time of planting the seed, several weeks and months can pass by without noticing any apparent movement on the soil. Suddenly, a small stem will eventually show out of the ground “out of the blue”. This small stem over time will convert itself into a full grown mature tree that can reach up to three meters high and can produce fruit and acorn for the next forty years. Oak trees can last as long as 300 years! Who would have thought, that such a tiny seed planted in the soil, will convert itself from a tiny oval into a majestic Oak tree?
Nature is a majestic teacher full of wisdom. Observe the works of nature and you will get very valuable insights about how life works. If you have a goal, but feel lost and do not know to start, do it like nature, start small. Start doing small and humble actions that bring order into your life and give you a sense of accomplishment. Get up early, do your bed, maintain order in your living space. Write down your dreams, fantasize and write down how to get there. Then decide what will you do today to reach them. It can be a small thing like writing an email, get subscribed into a course, call a friend, go out and do some sport.; read some books and invest in getting yourself as much educated as possible.
Do all those small things repeatedly and consistently and after 15 years you will be unbeatable!
When you think about the word «Leader» what comes to your mind?
The classical style of leadership has taught us that leaders show us the way: They represent a common goal, vision or ideal, which people identify with and therefore they follow the leaders call for action.
One type of leadership that hasn’t been the most popular in the business world is the coach-leader where the leader is not necessarily leading from the front. In fact, the leader is not really leading: Her job consists in sitting on the back, observing, listening and letting the others find their own way of doing things by asking questions and staying curious, fully focused on the person in front of them.
Although Goleman (2013) presents us with diverse types of leadership which can be applied according to specific circumstances, there have been numerous studies which show that the power of coaching can bring invaluable benefits to organizations, since the essence of being a coach-leader relies on helping others while unlocking their potential at the same time. It is a Win-Win for both the organization and the employees (Bungay 2016).
I have spent more than 10 years in the corporate business environment. During this time, I came across a number of bosses and leaders from all types: From the very directive and autocratic ones, all the way to the charismatic, democratic and laissez-faire ones (Goleman, Boyatzi, MkFee 2013).
I´m trying to recall when did a boss really caused an impact for me and my career. I realized that I could count them with one hand and I would even have many fingers left.
The reality is, the concept of leadership has been quite a misleading one for me. When I reflect on what is it what made a boss or a leader to have a real impact on me, the answer that comes to my mind is quite clear: I admire those leaders that trusted in my capabilities and guided me on a way that I felt I was developing and growing.
I appreciated those conversations that were not just about getting things done and describing timelines and having to prove to them how I am capable to solve certain problems. I admire a leader with a vision, but normally a vision is something that comes from one-self and your own belief systems. When a leader is interested in my vision of the company and of the way of doing things, gains automatically my respect and admiration. Therefore, coaching for development rather than coaching for performance (Bungay 2016) is something that really made a difference in my professional life.
As Goleman (2013) describes in the coach-leader style: “In a time when more and more companies are finding it difficult to retain the most talented and promising employees, those companies that provide people the nourishing development experiences provided by good coaching practice are more successful in creating loyal employees”. The coaching style might not scream “bottom-line” results, but ironically it is one of the styles that more delivers results”.
Based on a publication on the Harvard Business Review by Boyatzis, Smith, Oosten (2019) showed studies whose results proved that people tend to achieve more in a more prolonged and sustainable way when they feel physically and psychologically motivated and in a positive state. To bring people into a positive kind of mindset requires the ability to coach with compassion. When the leader shows genuine care and concern for the other person, so that at the end a reciprocal “resonant relationship” is built. Some of the key strengths of the coach-leader is their capability to display curiosity, asking exploratory, open-ended short questions that help the person recognize their personal vision, which becomes the basis on working together towards the shared goal.
The Underrated Characteristics of the Coach-Leader
When we talk about leadership characteristics, certainly there are the typical keywords that verybody knows: Charismatic, Influential, Powerful, Confident, Communicative, Problem Solver. However, for a leader to become a good coach-leader, they require other virtues that are not often related to Leadership.
Patience
In a world where information flows fast and the need for quick results is the norm, the art of patience seems to unfit with the desirable characteristics of a leader. However, by observing the main traits of the greatest leaders of our history, we can find in many occasions that one of the fundamental characteristics they had is mastering the art of patience. As Michelangelo would say “Genius is eternal patience”.
To develop patience, it requires a great level of self-awareness. Patience is defined by the common language as the capacity to accept and tolerate any kind of problems, and situations that do not develop as expected. It is done so without anxious feelings and therefore you remain emotionally stable. Leaders that show greater patience are as well the ones that end up succeeding on long term objectives and ideals.
Examples of extraordinary leaders which mastered the art of Patience were Ghandi, with his practice of non-violence ended up setting India free; Benjamin Franklin, who regarded patience and tranquility as one of the 13 virtues of a Man, virtues that he developed over time and which helped to define his character. Nelson Mandela´s patience and determination made him resist any obstacle and pay a condemn of 27 years of prison in order to see his dream come true: The eradication of the Apharteid era in South Africa.
Active Listening
Listening is the master of the skills. Unfortunately, it is as well one of the most underrated ones in leadership in the highly competitive business environments. Listening is often associated with being quiet and receptive and assertive characteristics that do not resonate with strong and assertive characters expected on leaders. However, active listening it´s a very powerful tool, that if used with enough awareness, could bring people to higher levels of understanding and unity. In your role as a leader, it is of most importance to develop exceptional listening skills, which is the ability to be able to fully focus your attention on what the other person is saying without getting into distractions. Great listeners enter into a trance, where nothing else exists outside the mutual conversation happening on the Now.
Research has shown that when active listening is present in the organizational culture, the levels of trust and cooperation are much higher than in organizations where employees feel that their opinions and ideas are neglected.
Silence
One might ask, how can silence benefit a leader in any way? In western cultures, silence has had a bad popularity on the business arena. Silence is associated with weakness, with fragility… perhaps with lack of knowledge or inability to express. However, in ancient cultures, silence is regarded as one of the highest faculties of wise men. James Allen, one of the pioneers of the field of Self-Development back in the 1800s, says it beautifully in his book As a Man Thinketh (1903): “Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of a patient effort in self-control. It´s presence, it´s an indication of ripened experience, and of a more than ordinary knowledge of the laws and operations of thought”.
In a coaching conversation, silence is the space where actually the magic happens. Silence allows the coachee to tap into his mind and reach for the solutions and answers he has been struggling to find in the “outside”. Although externally silence appears to have no content per se, actually, it is the space where everything is created. As a leader, giving people the space needed to think, reflect and answer calmly will allow for more meaningful and valuable inputs, as opposed to erratic non-sense responses triggered by a reaction to talk.
Franz Kafka, the Austrian philosopher, perfectly acknowledged it: “You need not to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not to even listen, simply wait. You need not just to even wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unmasked. It has not choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet”.
The problem solver vs the curious explorer
It is a famous fact that leaders see themselves as the problem-solvers by excellence. This is the one single quality that everybody would agree it belongs to a leader. It is the one single quality most people get paid for. The bigger the problems the leader can solve, the bigger the economic rewards she receives, and the bigger the recognition. However, when it comes to really understanding the reality of organizations and the real underlying feelings of the people, providing the answers to all of their questions and giving advice would rarely surface the root causes of the real problem.
The reality is, there is never a one simple side of the story, a solution that fits-to-all, like most businesses like to think about. The issue with the problem-solving minded people is that in the urge to jump into action, they neglect to see the full picture, and to step back and try to understand what is really going on. Assertive personalities do not hesitate to act and although action is important, if applied in the wrong direction can lead to less desirable results.
What would happen if instead of jumping directly into the solution mode, as leaders, we would simply stay open and curious, and try to discover the real causes by maintaining an explorative mind?
In a research performed by students in the University of Oregon, it was found that people who showed strong curiosity traits on personality tests performed better on creative tasks than those that did not showed a strong curiosity trait on the test. Also, people who scored higher in having interests for exploring unfamiliar topics and learning something new, were more likely to come up with creative solutions to solve problems (Hardy 2016).
After all, curiosity and problem-solving are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, a curious and open mind, will often lead to a better capacity to solve all kinds of problems. The key is not to get trapped on the egoistic self- rewarding solution mode, where the emotional need of control is bigger than the willingness to really understand the truth of things.
How to become a coach-leader?
We have been discussing so far about the benefits of becoming a coach-leader and the valuable but often underestimated traits that such leadership style requires in order to be able to truly serve the purpose of the people and the organization in the role.
Now the question is, how to become one of them?
Although one could go on and investigate and read books extensively about leadership and coaching and how the one complements the other, my conclusion is that the real starting point is when there is an inherent need of a leader to truly be able to master his own self first.
A coach-leader must demonstrate that he is able to control his own emotions when it comes to dealing with all sorts of complexities in the organizations they serve. As in the process of becoming a coach, one must observe oneself first, and work on developing the fundamental skills and self-awareness required to become an effective leader. It is an ongoing, self-development and self-mastering journey, which never ends.
“A leader. . .is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”– Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
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“May your choices reflect your Hopes, not your Fears”- Nelson Mandela
One of our most valuable and unique capabilities as humans, is our ability to make decisions. It is a well- known fact that we make on average 35,000 decisions per day . We might or might not be fully conscious about it, but actually, our life is an accumulation of all those tiny decisions we are making in our daily affairs.
Knowing that, isn´t it of most relevance to question ourselves where is the source of our decision-making process and to which extent, our decisions are serving our true desires and purposes or actually, if our own decisions are playing against us?
According to Ramón Samsó (2019) we are never alone when we take decisions. We are always influenced by two main aspects of our lives: Our internal experience and our external experience. For most people, the external experience actually defines to a great extent the way they make decisions. As we were Children, our parents decided for us, at School, our Teachers decided for us, the Educational System decides what it is what is relevant and meaningful to learn and which methodology we should use; Society decides which type of citizens we should become. Everyone seems to have an opinion about what is a good decision or a bad decision and wants make it for us.
On the other side, our internal experience is our own interpretation of the World: Our thoughts, feelings and reactions to all the information and impressions we accumulate in our lives. Driven by those emotions towards what happens to us, is how we decide to move forward. However, there are fundamental forces behind every action and decision: Every minute of our lives, we are deciding based on Love or based on Fear.
Decisions based on Fear
What is the meaning of Fear?
According to the Cambridge Dictionary (2019), Fear is “an unpleasant emotion or thought that you have when you are frightened or worried by something dangerous, painful or bad, that it´s happening of might happen”.
We are social beings that want to feel accepted and to have a sense of belonging in our society. We all have craved for attention and recognition in one way or another. So, it is not a surprise that as the years pass by and we accumulate life experiences, we tend to make decisions that are “fitting” with our family, culture, religion and geographical place we are living in. Over time, we adopt those external expectations as if they were our own, and shape our Personality in a way that fits those expectations. However, when we make decisions based on adopted beliefs rather than based in our authentic desire, we develop a sense of anxiety and insecurity. To depend on external approval becomes the norm.
Since we cannot really control all the external situations that surround our life, we become afraid and try to overprotect ourselves by covering up, either by the urge of gathering more things to feel more secure (e.g. money, relationships, food, power, etc.) or by trying to gain influence through people. As the Indian Mystic Sadhguru (2018) says “The whole need to conquer comes from the fear of losing yourself. The very need to conquer something or somebody has come to you because there is a deep fear of losing yourself on many levels (…) You feel so inadequate that you feel that the very way you were created is not enough(…)”.
One of the most common ways to express inadequacy is by saying to ourselves that we have many “Problems”. What constitutes a problem? If you ask a person on the street: Could you tell me what are your problems? It will be very likely that the list will be enormous- “Now that you ask, actually, I have so many problems. The weather is not good, I have so much stress at work, my husband does not listen to me, my children are not doing their housework…” and so the list will be endless. In the eyes of the person, all his/her “Problems” come from the outside. Everyone else is creating a problem for him/her. The size of the problem, is directly proportional to the degree of emotional attachment with the external persons and situations. By feeling that the “Problem” is not in their own control as they attribute it to the external happenings, the “Problems” tend to look bigger than themselves, thus enhancing this feeling of “I´m not enough, I´m a little person in this vast world”.
Now, the million-dollar question: How to overcome this feeling sensation of not being enough? How many times you have wanted to do something, but you were unable to act?
When we talk about desire, we talk about that need we have, an anxiety to acquire or achieve something in particular. It is at the end, a way to enhance ourselves. The problem is when this desire has sprung up from the wrong identifications, which are our limited beliefs.
Still, there is another way to express desire. There is a more positive and powerful energy, that does not have the boundaries that the fear has. Its energy has no limits and no preconditions. It is so powerful that it is the vital presence that holds everything alive. That force of energy is called Love.
Decisions based on Love
What would it feel like if you would base your decisions on Love?
What means actually Love for you? If we try to find a definition of Love in the dictionary, we find that no definition is really complete. How can you define a force with no boundaries, with our human language, which has many boundaries?
As the American Cosmologist Carl Sagan said: “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through Love.” Love is the force that drives life and which is basically present in anything and anywhere. Love is the very essence of our beings. Therefore, when we say we take decisions based on Love, we are listening to our inner intuition. Our inner Nature which tell us in whispers what is Real for us. Another interesting definition used by Gerald Jampolsy: “Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. It´s natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement”.
How do you know when you have made a decision based on Love?
When you take decisions based on Love, you don´t fear any outcome. You don´t judge beforehand if the consequences are good or bad. You trust and enjoy the process, even if the result might be unknown. This might sound strange and even unrealistic to some people, especially if you have grown up in a Culture that values results over process, or experiences. However, if we think about it: To which extent this kind of belief has helped us move forward in our aspirations? When we just value results, and not the process, the fear of failure becomes a great player in the game.
We want results, quick and with the less margin of errors as possible. This is not only unrealistic, but also very stressful. So many people prefer and decide to play small. Think conventionally, make few mistakes, and follow the most transited path. Love is still there, because Love it´s the very source of your existence, although it´s not flowing on it´s full and beautiful expression through you when you are unaware of it, being busy thinking about fear. In a place where fear exist, Love has less space to manifest. To Love is to Trust. To Trust everything: life, situations, other people and more importantly, yourself. Trust is to open yourself to life, to the outside and to everything. Show your vulnerability and embrace it. There is a popular saying that summarizes this beautifully: “To love at all is to be vulnerable”.
So, how do we know that we have made a decision based on Love?
It felt like an intuition that came from the inside, and not from the outside (i.e. family, friends, an expert, the news, etc.)
It feels right for you
It´s something meaningful for you
You feel happy when you think about it (even if it scares you a bit)
It shakes your world, by stretching your boundaries and making you grow
You don’t care about the result or the end, and you are more excited about the journey
You enjoy doing it
What matters is the effect the decision will have in other people/in the world and not only about getting benefits for yourself.
A thoughtful reflection by the great author Brené Brown (2018), which challenges our course of choice when done over fear and not over Love : “We fail the minute we let someone else define success for us. Like many of you, I spent too many years taking on projects and even positions, to prove I could do it. I was driven by a definition of success that didn´t reflect who I am, what I want or what brings me Joy. It was simply accomplish, acquire, collapse, repeat. There was little Joy, very little meaning (…) lots of exhaustion and resentment”.
At the end, the biggest gift of life when we are on the path of deciding every moment of our lives with Love rather than fear, is the amazing realization of the kind of person we are becoming: Strong, resilient, courageous, full of Love. Nelson Mandela said it very wisely: “In my life, I became to the realization that the real courage is not about not having fear, but in being able to overcome it when acting in the name of Justice, Generosity and Love”.
And you, what do you choose?
Reflections
Do you make decisions based on the “must” or in the “want”?
How do you feel at the end of your day?
How often do you choose your intuition over your rationality?
What is the worst and the best that can happen, if you decide do what you Love the most?
When you take a decision, do you think of yourself as the only beneficiary?
If you had no limits, what would you be doing with your Life right now?
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