Corazón: Essential Practices for Living and Leading from Heart.
How do you build inner strength and why does that matter to your leadership? Here are three practices to help you strengthen your inner core.
My favorite on-line yoga video is called “Corazón” (koh-rah-sohn), the Spanish word for heart.
This practice from Yoga with Adriene, is an elixir for so many things. Like how my thoracic spine likes to curl forward, crowding my center, and making me feel small and old. Or how, when I walk, I tend to walk headfirst. My shoulders and head pushing through the air ahead of the rest of my body.
If I'm to be honest, headfirst is my default way of living my life. Future-focused. Charging forward, scanning for what is not yet here. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Stuck in my head.
The Corazón and other core practices are antidotes for that.
The Corazón practice is core work in every sense of the word. It asks me to stand tall. To feel my feet on the ground. To tighten my abdomen and lift my sternum toward the sky. It asks me to move heart first into the world. It is a powerful practice both on and off the yoga mat.
I am more impactful from this place. I am more connected and useful from this place.
Leading from heart is open-hearted and compassionate. And it begins with building and maintaining a strong and stable inner core.
With a strong inner core, you can hold more, carry more, and lead more effectively.
Leadership core work is an essential part of Fire Inside Leadership's leadership development practice. It operates on the same principle as core physical strength training. Participants in our programs work to build a stronger, healthier sense of self. It supports them to feel and lead from a place of inner stability and openness to connection. It builds endurance, resilience, and flexibility.
Three ways to strengthen your inner core.
1. Train Your Attention
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”
Victor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning.
Training your attention supports you to build self-awareness, self-management, and self-trust. Meditation or other mindfulness practices are essential core practices that support attention training.
Author and emotional intelligence expert, Daniel Goleman, defines self awareness as “knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.”
By paying non-judgmental attention (and non-judgment is crucial here), you can lift yourself out of the habitual narrative of your life and into a closer relationship with reality.
With practice, you learn to observe and reflect on your thoughts as they arise. This develops the skill of meta-cognition, sometimes referred to as “thinking about thinking.” Meta-cognition is an essential skill for building self-awareness.
Self-management is another skill that arises from training your attention. Goleman defines self-management as “management of one’s internal states, impulses, and resources.”
You begin by paying attention to your body.
Emotions and urges arise as sensations in the body, often before we have any cognitive understanding of why they are arising. When you can detect and associate sensations in your body to particular emotions, you can better regulate those emotions and manage your response.
This skill allows you to create space to reflect before you act. You can use this space to override your impulses and choose healthier ways of responding. This, in turn, cultivates self-discipline, self-confidence, and self-trust.
When you can trust your mind, your judgment, and your ability to learn, you build self-confidence.
Self-management practices that foster self-trust include:
Making and keeping promises to yourself.
Building habits and rituals that support your well-being.
Developing a healthy relationship with failure that emphasizes learning.
Learning the art and practice of recovery.
Taking responsibility for your impact.
Finally, training your attention enables you to observe your behavior. This teaches you about what you value and what motivates you.
With practice, you learn to observe yourself in a way that teaches you who you are.
2. Strengthen Your Inner Guidance System.
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
Parker J. Palmer, author of Let your Life Speak.
I like to ask my clients, why does that matter?
It’s an invitation to lift up from your current struggle and remind yourself what matters most and why. This can be soothing to a troubled spirit or jet-fuel for lagging motivation in challenging times.
At the same time, I find a lot of clients get stuck on the question of finding their purpose. They feel that they are looking for a “thing” rather than a “why.” This is why Parker Palmer's quotation above, which comes from an old Quaker saying, is so useful.
Instead of asking, what’s my purpose, ask, what is my life teaching me about my purpose.
Values act like girders supporting your purpose. They are different than personal qualities or beliefs. I think of values as first principles for your life. They are deeply embedded parts of your internal operating system. They are the building blocks of your character.
“Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe. Values are your core principles in life. They might be excellence and generosity, freedom and fairness, or security and integrity. Basing your identity on these kinds of principles enables you to remain open-minded about the best ways to advance them.”
Adam Grant, from his book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.
Beliefs do and often should change as we get more information or develop greater wisdom and experience. Values are developed when we are quite young and are usually constant through our lives.
If we are not clear about our values, they can sometimes drive our behavior in ways that don’t serve us or others. For example, an unconscious and over-developed achievement value might lead to behaviors like overcommitment or micro-management.
Leadership core work enables you to understand and articulate your core values so that you can reflect on how your behavior aligns with those values or where those values might conflict. As with purpose, you can clarify your values by reflecting on the stories of your life.
What are some of your peak experiences or greatest hardships and why were these events important in your life?
What do they tell you about what you value most?
How are you honoring or not honoring those values now?
This can be a very revealing and sometimes painful exercise.
As with our emotions, our bodies can reveal to us when we are honoring or dishonoring our values. Pay careful attention to feelings of profound discomfort and dissonance, and also to feelings of peace and resonance. These sensations can alert you that your values are in play.
3. Practice Self Compassion
“Self-compassion involves treating yourself the way you would treat a friend who is having a hard time—even if your friend blew it or is feeling inadequate or is just facing a tough life challenge.”
From The Transformative Effects of Mindful Self-Compassion by Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer.
Core work, at its heart, is compassionate.
This begins with compassion for self.
Self-compassion is an essential precursor to non-judgmental self-awareness and self-management. If you lack compassion for yourself, it is difficult to own your impact. It is impossible to hear constructive feedback. It is tough to learn from your mistakes. When you are bent over under the weight of the harsh voice of your inner critic, it is impossible to move forward, heart-open.
The good news is that self-compassion is a skill that you can cultivate.
For more on self-compassion from pioneers in the area, read The Transformative Effects of Mindful Self-Compassion, by Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer.
For more on why so many of us struggle with self-compassion and what you can do about it, read Why Is Self-Compassion So Tough? - Cathy Jacob
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