Know Yourself!

We have now acquired some ideas of what leadership is, and why we ALL need leadership skills. Let me recap a little here. We need to understand and implement leadership skills because we all have some types of non-negotiable conflict in our every day lives. Non-negotiable conflict leaves only three choices: change/resolve the situation, accept the conflict as-is, or leave the situation. Each of the three choices is a valid answer depending on each personal situation.

Take, for example, a conflict in the self. This can be a “bad ” habit. What is “bad”? Whatever presents an obstacle that prevents meaningful growth. This is a fancy way to say “bad” is anything that prevents or interferes with life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.

Let's take something fairly obvious, like smoking. Smoking causes various types of sickness, including things like colds and cancer. The greater frequency of colds can be an obstacle to happiness, unless you enjoy the symptoms and the lost time that could be spent on something more fun. Cancer can certainly prevent meaningful growth and cause negative feelings in the self and in others. Let us apply the three choices here. Acceptance means sickness, death, negative feelings and the destruction of harmony. Leaving the situation means quitting. In this case, this is the same as changing/resolving the conflict. This means health, happiness, and restoring harmony. So how do we leave/change/resolve the conflict? By quitting. Can we use the implementation of leadership skills to solve this non-negotiable conflict? Yes!

The application of leadership skills here can empower you to get rid of the habit that causes the conflict. This is more involved than it sounds on the surface, because the root cause of the habit may be complicated and deeply ingrained. Rather than accept the habit and letting it take over your life, you can formulate a strategy to defeat your inner opponent and restore harmony in your life. Of course the same principles are applied to conflict with environment, conflict with another, and conflict among leaders.

How is this done? We will start with the most important and most basic requirement in formulating a winning strategy. Before anything else, before formulating the strategy, you must KNOW YOURSELF, and KNOW YOUR OPPONENT. If you do not know yourself, you cannot know your goals, your strengths, your weaknesses. No winning strategy can be formed without knowing these things. Harmony cannot be restored in your life if you do not know what “harmony” means TO YOU. Not to someone else, not to your friends, family, mother, father, adviser. TO YOU. You and only you can know yourself. There are some excellent systems for doing this. You can find, experiment with and choose the best one for you. (If you need help with that, please contact me because I have been of some help to many people on this path.)

Let us briefly discuss choosing your perspective. There are not problems, only challenges. There are no enemies, only opponents. Changing and choosing your perspective and perceptions is an effective tool to help overcome conflict. Choosing to see enemies and problems as opponents and challenges allows you and your organization to approach leadership skills as a way to understand, accept, tolerate, and facilitate. This is the way to create lasting triumph and harmony.

If you do not know your opponent, the same applies. You will never know how to resolve the conflict in a way that can create harmony for your opponent (and yourself) if you do not know the goals (motivations) of your opponent, the things that make your opponent tick.

Applied to the habit, knowing yourself means finding out why the habit was formed in the first place. You must come to a deep understanding of what triggers the behavior. Knowing your opponent means knowing why your inner opponent craves the habit. These things, among others, will help you to formulate a strategy that will effectively and permanently refocus your energies and change your situation, resulting in elimination of the habit and its negative influence on your life (harmony). Knowing yourself and your inner opponent will help prevent you from initiating the change when you are not strong enough to overcome the challenge. Losing the conflict will only strengthen the inner opponent.

Here we have advanced the idea of leadership, why we are all leaders, and the concept of knowing yourself and your opponent. The next post will present the Calculations, and discuss some central concepts of the Art of Strategy.