The Pursuit of Leadership Requires Pursuit of Growth

Author: Team xMonks | Published on: Wed, 17 Nov 2021 21:04:05 +0000

You have to let life happen. Jerry Colonna adds that in between life happening and decisions we make, one cannot be a strong leader unless you allow yourself to grow, and this can only happen by leading a life examined. Hear more of life and leadership with Jerry at The xMonks Drive podcast.

Practicing Conscious Compassion

Gaurav: For me the act of compassion, inculcating compassion begins with that self checking. Right? If we think about compassion, we often think about sympathy.

Jerry: If we think about compassion, we can respond to compassion sympathetically. Right, I can look at you. And I can say, Oh, what a difficult life you have. And I am separate from and, and that can engender all sorts of distrust and power dynamics.

“When compassion is really rooted in empathy, as we were joking before the recording, your story is my story. My story is your story. Passion is based on empathy.”

It creates a connection, it creates a bridge. But you cannot build an empathetic connection without self awareness. Right? Being aware of your past, being aware of your present state, even connecting to your ruminations and anxieties about the future. So that's why that simple little question, how are you asked with the right angle with the right perspective, is radical. And the second half of that is that we are socialized. Think that asking the question, How am I feeling is selfish, self indulgent. But here again, if we think about conflicts, maybe you have a conflict with your life partner. You know, they come in and they make a statement that just incenses you. You have a choice? In that moment. You can say, “I'm actually not capable of responding from my adult self.” So I'm going to say that and I'm going to come back to a moment in time when we can come back together.

Why Do People Take Time Open

Gaurav: I personally do a lot of work with, with leaders, whether in the business world or in the corporate world. I personally feel they don't open up so early, and so easily. Why do people take a lot of time to share what they are going through?

Jerry: Because it's unsafe. Because as children, and I'm going to imagine a world, I'm going to imagine that the people that you're talking about the people you're visualizing are for the most part identified as men. Is that right?

Gaurav: Yes.

Jerry: Okay. So if we think about the way we socialized boys, we socialized boys to compartmentalize their life, right? Feelings go in one box. And the only acceptable set of feelings are either happiness or anger. Anything in between is too nuanced, and we can't feel that so there's no grief, there's no sadness. There's no space for those feelings. And then there's our output. We measure worthiness by whether or not you got good grades in school, whether or not you got into the right school, whether or not you got the right job, whether or not you have enough money, whether or not you have more money, whether or not you have more toys than anybody else. Right. And we live this bifurcated, compartmentalized, disassociated life. And then we give that person power. And we say to them, coaches like you, coaches like me, coaches like Brene, Brown will say, be authentic, be vulnerable. And the little boy in them says, I'll be damned. That's too dangerous. Because when I was a little boy, and I fell down and scraped my knee, my father came up to me and said, I'll give you something to cry about. You're gonna cry. Man up. Stand up. Be a man. Boys don't cry.

Boys don't cry, boy, and you know what, what happens my friend, you give that person we were talking about business leaders, we're talking, I'm going to extend it to community leaders, I'm going to extend it to political leaders for a moment. You give that person power, and they are suffering. Suffering is all around us. All of our teachers teach us that suffering is a part of life. They have not internalized what to do with suffering. So they scapegoat people, Oh, it's this religious sector, not that it's not us, it's them. Or it's that other country, that's the problem. And you give them enough power, without any governor's on us, without any training on what to do with pain and suffering.

And you get war. You get pilots. You get demonization of human beings. All because I fell down. And some older man said Be a man.

The Pursuit of Leadership Requires Pursuit of Growth

Gaurav: The pursuit of leadership requires the pursuit of growing up. What does that mean when you mentioned growing up here?

Jerry: So that's me being a little cheeky. And noting that despite chronological age, we have many, many, many people who hold power for children. I often visualize them as little boys and girls in adult clothing, with their overly large sleeves flapping around as they struggle to make decisions. And because they feel at a loss, they don't feel grounded. They mask all the feelings with aggression. It's your fault. Why didn't you get? Right? So what I'm trying to convey is that the process of being a true leader is a process of becoming the fully actualized adult that you were born to be. Because all adulthood, you know, if we think about the elders in our lives, and we think about those who hold the preciousness in the precious container of our communities, whether it's our religious institutions, our political institutions, our businesses. There is a groundedness about that.

There's a beautiful word, which means I'm leading, if you will, from my solar plexus, not from my prefrontal cortex, my forehead, not from the back of my throat, where I'm tight and scared, leading from the seat of my soul. With divine spot, if you will. And every now and then there are a few of us who are graced with encountering elders. And the thing that I've always noticed about elders is that they laugh more than they cry. They laugh at our absurd, flailing arms trying to be grown up and they think it's okay.

Hear the follow- up conversation at The xMonks Drive episode here.

About The Speaker: Jerry Colonna

The founder and CEO of Reboot.IO, Inc. Colonna is a certified professional coach, Colonna draws on his wide variety of experiences to help clients design a more conscious life and make needed changes to their career to improve their performance and satisfaction. He established his coaching practice in 2007. Prior to this work, Colonna was venture capitalist focused on investing in early stage technology-related startups.

In 2002, Colonna became a partner with J.P. Morgan Partners (JPMP), the private-equity arm of J.P. Morgan Chase where he led the firm’s investments in companies such as ProfitLogic Inc. Colonna served as a director at ProfitLogic until its purchase by Oracle Inc.

Colonna also serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Naropa University. Naropa University comprises a four-year undergraduate college and graduate programs in the arts, education, environmental leadership, psychology and religious studies. It is the only accredited Buddhist-inspired university in North America.

He also serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Tibetan Village Project, a not-for-profit, non-political organization dedicated to creating sustainable livelihoods for Tibetans through social entrepreneurship and educational opportunities.

He is also a director at the Good Work Institute, whose mission is to educate and connect a network of local community members and actively support their collaborative efforts to regenerate their places.

The recipient of numerous awards and a compelling speaker on topics ranging from leadership to starting businesses, Colonna has been named to Forbes ASAP’s list of the best VCs and Worth’s list of the 25 most generous young Americans. A graduate of Queens College, Colonna lives in Boulder, Colo.

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