Storytelling – Leadership Narratives that Build Healthy Communities
Storytelling: Leadership that build healthy communities is such a timely theme to talk about.
“If we want the best out of our people, we have to treat our people well. You can’t rely on them being resilient if you’re trying your best to kill them with structure. We are maturing to be more focused on the contributor, not the contribution. The biggest piece of resilience is believing that you can rebound, you can overcome, you can come back, you can heal. To believe that you can’t, proves you can’t, and makes it so you won’t. You’ve got to believe that you can overcome. Being broken will be the anomaly rather than the norm. You’ve got to be well before you can help others be well.” says David Taylor Klaus.
Life Rhythm
Work is just an aspect of life. Just like family, community, travel, freedom. It doesn’t matter what your drivers are, they’re all part of your life, just like work is. , The idea of work doesn’t fit into a nice tidy container anymore. We’re trying to create a nice rhythm across those things. What we’re really working towards is a life rhythm. Finding that fluid, harmonic rhythm across all the beautiful components of our world is the new normal.
If the leader is not focused on their own well-being, then every push, every initiative within the organisation tied to well-being is hollow, at best. That’s completely inauthentic. One of the things we can work with leaders on is a holistic view of their own self-care. There is no such thing as well-being in an organisation where the leader is modelling imbalance. The first step is actually leaning into it, living it, and thereby modelling it.
We now understand what’s required to be at the top of your game. Bludgeoning through is not what works to be at the top of your game.
“Celebrating the fact that you’re working well in a system pushes us towards insanity – well-adjusted to a sick system. It’s not something to celebrate.”
“The valuation problem is huge. When we value people for what they do, who they be, that’s why I have a job. Right? So, the folks I work with are the ones who have gotten to that point where, in order to get better at doing any of the things they want to be doing better, it’s time to get better at being who they be; who they are at their core.”David reflects.
“So they’re shifting that focus to doing the internal work that we haven’t been socialised to do along the way. So, in our forties or fifties or some lucky ones thirties, decide, oh yeah, the work starts here. That’s how I’ll get better at doing all the things I want to do. But that’s by getting better at being me. So, much of our medical system here in particular, and medicine in general, is based on a break-fix model. It’s broken.
Let’s fix it! It’s not based on a wellness as a priority. What I am resilient towards is my wholeness, not a broken state. Authenticity is wellbeing not well looking. You have to be well to help others be well. Help yourself first so that you can help and model for others. And that’s the core of well-being. It is a holistic whole-body, whole-brain, whole-heart, whole-spirit. It has to be whole. It can’t be the mullet!
