Leadership Lessons: Finding Your Superpower vs Kryptonite
Executive coaching, toolkits, training, and other secret weapons.
Long before I entered the corporate realm of organizational and leadership development, I lived the life of a full-time martial arts instructor and practitioner. Somehow, the lessons learned over half a century in the dojos of Japan and through international competition brought me into the world of performance coaching, speaking, facilitating, training, and motivating people leaders and teams. Before I went back to school to complete undergraduate and graduate studies in the field of organizational psychology, I wound up becoming a corporate leadership development practitioner in the U.S., Mexico, Europe, the U.K. and Japan.
In this article, I would like to share a few thoughts about what it means to be a coach, sensei, and trusted advisor that helps world-class leaders and athletes, as well as entrepreneurs and corporate desk-jockeys, achieve greatness.
The balcony or the basement
Gallup StrengthsFinder, a personality inventory and growth tool-kit rooted in positive psychology, helps identify themes of talent and strength building higher levels of self-awareness and performance. The approach includes examining how our inherent traits can work for or against us (the balcony or the basement) depending upon the extent to which we self-actualize around these core competencies. It is often the coaching that helps us “get out of our own way” and calibrate our natural themes of talent to flourish, and not hinder our development and impact, hence, our senseis are there to help us tap into our superpowers and navigate away from our kryptonite — detractors and distractions.
Trying to be your own coach and learning from failure.
Blind spots. We all have them. While adversity can be the greatest teacher, taking away the right lessons and not repeating the same mistakes is rarely accomplished in solitude. Whether it’s removing obstacles to our next level of growth or slaying our dragons (within), it’s the tough love of a trusted guide, executive coach, a role model, or mentor that can help us get there.
Some of my biggest failures or set-backs have come from trying to be my own sensei or coach. In the ring, and in business, it was when I didn’t have someone in my corner, or failed to adequately collaborate, is when some of the toughest life-lessons happened.
Conversely, having the right, mentor, sensei, or coach has helped me tap into the needed confidence and clarity to accomplish epic stuff in my life, for which I am eternally grateful.
From behind the curtain and the art of the inner game coaching
“Winslow helps you with the mental aspects…finding your balance and getting your base.”
- David Robinson, NBA Spurs.
When your clients are some of the absolute best in the world at what they do, it’s understandable to be a little intimated, or maybe even, to have a degree of self-doubt. This is where your own superpowers come in. You’re not there to teach them something they already know much better than you do, you’re there to provide that missing piece, or to help them discover it for themselves.
When I was the inner game coach for NBA and NFL athletes, initially there was some trepidation, as my students/clients were at the top of their game on a magnitude few ever achieve. The same could be said for, earlier in my career, when consulting strategic planning, team and leadership development for multi-national CEO’s, top-tiered research scientists, and celebrities. One must remind oneself, they have come to you because you are also among the best in your field, so get over the imposter-syndrome stuff and just serve! In any case, it’s vital to find out what you are needed for and provide an approach that solves for any gaps presented, and then get out of the way let them soar.
There are few things as rewarding as seeing the result of one’s coaching and consulting work displayed on a national stage, within a leader’s personal and professional successes and accomplishments, or within an organization’s aspired outcomes.
The importance of coaches respecting the wisdom of leaders and teams
Coming into a new engagement, it is essential to identify what leaders and teams are already doing well and help them build upon that rather than wasting time and energy fixing something that isn’t even broken. From there, working together on what they can be doing a little (or even a lot) better respects everyone’s participation and the process is thereby much more impactful, sustainable, and value added.
One of the biggest shortcomings in the consulting and coaching world is the presumption that practitioners already have a solution and are now looking for a problem to fit it too. While we may have many wonderful tools in our kit, resist the temptation to work in a comfort/competency zone when it might not be needed.
When the mentee become the mentor, lessons learned from formal and informal leaders.
I don’t know how many times during my career, “the student has become the master” and it’s always a real high point. Learning from others, whether from an early-stage leader, someone you have helped and then watch them ascend the ranks, or any number of those in-between, people are amazing and all have so much more to offer than we realize.
Afterthought
In 2010, I shared some insights, experiences, and a leadership development model that had served many well during the early, nascent years of my entree into the personal and professional mastery arena of practice, beyond the dojo. Those ideas are shared in this book:
You can grab a copy here or on Amazon