Radical Self Inquiry

26 Jul 2020     3 min read

I am currently reading this book and it's a really annoying book, because it truly makes you sit down with yourself — in full honesty.

The book is called Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna, who is a start-up CEO coach. The premise of the book is that you can only fully achieve your potential as a leader, if you "sort through the emotional baggage that is holding you back professionally, and even more important, in your relationships."
So I sat down with myself and started answering some of the questions the book poses to me, and ladies, I cannot tell you how mind-opening it was to make some of those subconscious undercurrents more conscious to myself.

Here were some of the questions and the most honest answers I could verbalize.

In what ways do I deplete myself and run myself into the ground?

I run myself down by being overly busy, by putting too many meetings into my day. I seek meaning through being busy and through my many hobbies and side projects, but by doing so, I wonder, whether I actually live, or whether I am just living up to the expectations of my to-do list and schedule.
 
Where am I running from and where to?
I am running away from pain. I am running away from commitment, because commitment means to make myself vulnerable (and to risk getting hurt).
I am running towards happiness and stability, but I recognize that in order to be happy I need to open up and let people in and rely on them.
 
Why have I allowed myself to be so exhausted?
Because only in a state of exhaustion, I cannot flee anymore from my pain and it is when I start to reflect and face reality...

Verbalizing those thoughts makes me realize that a lot of my decision making, such as moving cities and traveling, have been mechanisms to avoid feeling pain or getting hurt. The original pain sits deep and resulted from the loss of my father to cancer many years ago and pain aovidance has ever since been a personal demon of mine.

One sentence that very much resonated with me from the book was this line here:
 
"By not standing still, I was able to be the object of everyone else’s projections of who and what I should be. Too busy to live my own life, I took direction from the affirmations of others."

While everyone will answer differently to the questions in the book, for me, it was tremendously helpful to realize that I have to stop running away and sit still with my pain and work through it, rather than to flee from it and avoid it. The book was very timely and if you choose to read it, I hope that i can also help you with your own personal baggage.

Some other powerful lines from the book I want to share and that play along the same theme described here are:
"In the space between our memories and the stories we create about ourselves, we live our lives."

"Learning to lead yourself is hard because we are wired to look outward. We feel pain and we look up and out to see who’s hurt"

"The common denominator in all our struggles is always people."

Categories: Life     Tags: #life #authenticity #leadership