We all have big and small versions of ourselves. When my children are irritating me, and I react in a grumpy way – and sometimes worse than grumpy – my small self is in the driver’s seat. My big self would see the moment and the actions of my children as irrelevant in the grander scheme of things, and react in a more calm, mature way.
How I wish this were always the case, but I know it won’t be. I am fallible, I can be overwhelmed at times, and my choices sometimes reflect this.
When our business is challenged, we are put in the position of choosing our big or small selves. Declining profits, shaky customers, unhappy people trigger our nervous systems, and from this triggered place, it’s almost automatic that our small selves take the wheel.
Ironically, these challenges more than anything else call for our bigger selves to step up. They are signals that something is fundamentally wrong and needs a transformative moment of change. Not in a disruptive way, but more just a frank acknowledgement that something fundamental is wrong.
I call this ‘the squeeze’: when space shuts down, oxygen lessens, choices feel limited, and pressure mounts.
As a CEO, the systemic effect of you showing up as the small version of yourself is highly consequential. The one you set sets the tone of the business. The landscape as you understand it will be the landscape that the business understands. The pressure you feel will be the pressure the business feels. I can’t over-emphasise the importance of this truth: as the CEO goes, so goes the business.
This has a massive downside to it, as I’ve described, but I’m far more interested in the upside: the impact of a CEO showing up in their ‘big self’ form – awake, aware, energised, up for the challenge and acting with wisdom.
The big self relies on a high level of awareness and self-management. It’s a choice at the end of the day, but it’s a profound choice. The small self will always be the easier way to go; this is the ego’s protective mechanism, continually seeking ways to keep us safe.
The big self, however, comes to CEOs who’ve ‘done their work’. Who’ve spent the time understanding their patterning, where that patterning came from, and how to course-correct when the small self is in play.
- When I work with CEOs, I call the moment that CEOs choose to do this deep work ‘making the turn’. The turn away from the routine, bog-standard, and orthodox, and toward remarkable CEOship. The kind of CEOship that produced the Transcendent Businesses that we seek to build at Lockstep.
- What does making the turn amount to?
- Changing your ‘story’ about what work is or could be – a more hopeful and optimistic view of how you spend your time
- Detecting the moments or situations where you feel unmoved, have low energy or resist
- Setting new expectations about the purposefulness you feel, and the meaning you derive from your work
- Focusing on your physical vitality so that the right amount of happy chemicals are flowing through you (this factor is hugely underappreciated when it comes to how choices are made)
My door remains open to a conversation to unpack this territory. When I chose my path as a guide for progressive CEOs, I made a pact with myself to welcome in as many conversations with CEOs as I could manage, for no commercial arrangement and with no obvious benefit to me.
So reach out if you’d like to talk: rowan@lockstep.global.