Maybe that's not a fair question. Maybe few of us would ever admit that we blurred lines or fuzzied up our boundaries. My guess is though that we all do.
To become more centered, we need to get more clear. To reach our people and build better teams, we need to get more clear. To stop confusing people or deceiving them, we must seek more clarity.
We seek more clarity by saying what we mean, and what we feel. We uncover our covered motivations. We listen with curiosity to discover how others are reacting (did they understand us? are we comfortable in their misunderstanding us?)
Sometimes clarity comes from exploring the unclear places. It comes by asking honest and probing (and sometimes discomforting questions):
- Did you understand what I said?
- Did you mean to say that _____?
- Are you saying that ______ ?
- Does it sound to you that we agree or disagree on this?
- Tell me what that means to you?
- How do you feel about that?
- Does this make sense to you?
- How do you make sense of all this?
...and so many more. If anything, centered leaders, high performance leaders, are skilled at asking open ended questions with genuine curiosity. We don't know all the answers, and our clarity dissolves when we pretend that we do.
It's one of the fun paradoxes of leadership: the more we seek clarity the more we realize that we don't understand.
Until we do.
The price of clarity is commitment. Commitment to exploring our various versions of truth. Commitment to staying curious. Commitment to saying exactly what we think and feel while staying open to think and feel new things.
Are you open? Are you ready? Are you clear?
-- Douglas Brent Smith
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