Open up!
In Nicole’s last blog we talked about reflexes and paradigm shifts. Reflex on what there is, and that’s a lot at the moment, and at the same time we experience there’s nothing at all. Nicole also talked about the paradigm shift which requires us to look at current reality from a different angle.
Reflex could be described as an autonomous reaction to a circumstance that we do not know or insufficiently know, and as Nicole so beautifully described in her blog, every human being, and therefore every leader, has his or her own appearance in it.
When we looked back on two intensive and beautiful weeks with leaders in Inzell in mid-March, we could not foresee what the month after would look like. Laughing about “well if we can’t fly 
home then we’ll stay here for a while”, we ended up within 48 hours in various forms of lockdown.
Lockdown? A term you only came across years ago just to quell prison riot, now suddenly we’re experiencing it as an “intelligent” appearance.
We had talked to leaders about values, about principles, about vision and mission statements and from one moment to the next the world was taken over by a virus. Try to escape from your primary reflex and to stay on track on what you experienced and learned in the previous week is very hard. That is simply too little developed to be put into action immediately.
Two weeks later, we decided to contact the participants again via Zoom in order to recontract their plans, their missions, but also and especially their obstacles and fears as a result of the current crisis.
A very valuable session that confirmed to us that in many cases the world of you as a leader can change in one day, but that this does not give you the tools or skills to respond adequately. Why not? Simply because a lot of them you have never experienced before, so we need each other very badly: to connect, to learn, to thaw together, perhaps freezing reflexes and to be able to grasp a hopeful view of a shifted paradigm again.
As a leader, what do you need to turn a lock-down into an open-up? What have you discovered about yourself, about being a leader, over the past few weeks? What do you want to hold on to this period and what drastic decisions are you going to make now? Of course, all of this fits in extremely well with how we as a the being on Mission team are looking at personal leadership development. For all, it is a choice, not a formal position!
