nerdleader

I had the best fortune last week. “You have a tendency to go into seclusion, but this is not the time for withdrawal. You must enter the world and atone.” That fortune is wildly incompatible with April 2020, but I could not get that second sentence out of my head. For starters, I suppose what I am doing with these posts could be construed as “entering the world”, yes? And that word “atone”; it is not a word that we use much in 21st century American English. It means “to make amends or reparation”, and the second thought I had about atonement was about how we tend to live with our past mistakes, even long after we have atoned for them.

We have learned by now that the route to success is through making mistakes. We have been told by celebrities, gurus, athletes, and businessfolks that failures are only permanent if you do not get back up. Yet, every single person reading this has baggage that they are metaphorically carrying with them through life – baggage from past embarrassments, failures, and mistakes – that is dragging them down and keeping them from attaining the velocity in life they are looking for. Yes, we have gotten back up and moved on, but we carry these instances with us through life and they negatively impact our reactions, thoughts, and instincts as we approach new situations.

I am not advocating that we forget our past mistakes and move on without self-awareness. Every 12-step program has steps designed to inventory our past mistakes and atone for them. Atonement truly is important when we err, because it allows both us and those who were impacted to remove it from our respective mental loads. We are not supposed to take failures into the future with us, only what we have learned from them. In technology we have even created ceremonies around this process. We have postmortems and root cause analyses to digest and contemplate the issues faced and how we have fixed and overcome. But too often we continue to think about that one time when we did that thing, and we overcorrect to avoid repeating the same mistake.

The secret is to deprioritize these items and realize that we are the only ones giving them credence. Let us do a quick exercise. Think of somebody else’s embarrassing incident or failure. Use a real-world example and not something you may have seen on social media. Half of you likely cannot remember any incidents at all! The rest of you are able to think of only a few incidents – perhaps only a single incident – and it likely has not permanently colored your view of those other people. You may instead have compassion for them and may think highly of how they handled the situation. By realizing these memories are unimportant we can kick them out of the space they have taken up and stop weighing ourselves down. It is a much bigger topic for another day, but I suggest mindfulness exercises and meditation to clear your headspace.

The net result of taking back your true self, without the baggage of the past, is being prepared to face what comes your way with the confidence that you have the right temperament and self-awareness. Leadership requires vigor and endurance, but it requires calm strength more. Calmness and confidence are contagious, and your team needs you to steady the boat while they row instead of brandishing the whip. Additionally, you will be better able to react to events with authentic emotion, understand where your team is coming from and what they are feeling, and be better able to utilize a solution-oriented mindset.