About a dozen or so years after my grandfather died, I lost my father Alan. It was sudden and shocking. Dad is the most significant influence in my life. A quarter of a century later, I am four years older than Dad was when he died, and I still go to ring him. What I think about most are the conversations we never got to have. We still had a lot of talking to do.
But we do not rise to the level of our ambition, we fall to the level of our capability, and leadership insight is critical. We will not achieve this understanding by “working harder”, it is achieved by “thinking harder”.
Discipline, like goals, is overrated. It is likely to help in the short term, but is unlikely to be a long-term solution. Motivation wanes for many reasons, human nature takes over, and momentum is lost.
To be a teacher, you must be a learner, the mindset to embrace the discomfort and ambiguity of taking yourself beyond the limits of your understanding, but with the view “It is not what I learn today, it is what I will teach tomorrow that is important”.
Many of my personal learnings in relation to resilience come from my lived experience as a CEO of AFL clubs. This was a test I failed often, tough lessons learned when dealing with the ups and downs, often with an inappropriate allocation of emotional resources.