"Your intentions, energy, and presence guide your impact. Your focus today builds your leadership and culture today and tomorrow. Are you clear?" This is a question I used to ask clients. I still do. It’s still true, and the stakes feel higher today, don’t they?
As we navigate the new business and world environment of today, we'll need to focus more deeply on things we may have been able to dismiss, de-emphasize, or put off, in the past. I've spent the last twenty years building out the IEP Method® (Intentional Energetic Presence®) body of work, writing books and creating programs devoted to leadership and culture, and working deeply with organizations who wanted to have healthy high-performing positively contagious cultures for happy people and solid business results.
While writing CONTAGIOUS YOU* last year, I spent time digging deep into data, science, research, and case studies. I wanted to help bridge the gap people often come to the edge of when tying the IEP leadership work (often seen as the "soft stuff") to tangible business costs and outcomes.
Of course everyone knows that being more present, healthier, clearer, kinder, and trustworthy is a nice to have, but does it really net a financial impact? Is it really good business? After all, people say it is, but I've found that when it comes to learning how to do it — which requires leaning into the "soft stuff" — people often disappear into some version of, "We don't have budget, we don't have time, we've got work to do" or my favorite "Isn't that a little woo woo?"
After having done this work for more than twenty years with a spectrum of organizations, business leaders, humans, and industries, I knew the answer to "Does it really net a financial impact and is it good business and is it worth tending to?" was a HUMONGOUS “YES.”
(So do you, if even only intuitively right now.)
And turning myself into a researcher validated my beliefs.
CONTAGIOUS CULTURE, CONTAGIOUS YOU...
Who would have thought we’d be in a CONTAGIOUS PANDEMIC just four months after the release of CONTAGIOUS YOU (the follow on to CONTAGIOUS CULTURE)? Or even deeper in that pandemic -- amongst hundreds of other hard things that challenge our energetic and leadership contagiousness and way of being -- just eight months later. Or after I'd written a book call THE LEADER YOU WILL BE...
I'll write another post about the experience of this year with these books, and the divinity and gifts I can see in all of it (now). And in the meantime, I wanted to offer some extra guidance and support in engaging with this work right now as we navigate pandemics, politics, natural disasters, social injustices, massive tension and ambiguity, mental and physical health trauma, upcoming holidays, and more, and as our leadership, self-care, and positively, usefully, and healthy contagiousness become even more important...
Navigating this year has been tricky -- I know I'm not alone. The range of emotion I experience, almost daily, is like nothing I've ever felt before -- a mix of personal feelings, empathy for what's going on, feeling the collective energy and emotions on our planet right now, and ambiguity galore -- combined with a lack of control of so many big things -- creating an incredible amount of global anxiety. It's a lot.
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