Stronger, Smarter, Safer - Leadership and transformation with Jim Bennett
Leadership isn't a policy. It's what people do when nobody's checking.Jim Bennett has spent a career in places where getting leadership wrong costs more than money: Strathclyde Fire Brigade, North Sea offshore operations, and more than twenty-five years since as a leadership and transformational coach in the Major Accident Hazards sector.Stronger, Smarter, Safer is about the part of leadership no procedure covers: how you talk to people, how you read a room, and whether your team will tell you the truth when it's inconvenient.These are practical conversations for supervisors, managers and safety professionals, the people who set...
Steady under load: The Power of Routine
If you wish to maximise your day - saying it isn't enough; you have to create the conditions in which to make it happen.
The best method I've found is having a good routine. Routines are the foundation on which your lifestyle can be built. When you have discipline and structure in your life, motivation comes so much easier....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Steady under Load: Standards
Success and failure can be viewed by different eyes and filters. For me, ther are pretty few objective measures of success. What may be a dismal failure to someone could be a dazzling success to another. The opposite may also be true.
If you do something that other people go 'crazy about' , but you know deep down that you have fallen short of the standards you expect of yourself, I would suggest not taking the acclaim they give you.
For me, I've found that if you life life according to other people's definition of success you w...
Steady under Load: authenticity
There are seven billion people on our planet. Many will tell you what to think and do, for me, the most important voice to listen to is yours. It's the classic "walk your own path, be your own person" - aye that's easy to say - not so easy to do in our turbulent world.
Let's explore that concept of being your authentic self and about having the resilience of being "steady under load".....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Steady under Load: Imposter Syndrome
eNobody is immune to imposter syndrome. I am certainly not. There were days when I was presenting a workshop in foreign soil and had nagging thoughts "Why are you doing this? Are you really qualified...., on, on, on." Now I can reply I am drawing on my experience, which in my opinion, is as valuable as an academic course. Yes, the academic courses give us a solid foundation to build on, for me, it's the application of the knowledge by lived experience that makes the difference.
People think that imposter syndrome comes from inside us. I think they...
Steady under Load: building a solid Foundation
Confidence is somethingthat so many prople struggle with. It's the lack of confiddence that holds them back from doing the things they want to do or become the personthey want to be, inhibiting them in social events and prevents them from obtaining new skills.
I beieve the thing that confuses some people is that ther's a difference between the kind of confidence that is given externally and the kind of confidene that that is generated internally. It's the internal confidence that gives the solid foundation which empoweres us to extend our self-limiting beliefs and reach new heights. Let's...
Stronger, Smarter, Safer: Steady under Load - the HOT Seat
For many there is a gap between the way people think and the way they behave. I've found that when your mental and physical sides are out of balance you can feel lost, have a sense you're failing to reach your full potential or end up making the same poor decisions time and time again.
Over the years in my coaching journeys around the globe I've mused over this more and more. I believe that many people are far too quick to disconnect body and mind and have been taught to think they are somehow seperate. Having them...
Heart Leadership: Choosing courage over fear
o be leaders who inspire courage, we have to be concious. We must awaken fromthe spells that autopilot modes have cast upon us. From the place I have called our heart our spirit, our passion and enthusiasm allow us to be leaders because people want to follow and not because we contrive to make themwhat we think is safe.
From that place of being true to ourself we can come to live the integrity of leadership that demands we be true to others becuse we are speaking from our authentic self. Our heart is our place of inspiration...
Heart Leadership: The Power of Change
Until leaders are willing to let go of their fear and discover the courage of their hearts, our workplaces will continueto stifle the natural forces that produce energy, vitality, flexibility, resilience, learning and excellence.
Programmes that are implemented on a foundation of fear are doomed to failure. The sustained energyfor flexibility and resposveness for an ever chnaing world will never emerge.
The sustained energy will only be discovered when we have the courage to seek it with the understanding that we can't know whatt form it will take until it emerges - let's explore...
S...
Heart Leadership: Fiding the courage to be
Regardless of where we are in an organisation, what our role may be or where we sit in an organisational chart - the key to being a leader without title is to be our true selves, speaking from our heart.
A maturing 'inner wonderchild' soars and shines brightly with all our unique natural qualities rather than wearing the masks our egos may have created to protect us on the path of Fear....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Lighting the fire within
Work can be energising, exhilarating, and a place of learning and growth. It can provide and outlet for our creativity. Creativity is, among other things, learning. Creativity is learning new ways of looking at old probelems and learning new ways of working to produce better results.
The uniqueness that each of us brings to the workplace is the fuel for creativity.That uniqueness is part of the Wonder Child and part of our spirit that sprks the fire within us at work, home and play....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: developing an attitude of service
If we wish to build an organisation that leads from the heart we want to build a spirit respecting workplace. This leads us to the transformation of the role of our senior managers. We shift our thinking from focusing on the product, the task, or what we call the tangible outcome to being in service to the people whoc make the prodcut, perform the task, or produce the tangible outcomes.
We shift our role from sustaining a system to being in service to our joint vsision. Leaders have the concsiousness, the commitment and the courage to see that t...
Heart Leadership: leadership without title
In recent years It has become increasingly apparent that our organisations can't make the transition required by the fast pace of change in the world except under one condition: Change must happen through every level within the organisation almost simutlataneously.
What this comes down to is that people all know what they want the organisation to be, they also have the personal commitment to be leaders without title and personally make a difference in making it happen...
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: The Essence
Within Heart Leadership we 'see things as we would like them to be' and then having the courage to be the change to make it happen.
On the path of courage, there is a time when a leader comes to know what is possible. With their heart as a guide they have a knowing feeling "If I can think it, It can happen". Their heart spirit brings them peace, inspiration, faith, trust and the complete belief in themselves and others. Let's explorein more depth....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Spirit Respecting organisations - what price?
When our businesses choose to lead from the heart and choose the Path of Courage - building a spirit respectine workplace, there are also prices to pay as well as rewards to reap - a balance:
give up being driven by events and accept being guided by our vision and values.give up doing it alone and being part of a team.give up our need to control peolple and outcomes and empower others.give up fighting the 'white water' and be in it; have trust and faith our that our skills and expertise will carry us to outcomes...
Heart Leadership: Conscious Living - paying the price
The ability to lead for the heart and live from spirit is the result of choosing to live consciously. Being committed to living consciously in a society that mostly muddle through in auto-pilot isn't easy.
There is a price to pay for choosing to live consciously. A friend has said that to live consciously is to be more charitable. Unlike the the grudging donation made form obligation, true charitable giving comes from the heart. We still pay she says, but it is charitbale because we willingly choose to pay and it feels good when we do so.Whater...
Heart Leadership: Liberation from Rules
I have discovered that the things I should be doing were the product of my rules. Importantly, doing things kept me insulated form the conscious part of me that would have let me discover that there were no rules. It was a long time before I could sit and listen to my inner wisdom. When I listened to my inner wisdom I discovered incredible things....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Avoiding Fear
Many believe that all human behaviours are motivated by either fear or desire. I believe that fear and desire/want are nearly always related. Likewise, with almost every fear, there is an implied desire. attached to it. The associated fear may be as simple as being afraid we won't get what we want/desire - it is still there. I believe that until we name that fear and come to terms with it and make peace with it we never achieve wjat we are after in a sustainable way - let's explore....
Empowering Resource: Overcoming Fear with N...
Heart Leadership: Inner Peace
Peace is an essential part of our spirits. When we live and lead on our path of courage we become to know a deep level of peace that goes through every part of our bodies, We may still be afraid, angry and frustrated by at events of teh day, however, guiding us like a rudder is a deep sense of peace that tells us we are on the right track. This peace is generated by a inner connection to our authentic core made possible by self-awareness and conscious living...
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Resilience and being Present
When we plan for the future, we try to project what conditions will be and determine in advance how to act to achieve a future goal that we established some time in the past.
However, when we prepare in the present to respond in the future we focus on our vision and values and on learning. We focus on identifying a core set of questions that will tell us if we are on track that enables resilience.
Our vision defines for us what we want to be. Our values how we want to do that.....
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Heart Leadership: being present
When we are not present and not aware, we can lose connection. When we think about something we are going to do or something we should have done differently, we are affecting all the relationships of the connection that allows us to build trust, faith, cooperation, connection, and community.
For most of us, going mindlessly through the day is so habitual that it takes a lot of practice to start being truly present - let's explore in more depth...
Empowering Resource
The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
https://newearth.university...
Heart Leadership: Resolving Conflict in a spirit respecting workplace
When we don't address and resolve conflict in a healthy way that respects everyone involved, misplaced anger almost always results. As human beigs, when we keep surpressing emotions around unresolved conflict, pressure builds, over time we becomd more and more volatile and can explode over the most minor of things.
When we want to truly resolve conflicts so that relationships improveand people work tohether in a mutually spirit respecting way, we must operatefrom our spirits. Let's explore....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Integrated Work Relationships
If we are to be completely in a relationship, we have to be whole, aware individuals who know what to feeland what we want as well as what we think, and we have to truly want to be in a community with others. I believe we can't come into the relationship dependant on others to get approval to make us feel whole.
When we come to relationships as whole individuals committed to acepting others in our community for who they are, as they are, we are committing to the relationship rather than ourselves, without giving up ourselves...
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Heart Leadership: Creating Connection
In building relationships it's important to know what gets in the way of connectiont. To connect with others, we must be completely in the relationship - we must bting our true, whole, authentic self, complete with beliefs, values and emotions, to other that we live and work with.
We risk being vulnerable - instead of mechanically saying, doing, or feeling what we believe we 'should' say, do, or feel, we honestly sharewhat we are actually feeling. Let's explore in more depth....
Data on Organisational Maturity
Energy Sector Hearts and Minds Toolkit
https...
Heart Leadership: knowingness - the power of questions
On the Path of Courage, there are aswers to the many barriers we encounter on the path of fear. When the Path of Courage is taken, empowered by powerful questions, new and different ways of doing things are always discovered. Each new venture/challenge coming over the horizon is an opportunity to learn and grow.
When we question what we know, we continuse to develop a higher sense of kowingness - we come closer to discovering our real truth.
"If the opposite of what we believed to be true was true - what would that mean...
Heart Leadership: Discovering what you dont know you know
A considerable amount of my time in business has been helping individual Leaders and groups of Leaders discover what they didn't know they knew and also what they didn'r know they didn't know - tose things they believed to be true and were false. The consious mind has the ability to process about 7 pieces of informayion per minute. Our unconcious mind can process three hundred thousand pieces of information in about the same time!
Most of this vast databas of information is carried aound in our uncoscious mind, that part that 'we don't know', or the right brain...
Heart Leadership: exploring what you dont know
We only know what we know - what we have been taught by books, by others and by our expereinces. That is all we know. Or is it? Is it possible that we don't know what we belive we know? That we know we don't know we know? Once is was sure I knew how to get ahead: get a good education, find a good company, work hard, do what I am told and be loyal...
In lee than a geneation, most of what I and other thought we knew began crumbling - compaies downsize, rightsize, flatten, reengineer,a...
Heart Leadership: Sustaining Inner Wisdom Connection
Much of our world isn't very spiritual or positive - it is filld with negativity and fear. We are bombarded daily with negativity on a conscious and subliminal level most of our days. As the pace of doing quickens, we become more and more diatant from our being and from our values and slip more into reactive doing.
rather than conciously accessing our unconcious for inner wisdom, we slip into letting our unconcious run out lives as fate! We get furhter and furhter from our heart consiousness. When we spend some of our time in reflection ...
Heart Leadership: Inner Wisdom
Dreams are another door to access our inner wisdom and can be considered a goodway to receive message - sometimesa very importnat message from our subconcious.Dreams are are our most effectivesource of informationthat we are taking into our unconscious minds at a rate of 43,000 times that our conscious minds process data.
Ther are countless ways for people to access their inner heart, their spirit. There are no right or wrongs ways, only different ways - let's ex[plore some.....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Reflection
People ask, "How do you get in touch with your heart, your spirit?" I belive the answer lies in being, - just being, in self knowledge and self awareness.It lies in listening to our inner wisdom and trusting that we have the answers. In trusting that we can know what we don't know. It lies inin giving up the past and choosing to live in the present.....
Interesting Reading
The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
https://archive.org/download/ThePowerOfNowEckhartTolle_201806/The%20Power%20Of%20Now%20-%20Eckhart%20Tolle.pdf
Stronger...
Heart Leadership: Mustering Courage
We need to remember that we are all programmed with a lifetime of instructions, socialistation and linear, analytical, quantitative thinking. One of the greatest challenges we face when learning to lead from our hearts is to become aware when our automatic responses are active. We then begin to understand what is needed in mustering courage to keep the faith in Heart Leadership....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Wonder Child
An important part of discovering inner knowing, heart knowing, spiritual knowing is learning to be aware of our ourselves. Listening to our inner knowingness.Most of us have been socialised to ignore or stifle the gifts our bodies send us to help us be awater of our heart knowing - the tear in the eye, the lump in the throat,irritabiliuty or nervous enrgy. For some it may be abig stept o become conscious to the fact that we are having heart/spiritual reaction that says "There's something that we should examine more closely"
When we learn to...
Heart Leadership: Learning of the heart
When we lead on the path of courage, complex situations, confusion and apparent chaos don't deter us from our learning. From out heart we know there is deep order in what is happening.
If we have the openness, the patience and the courage to ask questions and generate more and more information, we put ourselves and our organisations in the position to begin to see order in the chaos. We begin to see how how events and conditions relate to other events and conditions.....
Good Reading
Can't See the Wood...
Heart Leadership: Glue
A key component of successful organisations is The Heart within the operations, the glue, the spirit that presents itself as a positive belief in people, and a belief that the organisation can handle whatever comes its way.
There is an intentional consciousness and commitment to live from that belief system. This apllies in all walks of life - highlighted recently at the winter olympics.
Good Reading
Susan Jefffers, Feel the Fear and Beyond (ISBN: 9780712608831)
https://susanjeffers.com/books/feel-the-fear-and-beyond/
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Learning
In Heart Leadership if we are to lead with courage we have to Learn. Learn why we may be 'missing the mark'. Learn whay we do very well sometimes and not so well at other times. We need to undersatnd the sources of our fears.
Understand what disguises them from us so that we believe we are angry, frustrated, irritated or confused.
WE need to be conscious of what is driving us. WE should also understand our own spirits and the nature of spirit if we are to know how to respect the spirits of others.....
Heart Leadership: Courage in action
To bring spirit into an organisation requires Courage. It requires Leadership commiting to have courage to be calm amid chaos, to sustain the tension until empowered learning has happened. To maintain personal spirit, to have faith and trust in both people and the process.
Giving orders doesn't require personal courage. That's one of the reasons so many mangers, who give lip service to workers involvement, revert to old modes of working when the going gets tough...
To live the kind of courage required to bring spirit into the workplace requires our organisational leadership to take time...
Heart Leadership: Tapping The Spirit
The Leader who doesn't keep people focused on the organisation's financials as well as their spiritual goals is undermining their trust which jepordises the relationship of the leader to their workers.
Having a safe relationship is needed for workers to be innovative and creative. The real bottom line is to have finacially healthy, competitive organisationin which there is no need to choose between either financial security and productivity or helping people dicover creativity and meaning in their work - both are critical.
One way of looking and understanding this is to explore something called the Spirit Cy...
Heart Leadership: Empowering Relationships
In my Human and Organisational Factors research I have found that in organisations with empowering communications they do the following:
when people talk they are present with each othertheir focus is on the person they are speaking to - completelythey listen carefullytheir pace of talking is slower and more studiedthe level of respect with which each speaks to the other truly honours bothLet's explore in more depth...
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Unleashing the Spirit Cycle
In my research into Human Factors and leaders who promoted creativity, quality and safety I had the opportunity to travel far and wide. I came across an organisation that had an intuitive leader who told me story after story of innovations that their workers had made to enhance the way that they worked. Some changes improved safety, others improved productivity, others improved engineering of products...
What was 'setting these people on fire'? It was something that was happening at a deep root level, someting we called the Spirit Cycle. It was the way people reltaed to each other...
Heart Leadership: Dialogue
As Leaders if we are to provide space for a spirit centred community to emerge we need a new tool that seeks to challenge our assumptions, our creativity and our spotaneity rather than to restrict and controlin order toensure outomes with which we are familiar and comfotablw with.
A communication process called dialogue has gained great respect over the last number oy years - let's explore....
Stronger, Smarter, Safer
Heart Leadership: Ask - Listen - Create Space
The Power of questions may be the most underrated and overlooked leverage we have on our organisations.
It is a powerful decision making device and a powerful learning tool. Most of us aren't used to thinking in the terms of questions; we have to practice developing information and idea generating questions and learn to 'package' them in an empowering way to bring understanding to the isssue(s) being explored.
When we combine that with creating space for ideas to develop and actively listen to responses we all grow to greater levels of understaning and...
