Thursday, February 11, 2010

The Monster Inside Your Head

I've just started following Hugh MacLeod over at the gapingvoid blog. He's a cartoonist that works on the backs of business cards. One of his recent posts came with a backstory about business executives who must get over their fears of achi­eving that which they must do, if they want to become the peo­ple they one day hope to be. As MacLeod quotes a business coach friend of his:

“The issues my clients fear the most tend not to be the actual stuff out there–com­pe­ti­tion, cash­flow, mar­ke­ting,” he says, “but the worst-case ima­gi­nary sce­na­rios. ‘The Mons­ter Inside Their Heads’, as it were. So a cen­tral tenet to what I do is hel­ping them to get over The Monster.”

The cartoon itself perfectly captures this inner demon:

How many leaders wrestle with this monster as they try to move their organizations and their careers forward? How many don't even realize the struggle is within instead of without? I've been in enough situations where the actual consequences of action have turned out to be a lot less negative (and sometimes actually positive) than the dreaded perceptions I harbored to know that this monster is real and an adversary that must be overcome. Imagine what could be accomplished if leaders were no longer afraid of the monster inside their heads.

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