For additional context on this post, please refer to:

The Practice of Leadership
Eight Leadership Practices

What is your edge — the place in yourself where you currently want to grow as a leader? This question is a good starting point for a study of personal leadership.

Many people raise there hands in any audience when I ask the question, “Who here has an itch to grow as a leader?” But the issue isn’t whether we’ve got the itch. It is whether we can articulate it. If we can verbalize our edge accurately and be conscious of it, natural energies for change and growth can appear.

I remember a manager in a class saying that she wanted to learn to be less selfish and self-centered. She wanted to learn to give others all the credit. On one level this sounded very good, very altruistic, but there was a sense that something else was going on. As she continued to describe this desire, another member of the class commented, “It sounds to me like you want to become a better door mat for other people.” The manager asked, “Really?” but I think she could already see from the faces of the thirty other managers in the room that there was something here to consider. The way she expressed her wish had sounded like she was asking for a mild form of self-punishment. I think by the end of the training she was heading in a more positive direction — about 180 degrees from where she started — a direction where she gave herself permission to affirm her own contributions.

So one lesson about articulating a core learning challenge (another name for edge) is that it is not about discovering flaws but about delivering on affirmations. A consultant friend of mine said one day, “I’m doing, doing, doing. Why can’t I just be?” Well, there certainly was an edge there, but it was attended by substantial self-criticism. With some coaching she changed it around in a useful way: “How can I release beinginto my life and work?”

This isn’t just semantics. The intellectual part of a person might wonder about that, but as human beings I believe we are built to appreciate our challenges much differently. We need them in a form that preserves our fundamental integrity and wholeness as individuals. Asking ourselves negative questions usually results in negative answers. Asking, “Why can’t I do this?” at best will give you a laundry list of barriers, not solutions. Some other examples:

Why am I so bad? Because you just are!
How do I curb my impatience? By not feeling!
How can I become more creative? You are already too creative!
How can I work harder and get more done? Find a way not make so many stupid mistakes.
How do I win more fights? By not being such a coward.

Each of these examples can be changed to define an affirming edge for growth.

What is the good I wish to do?
How do I fully liberate my passions?
How do I really honor my creativity?
When am I in the flow? And how can I be there more often?
How can I sustain the tension when differences come to the surface?

It’s always a surprise to me as people work on defining their edge, how the issues are mostly about the relationship of self to Self. It is as if we all intuitively know what Self is, but we have to cross a river of some kind to get there.

The way to get started is to search the ordinary incidents of your life — what happens to you — for the clues that can reveal a conscious part of your edge. Let me give you an example of how this can work from my own recent personal life.

A couple weeks ago, in four separate instances over a period of about three days, disaster invaded my kitchen. In the first incident I started the coffee maker without putting the bowl under it, resulting in hot coffee mixed with grounds all over my counters and the floor; the next problem was a seriously clogged drain in my sink; the third and worst instance was accidentally turning on a burner under a plastic bag of rice; and the fourth was the mysterious explosion of a box of sandwich bags I had picked up — fifty plastic bags everywhere — this time luckily the stove was off.

Written in this way it all sounds minor, and it was, but at the time there were magnifying issues. The first two incidents happened just before my brother and his wife arrived for dinner, and I had felt like a raging klutz. The rice incident also left me, shall we say, completely pissed off at myself. Rice everywhere, bag burned onto burner. My daughter Victoria thanked me for not getting totally upset — she’d seen (and heard) my reaction when the drain plugged up just before my brother arrived. And the sandwich bags, they were just a kind of fatal aftershock in the series. I felt like an evil spirit had moved into my kitchen — and me.

My friend, Vikki, helped me sort it out. She asked in an email, “Is it an evil spirit or just a surfacing of emotion – your inner state turned outward so you can see it more clearly?” And she continued, deftly, “Even the kitchen incidents prior to each dinner you gave for your brother are interesting because the problems were resolved at the last minute — almost as if you were being taught to trust. The drain clogged but unclogged in time – you weren’t allowed to fail. Or, to sink beyond reach.”

As if I was being taught to trust. The words rang true with sufficient irony to make me take notice on a different, larger scale. Here I am a consultant who focuses much of his work on trust issues among people (I’ve written books on this) now having trouble trusting the universe, life, Self — to make it through some really very minor stuff. Vikki’s words turned an unknown rushing river into a stream I could begin to wade across. And her words gave me the energy to go farther, to look all the way back through my life for moments when I hadn’t trusted life in situations small and large — and paid the price for it in loss.

The reflection helped me empathize a little better with all of us, particularly in leadership roles, who occasionally just lose it — especially over minor events. I’d never thought of it particularly as a trust issue. Now it resonates as part of my edge — where I am still learning and want to learn more. I’d articulate this the edge as: “How can I more fully bring forward my trust in life…and receive?”

But I, like most people, have trouble articulating an edge for myself. It occasionally takes a village. It is often easier for others to see and to help. So if you feel so moved, share a comment, feedback, or a story of your own about defining leadership edge.