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Peak Performance Resources for Leaders by Leaders

Tag: Anjou MacPherson

Confront and the Financial Crisis

With the financial crisis deepening, many of our worst fears are being realized.  With the Waves of Impact continuing to wash over us, we are being confronted by financial losses on a never-before-seen scale. Entire industries are at risk of being wiped out. Previously invulnerable mega-corporations are being brought to their knees. Hidden weaknesses are being exposed.

As individuals, we are being faced with the complete loss or at least dramatic reduction in the value of our retirement accounts. It can feel like we are being confronted on all sides. How do we cope with the uncertainty?

What Is a Leader?

New-Paradigm leadership begins with personal responsibility and combines vision, commitment, relationships, communication, compassion, courage, decisiveness, integrity, organization, strength, and the ability to influence and inspire others.

Leadership in the knowledge economy is vastly different from leadership in the information, industrial and agrarian economies. In the old economies, dictatorship, domination, command and control where the prevalent models.  It is easy to lead through domination.  Hold a gun (or a paycheck) to a person’s head and you can get them to do almost anything; however, when you take the gun (or paycheck) away – you no longer have the ability to get them to do what you want. And chances are, they will pay you back for forcing them to do something they may not have wanted to do without the gun (or paycheck.)

Towers of Glass, Feet of Clay: What Is the Quest?

I was going throughdubaipaster my travel photographs and saw this picture of a poster at the Dubai Airport advertising the world’s tallest building, which was under construction at the time. The Burj Dubai is very impressive and I was inspired to write more about the towers of glass.

Towers of Glass, Feet of Clay

royal_bank_building-smallI have been reflecting further about the “financial crisis,” and recalling a book I read in 1982 called Towers of Gold: Feet of Clay – the Canadian Banks, by Walter Stewart.

In a conversation about this with my colleagues I happened to say towers of glass, and perhaps 27 years later, Glass is more descriptive. In 1982, I was working in the oil and gas industry in Canada and this book was written about the Banking Industry, the mortgage crisis and the oil prices. These themes are again relevant in 2009.

Waves of Impact

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Nearly everyone is feeling the financial crisis, not all at once, but rather in waves.  These waves or fluctuations go in and out like the ocean. Each one brings more insight, more truth, more change, and with each contact, ever greater connections that impact our reality. The illusions and ideas that we took for granted are eroding.

Dealing with Unwanted Emotions/Feelings

Dealing with unwanted feelings can be a very tricky thing.  It can often lead to upsets and a lot of unhappiness in relationships between people.

The purpose of this article is to provide some understanding of feelings, their purpose in our lives, and to provide a guideline for expressing one’s feelings in an appropriate manner.

Fragmentation Leads to Stress

Futurists commonly predict that we are moving away from separate personal and professional lives towards a life where our personal and professional lives are fully integrated.

For many of us, our lives have developed as fragmented sections or compartments. We are one way at work, and altogether different in our personal life. This leads to a split personality: the work persona and the home persona and never the twain shall meet. Our feelings get left at home, and the very fabric of what makes us human gets left out of the workplace.

What is a Leader?

True leadership begins with personal responsibility and combines vision, commitment, communication, compassion, courage, decisiveness, integrity, organization, strength, and the ability to influence and inspire others. If you can’t inspire people into action, then who are you leading?

The Oxford Dictionary defines a leader as one who leads or has followers.  If no one is following you, how can you call yourself a leader?

The Optima Zones of Life

All of life can be measured on a scale from FULLY ALIVE at the top to NEARLY DEAD at the bottom (in fact DEATH is the bottom of the scale.) We call this scale the OPTIMA ZONES OF LIFE as it is divided into seven Zones, or categories.

Each Zone is represented by a color. The colors are GOLD, BLUE, GREEN, YELLOW, ORANGE, RED, and BROWN.

Most of us fluctuate somewhere from the top to the bottom, throughout the day, from day to day and year to year. On average we spend most of our time in one particular place or Zone of the scale.

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