Summary

Out of the Cave© is my engaging, entertaining and inspiring talk about the coming tipping-point around men’s leadership – why it’s a problem and an opportunity for us all, and what to do about it.

From an experienced business leader and personal development specialist, popular with audiences of men and women, approximately 40 minutes.

Story

I believe we’re about to reach a tipping-point around perceptions of men’s ability to lead.

There’s a lot of evidence about at the moment to suggest that men’s leadership is falling behind and is no longer as effective or inspirational as it needs to be. A recent article in Harvard Business Review scored men lower than women on 15 out of the highest 16 competences of top leaders. And more and more data implies that men are not capable of the kind of leadership that businesses and other organisations now need.

This is because of the triple-whammy of Nuts, Nature and Nurture: men’s innate drive to compete, their slightly lower natural levels of emotional intelligence and the way they are interpreting social pressures to be strong and capable providers.

Organisations and businesses run on the strength of their relationships, needing good interpersonal skills to lead successfully. As big organisations have been de-layered and all businesses have had to become much more inter-connected to survive, men are finding it harder to lead well and get the results they want to make their businesses thrive.

The effects are that some men are falling into negative behaviours and are struggling to be effective and inspiring leaders in today’s complex, fast-moving situations. And other men are not reaching their full potential, failing to balance their lives well, or lacking a sense of purpose. This can be holding the business back and has a hugely negative impact not just for those men themselves but also for their colleagues.

NR speaking with communications experts McCann Erickson

“Out of the Cave” looks at why this is a problem and why it is an opportunity for us all, suggests some things we could do about it and gets to grips with the real strengths that men can bring to leadership.

More Information

Click here to download more info

Or please get in touch to discuss your speaking requirements.

Male Early Retirees Die Early Too

An Austrian study finds that when blue-collar male workers involuntarily retire early, they are also significantly more likely to die earlier. The same effects are NOT seen in women.

Causes are likely to relate to increased alcohol consumption and smoking, and to the stress of getting booted-out early.

Click here for full article

Anybody not think we should be doing more health-awareness campaigning aimed at men?

Reference:
Fatal attraction? Access to early retirement and mortality
Andreas Kuhn, Jean-Philippe Wuellrich, Josef Zweimüller
25 March 2012

http://www.voxeu.org

The Power of Holding Your Nerve and How to Do It

Yet another example this week of a client having to hang in there; not powerless, but just needing to stick with it until either a great result emerges, or something shifts, or they can know for sure it hasn’t worked.

Sometimes, just holding your nerve is the only option. Not because you’ve got nothing left to give (although that can also be the case at times) but simply because the situation isn’t ready to receive any more from you. You’ve done what you can, now you have to wait.

This is a common scene in action movies (think Magnificent Seven perhaps): the band of heroes has dug-in, the defenses are prepared, they’ve done what they can, they’ve used the tools they had. Now they just need to wait until the bad guys show up.

It’s at this point that the people who are not going to be part of the solution will bail. That one guy who you thought might help out decides he’s had enough and, while the Seven are lying there in the dark, he sneaks off into the night, unable to take the tension of waiting.

The bad guys ride into town, and now the leader has to ask everybody to wait just a little bit longer. Open fire too soon and those baddies will turn tail and ride around behind you.

Hold your nerve properly, until the time is on your side, and the day is won.

Three things are important for holding your nerve:

• Really having bought into why you’re doing it,
  because if the cause isn’t worth fighting for, you’ll bail when the waiting gets too tough
• Knowing that inaction is not the same as being unable to act,
  for resourceful people, waiting is hard. It can seem a lot like being powerless but it’s not; you will survive the waiting, you are not powerless
• Accepting that you have no choice but to wait,
  I’m clinging onto this cliff-edge, I’m holding my breath down here for one moment longer, because I have no choice; either I hang-on and hold my nerve or that’s it, game-over – and I don’t want game-over.

Zen Buddhists tell a great story of an old monk who spent sixty years in a monastery searching for enlightenment that hadn’t come to him. On the day he sadly decides to give up and return to a lay-person’s life, the Abbott asks him to sweep the courtyard for one last time before he goes.

Unknown to the monks, the Buddha has decided to visit the monastery that very day and is waiting, disguised as a small stone, hidden under some leaves in the courtyard. The old monk agrees to perform this one last service to his brothers before going and although his heart is breaking with the sadness of leaving, he sweeps the courtyard with loving care. On his very last sweep, the broom catches the hidden Buddha-stone and flicks it against a large clay pot. The ‘chink’ sound of the Buddha-stone striking the pot is so exquisite that the old monk is instantly enlightened.

They say:

“The European Men’s Health Forum (EMHF) is the only European organisation dedicated to the improvement of men’s health in all its aspects, and a platform for the collaboration of a wide range of stakeholder groups in Europe.

EMHF is an independent, non-governmental, non-profit-making organisation. It is a membership association headed by an elected Board of Directors which represents the diverse range of Europe-wide and national organisations with an interest in men’s health issues”

Click here for website

They say:

“Men’s Health Forum (MHF) is a charity that provides an independent and authoritative voice for male health in England and Wales and tackles the issues and inequalities affecting the health and well-being of men and boys.

MHF’s vision is a future in which all boys and men in England and Wales have an equal opportunity to attain the highest possible level of health and well-being.”

Click here for website

They say:

“‘Men Get Eating Disorders Too’ is a UK based charity dedicated to representing and supporting the needs of men with eating disorders.

Eating disorders are typically perceived to be conditions that are suffered by only females. This is far from the case. Men of any age, background or sexuality can be affected.”

Click here for website

Why it’s OK for Men to be Angry and How to do Something Useful with it

A theme that comes up a lot in working with leading men is anger.

Often, these men are feeling bad for feeling angry. It’s almost as if there’s rule that says as an emotionally-mature, intelligent man: “You’re not allowed to be angry; you need to suppress that feeling.”

Well, yes, you are allowed to feel angry! And suppressing stuff just gets us nowhere anyway (see my post on Integration). It’s what you choose to do with your anger that really counts.

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering
Yoda

In the Star Wars myth Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader because he can’t face his fears for the lives of those he loves. Because he’s supposed to be a Jedi in training, he mistakenly hides his emotions and can’t tell even his closest friends what he’s experiencing. Instead of integrating his fear he chooses to live, twisted and darkened, in the tremendous power that his anger generates. And we all know where that leads to…

Like all human emotions, there’s a reason that we feel anger. If it didn’t confer some kind of evolutionary-advantage, we’d have evolved out anger thousands of years ago.

I believe that anger is both a really useful signal and a spur to action.

As a useful signal, anger is often a sign pointing towards one of three things:

• fear- there’s something that we’re afraid might happen
• threat – we’re under some kind of attack already
• injustice – other people who are important to us may be threatened themselves.

I’ve written before about how it’s impossible to deal with things by trying to become invulnerable (click here), so a better response to anger is to allow it to happen, but choose to use the energy it generates to do something positive, as a useful spur to action. And by positive I don’t mean kill all your enemies and/or create a galactic empire so that nothing can ever threaten you again; I mean:

1. Stay with your fear long enough for it not to be unconsciously ruling you;
2. Set-up realistic and adult-shaped boundaries so that you can tell the difference between: (a) your ego feeling a bit threatened and (b) you and the people you care for genuinely being at risk

And do something realistically and ethically constructive about those genuine risks.

I’ll write more on staying with fear in the near future.

Why Leaders Need to Embrace Their Vulnerability

Had a great discussion last night, with one of the mentally and physically strongest men I know, about situations when we’d both not told people about feeling ill. It reminded me of when I was in charge of a London office with a couple of assistant managers and around 20 staff. It was a difficult time and one day, in a really uncharacteristic outburst, one of my assistant managers turned and shouted at me:

for god’s sake, show some f@cking weakness!

I’d fallen into the trap of thinking that as the leader of that small team, I had to be invulnerable and not show that I was also battered and bruised by all that was going on around us.

There’s a great scene in Spiderman 2, where Spidey saves a train full of passengers but is injured, unmasked and rendered unconscious by the tremendous effort. He is held and carried aloft into the train by the passengers. They are not shocked by his vulnerability, they are moved by it. I think it says that everybody wants to reach out and help a hero.

Men often struggle to reconcile their great strengths with the inherent weaknesses of being human; and yet to be human is exactly what people want from their leaders. We need to move away from believing “I have to be strong for people, so I can’t show my weakness” towards something more like: “I have to show people it’s OK to be human, so I must be strong enough to ask for help.”

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L’Engle

Real dishes break. That’s how you know they’re real.
Marty Rubin

How to Get Meaningful Stuff Done Without Struggling

Here’s a really quick overview of the way I help my clients with their time-management if and when they need it. You can download a bigger version of the diagram by clicking it.

It’s got two dimensions:

First the Columns. These are:

• Creating the Future – setting-up attractive goals that will pull you towards them;
• Managing the Now – basically, keeping on top of stuff.

Now the Rows. These are:

• Being – as my American trainers were always so fond of saying: “We’re Human Beings, Nick, not human doings.” Managing time successfully takes an acknowledgement of and process for dealing with the unstructured emotional aspects of being human
• Doing – and you still need to have systems for dealing with everything that needs doing and linking that to the many aspects of a full and rounded working life.

And a quick look at the boxes:

Life-Purpose and Big Hairy Goal
Experience shows that when the going gets tough, the people who thrive are those who know why they’re here, so they’re not just existing but have a compelling Life-Purpose that will pull them through. Similarly, having a really ambitious Big Hairy Goal that is worth getting your teeth into makes so much sense.

Fully Rounded Set of Goals
We know that setting goals makes a difference, but too often people fail to realise that just setting goals for (eg) work are not enough. Alone, they can create conflict with other areas of life. I usually set medium-term personal goals for between 6 – 9 areas, including: Career, Family, Spouse, Friends, Personal Growth, Money-Management, Recreation, My Surroundings, Spirituality.

Dealing with Fears and Desires
Have you ever noticed that no matter how good your goal-setting, or how clever your To-Do system is, things sometimes just get blown right off course? Often this is because we have some unrecognised, unconscious desire or fear that has not been addressed. As a first-step, simply making these conscious by writing them down can really help.

To-Do System
Last, you need a system, preferably something really simple, for managing all the stuff that actually needs doing. Having a To-Do system is unfortunately where most people start with Time Management, which is a shame because unless their load is light or they’re way more disciplined than most, on its own it’s doomed to failure. A notebook or app where you add new to-do’s to the bottom and cross-through the ones that have been done is enough. Avoid anything more complicated like the plague.

Help or Support When Life Gets On Top of You

CLICK HERE TO GO STRAIGHT TO THE CALM WEBSITE

They say:

“The campaign against living miserably (CALM) was set up to reduce the high suicide rate amongst men under 35, currently the single biggest killer of young men in the UK. It is a campaign and charity targeting young men with a helpline, magazine and online community, but CALM listens to anyone who needs help or support.

Men are three times more at risk of suicide than young women – in 2010 75% of suicides were men. But while smoking and knife crime make the headlines, suicide is the biggest killer. Most men who take their own lives aren’t in contact with any other agency, and don’t identify with much out there.  When asked, what they indicated they wanted was practical, anonymous, confidential help from professionals. Which is why CALM was formed.

Talk to CALM

The helpline is open 5pm-midnight on Sat, Sun, Mon and Tues, every week of the year.

Call 0808 802 5858 within London – or if you’re outside London call 0800 585858. It’s free, confidential and anonymous.

Text 07537 404717, start your first text ‘CALM1’ (service only available within London, until we get more funding). We don’t charge, but your network might.

For more info, get in touch with CALM today
Join the buzz on www.facebook.com/theCALMzone and www.twitter.com/theCALMzone
Email info@theCALMzone.net
Or write to CALM, PO Box 68766, London SE1P 4JZ.”

CLICK HERE TO GO STRAIGHT TO THE CALM WEBSITE

Text credit to the CALM website. Photo credit is a screenshot of the site. Sub-title is mine.