What is Your Human Condition?
We all share the human condition, and just as we are all unique individuals, so is our individual human condition. You have an opportunity, more so an obligation, to work with your own human condition with respect to your leadership of self and others.
Your human condition is shaped in two ways. First, it is shaped by the external experiences you have with your environment. Second it is shaped by your internal reactions to your environment, or the story you tell yourself about your experiences.
Discover Your Human Condition
To discover your particular human condition, first seek to understand what signals your environment is sending you. Are your colleagues supportive or punitive with their words and actions? What is the story they are telling you through their words and actions?
Second, ask yourself "what is the story that I am telling myself?" As you go about your day, be it a work day or a weekend, try to observe yourself and the messages that you send to yourself. If you are presenting to a client or team of people, what is your state of mind? Are you whispering to yourself that the meeting is going to be a success, or is there self doubt creeping in or dominating your thoughts? These external and internal perspectives help to share your human condition.
Discover Your Corporate Condition
By the way, the same internal / external human condition concept that applies to you as an individual, applies to your business entity. What is the story that your employees and leaders are telling themselves and each other about the company? This is your company's internal story. Is that story supporting or inhibiting your ability to achieve your strategic intentions?
Your customers are telling stories too. They are shaping your corporate condition through the experiences they share with others and with your employees. Finally, what story are your employees telling your customers? The messages to your customers are your company's external story.
Changing Your Human Condition
To work with or change your human condition, you must start with your internal story. You cannot directly change your external environment or other's words and actions, but you can directly change the internal story you are telling yourself.
In my experience, the most impactful option to change your human condition is to change your own mindset. A highly valuable method for changing your mindset is meditation. Meditation leads to mindfulness which leads to a new way of seeing, feeling, and deciding about yourself and others.
Check Out What Harvard Says About Meditation and Strategy Implementation
Changing Your Corporate Condition
To lead your company, you need to start with yourself in the journey. By changing your internal story, you change other's story about you and your role model the change required at the company level.
Developing new ways of seeing, feeling, and deciding is critical for strategy implementation, transformation, and leadership breakthrough because this new way of seeing, feeling, and deciding generates a new human condition to be shared by yourself, your employees, and your customers.
To learn more about how these concepts come together for corporate transformation, please visit www.businesschangeleader.com.