The Shell Must break before the Bird can fly- Alfred lord Tennyson
What thoughts hold you down? What keeps you from your full leadership potential?
With so much information around us every day it is easy to see how we can make quick assumptions and become rigid in our thinking. Yet in this rigidity there is little room for growth.
There are times we must break free from our past patterns in order to soar above challenges. For a baby bird the breaking free is just a one-time event. For us – we may need to break free over and over again. Knowing that can be a source of frustration or intimidation.
What if we perceived it differently? What if we looked at arriving at the freedom to be more creative with our leadership – to reach new heights of supervising, motivating and inspiring others started by the willingness to break the shell?
One of the first steps you can take toward breaking this shell is to examine the stories you may tell yourself and how much value you place on experiences. Once you understand this – you can readjust your perceptions and become more open to new experiences. As Scientists Antonia Damasio suggests, “In other words, you were not walking before you were born and you were not doing X and Y before you did something else first. So there’s a sequencing of events that imposes a certain structure to the story. Then there’s something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value."
Memories of experiences?. “Question: How do our brains construct coherent personal narrative out of our memories of experience
Antonio Damasio: "You do it in very interesting ways. A first way is by taking the story as it happens. You know, our biographies happened one part at a time. There is a sequence of events in our lives and so there’s a temporal aspect to our experience that brings by itself, sense into the story. In other words, you were not walking before you were born and you were not doing X and Y before you did something else first. So there’s a sequencing of events that imposes a certain structure to the story.
Then there’s something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value. Value in the true biological sense, which is that contrary to what many people seem to think, taking it at face value—sorry for the pun—we do not give the same amount of emotional significance to every event. So there are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response. So if something produces an undue amount of pleasure or undue amount of displeasure, it’s going to be judged differently and it’s going to be introduced in your narrative with a different size, with a different development."