To be a leader (in business and life) it’s not the easiest thing in the world. As almost everything is complex in life, it comes with a series of advantages and challenges.
Albert Ellis, one of the founding fathers of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), who founded and managed the “Albert Ellis Institute” (one of the elite centers of CBT, together with Beck Institute) had a lot of things to say about leadership based on psychology and a very large experience driving a large organization. You can find more about it in his book:
One of the basic principles of a good life and a sane leadership mindset is rational sensitivity; this principle says that I, as a human being, want to maximize my pleasures (my enjoyment) and I want to minimize my pains (what is not so good for me). At the same time, it’s good to take into account that others have the same rights as myself – and that also means that’s good to express my opinions and my emotions, but I can’t impose my way of doing things on others (because other people have the same right as me to do the things in their way). By this principle (in life and leadership) we promote the equal right to own opinions, own emotions, and own behaviors and we don’t promote at all the tyranny.
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Another principle is to not rate your entire person, only your behaviors! We human beings are dynamic processes and we make a lot of mistakes all of our life. We can’t rate ourselves as human beings (we are equal in that regard), but we can rate our behaviors (which we can change if we want to) – so our behavior can be good, bad, inefficient, stupid, etc -> but our entire being can’t be rated at all. The human being was not, is not, and will not ever be the same as his behaviors! The human being, in all of his totality, can not receive a rate!
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Also, Albert Ellis makes a very beautiful description of an organizational leader: he is a person who looks constantly for inefficiencies to solve and to put in place efficient ways of working. He has almost as a second nature the radical change (and sometimes the drastic change).
Also, a leader is essentially logical and rational. One of his most important features is that he combines emoting, thinking, and acting powerfully.
We can also say that every human being (and the leader, of course) thinks first of all about his wishes and his objectives; then he thinks about other people; and then at diverse modes to harmonize (by negotiations mostly).
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Also Ellis gives some very powerful suggestions in order to accomplish you objectives:
- work only on the most important tasks
- take into account the deadlines and that you have a limited number of hours in a day
- abandon trivia and cheap conversation (sometimes these conversations are ok, but most of the time they are not helpful for your medium and long-term goals)
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Regarding the medium and long-term goals, try not to engage too much in short-term goals (because they are not helping you to achieve the medium and long-term objectives most of the time). The medium and long-term goals give you purpose and meaning (besides other things) and are a kind of rational hedonism.
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As final words, I live you with a beautiful description of that it means Rational Sensitivity, according to Albert Ellis.
“An individual who believes in and practices this philosophic orientation is highly sensitized:
– to himself and his survival and enjoyments
– to other human beings and their desires to live and be happy
– to short-range and long-range pleasures and pains
– to his own propensity to create his highly emotional feelings, about the Activating Events and Experiences he encounters, by actively thinking and valuing
– to the fact that practically all humans, including himself, are frequently needlessly disturbed
– to discriminating accurately between his rational, empirically centered and his irrational, magic-impelled beliefs
– to the difficulty of his (and others’) changing basic thinking and emoting patterns
– to the possibility, nonetheless, of such radical change being effected
– to the desirability of continual work and practice, at his own thinking and behaving patterns, in order to effect basic personality change.”
This being said, I leave you to read this wondferful book that can make wonders if you try to put it in practice:
Enjoy and accept yourself with all your mistakes!
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