Leading Through Fire

I recently sat down to write a piece for  a new book project that I was invited to be a part of.  It is always such an honor to be a part of a project that has a mission to share leadership lessons and learning with aspiring women leaders. The topic I chose was Leading Through Fire. I think sometimes when we look at leaders we see them at their best and we can think that everyone else has it all together and that their journey has been all smooth sailing.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and Built to Last, has a new book out called What to Make of a Life. The subtitle is "Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative". Jim uses the metaphor of cliffs, fog, and fire to discuss what we all face in life. A cliff is a major disruptive life altering event like death, retirement, a serious medical diagnosis. It is something that makes you question ‘what do I do with my life now?’. Fog is the fuzzy disorientation we feel following a cliff. It is the discomfort of not really knowing who we are and what comes next. And fire is the drive that carries through the challenging and difficult time.

In the book project I found myself sharing an example of a time I went through an unexpected and challenging experience. It was difficult and public and painful and I learned a lot through going through that fire. But in Jim Collins description - it wasn’t really a cliff.  But I have had plenty of cliff experiences.

Some personal cliffs have included: 

• My then husband having a life altering near death work accident

• Having a traumatic unexpected birth of twins with complications

• Divorce

• Retirement

Some professional cliffs have included:

• Leaving a successful teaching career for the charter school field; when it was new and very counter culture

• Being a part of the implosion and closing of a large charter school

• Surviving and then re-emerging from the unification of 4 school districts

When Collins discusses cliffs, he shared that the “odds any of us will complete life without cliffs is close to zero…. Life is punctuated by cliffs” (pg. 5).

My life has definitely been punctuated by cliffs. It’s most likely yours has also.  Collins was intrigued by life's cliffs and studied people who went through them and how they reconstituted themselves after a life-altering cliff. This research led him to the concept of encodings. He describes encodings as “durable capacities of a person’s intrinsic construction that lie within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life.” Each of has what he describes as our own constellation of encodings - the cliff or the fire lead us to discover those encodings within us. 

What have you learned about your durable capacities due to the cliffs (and fires) you’ve experienced?