Let’s Talk About Love

So many people tell me about their fear-based organizations and how unproductive those workplaces can be. The key to shifting from fear to love is learning how to love with greater capacity than living in fear. Think of a scale with fear on one side and love on the other. Only when your love for something or someone becomes greater to you than fear, will the scale tip in favor of love. However, if your fear of something or someone is greater than your love for something else, then fear wins again.

• Do I love and respect my desire to go for that position more than my fear of being rejected?

• Do I love and value my goal to launch my own business more than my fear of stepping out and possibly failing?

• Do I value the call to write my own book more than my fear of negative response?

Do you see how easy it is to put more value onto the side of fear? The great news is that we can learn a better way to lead by employing love-based strategies and techniques with tremendous, sustainable results that are more powerful than fear-based methods. We can learn to be irresistible leaders with the power of love. Let’s all get on the same page with the definitions of love and leadership about which I am speaking.

• Love -- the universal definition of love: Honoring, caring, trusting, and respecting one human being to another.

• Leadership -- inspiring one or many toward a vision.

Love is our natural state of being, while fear is learned. Because love is our natural state, it is also the core, the very essence of who we are. When we fully embrace this concept and integrate it with our thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors, we come into the perfect balance of warmth and courage. Warmth and love juxtaposed with courage and strength are not opposing values; in fact, they are completely related. The root origin of the word courage is the French word Coeur, which means heart. We know that to be courageous requires fearlessness, and to be fear-less is to be love-filled.

Let’s be those courageous, fearless leaders and shift to the other 4-letter word, love

.With Love,

Maria

• Abundance
• Action
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Cooperation
• Culture
• Influence
• Intuition
• Leadership
• Leadership shift
• Love
• Love-Based Leadership
• Mindfulness
• Motivation
• Power
• Presence
• Significance
• Source
• Team
• Transparency
• Uncategorized
• Vision
• Vulnerability

Got Meaning?

Did you know the majority of heart attacks occur around nine o’clock on Monday mornings?

One study showed that the most common factor in these heart attacks was that the victims were people whose work had become joyless striving. In other words, they could not find meaning in their work, and their lives had become so out of balance that, one Monday morning, their bodies said, “You are not going to work today. Zap.”1

I remember a discussion I had with the general manager of a regional division, discussing with him the importance of finding meaning in work for our employees and leaders. His response was, “I think meaning at work is over-rated.” Overrated? We spend the vast majority of our adult lives at work.

One of the primary purposes of a leader is to inspire vision and motivation in those he or she leads, and few things are more inspiring and motivating than meaningful work.If we don’t have meaning…what do we have?

We must know the “why” behind the things we do, or we are at unrest and certainly unmotivated.

As always, I welcome your input. What is the most meaningful aspect of your job and why?

With love,

Maria

1. J. A .Autrey, & S. Mitchell, Real power: Business lessons from the Tao Te Ching (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 23.