Tag: success

How To Be A Leader People Want To Follow

by Rita Burgett-Martell

“The days of Command and Control are over. Today’s leaders must Trust and Inspire their employees to be trusted as leaders.”

I was a shy sixteen years old, afraid of my own shadow, the summer I worked as a Nurse’s Aide at our local hospital. The Director of Nursing was a strong loud woman that I found very intimidating. Whenever I saw her coming I would turn and go the other direction, or look for someplace to hide.

One day she stopped beside me, put her arm around my shoulder, and said: “I want you to look at my shoes.”

I immediately thought there must be something wrong with my shoes. They were the wrong kind. They weren’t as white as hers. They weren’t laced up correctly. I was literally “shaking in my shoes,” expecting to be criticized or reprimanded. Instead, her words taught me a valuable lesson in leadership that has served me well in my career.

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How To Feel Secure In Insecure Times

by Rita Burgett-Martell

How well are you managing change and disruption caused by COVID-19? Listen to my interview on “The Evolutionary Power of Change and Disruption” with Gwilda Wiyaka, host of Mission Evolution Radio, and learn what you can do to feel secure in insecure times.

It’s 4 a.m. and you are wide awake, worrying about all the bad things that could happen, feeling anxious, and unable to sleep. The fear you are feeling is self-imposed instead of a reaction to what is actually happening because at the present moment you are safe. There is nothing to be afraid of other than the imaginary reality that you have allowed the power of fear to create in your mind.

Sleeping at 4 a.m. is not easy when you are living in the misery of uncertainty, as many of us are with all that is happening in our external world plus our internal imagination-induced fears, We do not like the feeling of being out of control of our life and we do not like being in a position not knowing what’s going to happen next. We need to fill in the blanks. When you are awake at 4 a.m., you probably are not imagining a happy future and will likely fill in the blanks with what you fear will happen instead of what you desire to happen. You easily become trapped in a fear-driven thought cycle instead of a faith-driven cycle focused on pleasurable possibilities.

In 2020 we are faced with very real threats to our health and financial security that many of us have never experienced and never thought we would. This has been a rapid unexpected and unwanted change that we must deal with. Fear prevents us from thinking clearly about what we can do to minimize the threat to our wellbeing. It renders us helpless and blinds our vision to what we can do to stay healthy and keep the money flowing to keep a roof over our head and food on the table.

Although we do not like being in an undefined place between the past and the future, that is where we live.  It is called the present moment.  And, as you know, it is all you ever really control. If you once thought you had created a secure, controllable, and predictable life for yourself, you may be realizing that this was an illusion. There is much that is beyond our control and nothing stays the same forever.

Continue reading “How To Feel Secure In Insecure Times”