What Sir Stirling Moss can teach us about fear

Picture credit Peter Brown

I have just listened to an Excellent 5 minute interview with the wonderful Stirling Moss conducted by Chris Evans from radio 2. Love him or hate him he does do a great interview, his 3 minute interviews are superb with no preparation as the guest is a complete surprise, so it flows like a conversation that you may have if you met someone for the first time in a pub!! However this post is not about interview technique (though it gives me an idea) but about fear!

At 81 Sir Stirling Moss is still racing. He is Britain’s most successful fomula 1 racing driver and if you want to know more see wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_Moss

So, I hear you say, why would a racing driver be talking about fear, surely they are among the most fearless of people in the world. I would agree and also add that his generation were the uber fearless as this was a time before health and safety, before fireproof material and modern technology. This was a time of raw steel, cotton overalls and leather helmets.

Stirling has announced his retirement from the racing world as he for the very first time felt frightened going round the race track. He realised on his last race that if he were to get up to the speed he was supposed to that he would for the very first time in his life, be scared. He apparently spoke to his ‘people’ and of course his loyal and supportive wife and made the decision there and then to retire.

From a leadership perspective this is really interesting. He has shown in the past an unfaltering fearlessness which was his driving force for more than 65 years of racing. This shows amongst others the competences of steadfastness and determination. But he also listens to himself. He must have been listening to his intuition for all that time. For every other race it urged him on, but, on this his last race, he listened and it told him to stop.

Fear is a really important emotion. In her book ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’ Susan Jeffers tells us effectively that all we have to do is get over the fear because it’s the fear that is the ‘thing’ we fear not the ‘thing’ that we are doing.

Stirling epitomized this in his career up until his last race. He was fearless of the ‘thing’ which was driving very fast with little protection. Using his positive energy and power to be the biggest and best of his generation. But he also showed his courage in the face of his fear, which I surmise he must have had; which was giving up!.

Motor racing has defined him for 66 years of his life, he is an icon and for him to hang up his steering wheel took a huge amount of courage.

Imagine how scared he must have been as he realised that this was it, the end. That he would never go round the track as a racing driver again. Fini, nada.

To make the final trip to the pits, to tell ‘team moss’ that it was all over. That took courage.

Good luck Sir Stirling. You have given us many years of vicarious danger. May you retire in peace and in the knowledge that you were brave to the very end.

Here is the link to the interview
Stirling moss interview with Chris Evans it starts at 2.06.20

Volunteers needed

Are you or your company right for the ‘imeus’ leadership competence programme for emerging talent.

Could you be what we are looking for

We have been working hard to develop an online, interactive coaching programme that delivers great content and engages with the coachee from the start. We believe this programme will revolutionise the way organisations develop their leaders.

Our Big Fat Hairy Audacious goal is that in 10 years time there will be someone sitting on the board of every FTSE 100 company in the UK who began flexing their leadership muscle within our learning community.

Before we start marketing the programme we want to make sure it’s as good as we think it is, that the technology works and we hit the right tone.

Therefore we are looking for 25 participants to help us to trail the programme.

These are the criteria:

The company:
• large organisations (minimum of 500 employees worldwide)
• serious about investing in and growing talent that will be their future leaders
• interested/curious in the impact and flexibility of a new approach to training/coaching.

Our commitment:
• to provide our programme completely free of charge to the first 25 (usual cost £1,500 per person)
• to provide a quality resource that will make an impact on the leadership journey.

Your commitment:
• to put forward individuals who meet the criteria and provide feedback from both coachee and line manager perspective.

The individual:
• the individual chosen for the programme must be willing to trial the programme for 12 weeks
• will complete a diagnostic and 5 learning modules
• their line manager will be required to complete a diagnostic on the individual
• the individual must be emerging talent, committed to a process of personal and professional development, and prepared to put in the work required to achieve this. This is not a passive training experience but active development.

The time demand: Each module takes around 1.5 hours but also requires some work offline.

Technical requirement: A sound enabled computer with internet access.

Timescale: Commencing 1st July (feedback completed by 30th September)

Please apply if you are totally serious about fulfilling your potential as a future leader of your organisation.

Please e-mail me at emma@imeuscoaching.com if you are interested in taking part.

Who’s managing your talent?

Your manager, HR department, recruitment consultant? Maybe you have coach. Is it your best friend or partner? The answer is all of these and none.

Let me explain.

Your talent is exactly that, your talent. It’s your responsibility to manage and nurture the talent that you have always had. Others have input, sure, but give away responsibility for managing your talent and you turn into at best, a puppet for others to use for their own ends or worse a mish mash of ideas and thoughts of others.

I am a firm believer that people don’t change. We can adjust, we can develop, we can go toward positive natural behaviours and walk away from the negative one’s, but full on change just doesn’t happen.

If you are shaking your head now lets look at biology. You are born with a genetic make-up with a combination of genes from your ancestors. A bit like a big lottery machine. The genetic lottery machine throws out a combination of genes when you are born and that’s your lucky number. It may have given you a terrific talent for music or art or maths or a charismatic voice or long legs. What ever it gave you it gave them to you in a unique combination. You can’ t go back into the machine and pick a few more you prefer. That’s it like it or lump it. If you want to blame any one blame your parents, their parents and so on. The best you can do is just get on with it.

Now we have that sorted out; You may feel that it is limiting; but it is part of the human experience to always want we haven’t got. Also everyone else has only got what they have. Chances are if they are successful they have been making the most of their inherent talents. Yep it may be that they went to a better school had a pony or blonde hair, but stop looking at what others have and begin to see what you have;and chances are others are just as envious of you as you are of them.

Once you know what it is you have you can do something about making what you have the best it can be and to fulfil the potential; that the genetic lottery machine gave you.

First thing first, start off with an inventory. What talents do you think you have, what talents do others think you have. You may find synergy or you may find the answers you get as surprising.

Now what’s all this got to do with leadership? Well if we agree that your talent is there all along then it will mean that you may have natural leadership qualities. I again believe that leaders are born not made and that the combination of genes you have either make you a leader or a follower. If you are a follower I doubt if you are even reading this blog, so I am going to summise you are a leader you have leadership qualities and you need a bit of help and support to bring them out and develop. In other words how do you become the best version of yourself?.

1) Take a good long honest look at who you are what you stand for.
2) Get 2 other people who you know who you can rely upon to be honest and ask them what they think the answers to the above questions are.
3) Now you have a talent inventory you can score yourself. Look at each one and ask what is the best this can be? On a scale of 1-10 how close to it are you?
4) Once you know what your talents are, how close are you to making them really brilliant you can work on getting closer to the full potential everyday.

How to get close to your potential?

You need to take control, manage your own talent. When the above has been done (the hard bit) it now gets easier, it’s just consistency and discipline.

1) Keep a diary. Make notes of the challenges and success’s in your development. It’s good to make a mistake once, it’s forgivable twice a third time is a no no, with a diary youi can manage this.
2) Keep checking in. Remember those friends, tell them what you are doing, how they can help you and get feedback regularly. You never know this may even help them.
3) Read and learn from others. Look at your list of talents, seek others out who have what you have and go and see how they do it, learn from the experts in the field, Communicate with them. You never know where this kind of connection may lead
4) Help others, as you learn from others let others learn from you. Do you recognise yourself in others, take them under your wing and mentor them it could be an excellent experience for all.

It’s your responsibility to take control of your own talent and it’s long term nurturing and management.

Coaching question. 1) What would it mean for my future if my talent was truly exposed? 2) What is my unique leadership quality which makes me stand out of the crowd. 3) What is the next opportunity I have to expose this talent to the world.

A big KISS from a Yorkshireman

A big KISS from a Yorkshireman

I have worked in Media sales in one form or another since I was 17 years old.

The media presentation was one of the first ‘training courses’ I went on when I became a sales rep. The stand up presentation is when you present the product, the readership, the differentials of the product and show yourself as the person who will be hassling the client for business, sometimes with good news sometimes with bad.

Even though it is the presentation that as media folk we do the most it is the most potentially dangerous.

Why?

The figures are boring, depending on your field you could be looking at NRS, ABC, BPA, JICNARS all sorts. You may be talking up rises, or talking down decreases of either you or your competition.

The more senior you become the more of these you have to do to a more eclectic mix of people; internal and external senior and junior execs, clients, partners, agencies and other stakeholders. All wanting a slightly different twist and all waiting for a slightly different punchline.

It is however the most effective way of getting your capsule offering across and where your employers and peers can really get the measure of you.

When I came across this presentation by Steve Auckland, who was at the time Managing Director of Metro, I really did think it had a lot of class. Having worked at Associated when Metro launched and the wobbles of the launch and elbowing of a new product at a new time. Metro has really come of age. The package is simple, the offering straightforward and the message memorable. If he has taken the KISS pneumonic as his ‘style’ of communicating, Keep it Simple and Straightforward’ then this Yorkshireman’s presentation is a perfect example.

Communication is a key competence for leaders wherever they are in their career. As well as their internal communication style their ‘set piece’ formal communication style sets them apart from managers. It obviously works for Steve as he has recently been promoted to MD of Regional Newspaper group, Northcliffe.

Coaching Question: What is your communication style and how consistent is it?

One in the eye for kelly’s critics

If you had told me last year that I would be blogging enthusiastically about Kelly Osborne being a role model for leaders I would have looked at you very strangely.

Yep you heard me right, Kelly Osborne.  You know, the youngest Daughter of Ozzie; the Prince of Darkness. Spoilt Millionairess, Drug taking talentless twit. Yes the very same.

I saw her interviewed on Saturday by Piers Morgan and I was struck immediately by her honesty and ability to listen to the questions and with candour answer them from the heart without putting any sort of spin on her responses.

She has come through the other side of LA school pretentiousness, drug taking, eating disorders, abusive relationships, her Mother nearly dying of Cancer and her Father nearly dying of a daft quad bike accident.

Not many people could cope with that, let alone at the age of 26 and in the near constant gaze of the ever so fickle global public eye.

She made some dreadful mistakes, some shocking errors of judgement and lapped up all that the celebrity lifestyle threw at her. She hit her Annus horribulus with both her parents lying in separate hospital beds on different continents waging their own personal struggle for survival as she blearily rallied between the two. What pulled her through? Dancing!

She agreed to compete in the US equivalent of Strictly Come dancing, Dancing with the stars, where she and partner Louis Van Amstel came third.

So how did dancing help her? And what traits make her a leadership role model Emma ?

Discipline: the training and complicated choreography is well known for being very difficult. Dancers are strong, courageous and committed. How many times in her charmed LA life had she witnessed or experienced these character traits.

Able to handle the attention: The attention was purely on her, her steps, her control. But the attention in a positive way rather than a negative.  As the youngest daughter of a famous, some say iconic individual, it must be very difficult to fight for your own personality as you drown in another’s persona.

Able to rise to the challenge. The  expectations of famous children is great. A models children are expected to beautiful, an actors children are expected to be brilliant actors and singers children are expected to have great voices. They are expected to emerge from the family, the finished product, not able to make their own mistakes or carve, through trial and error, their own path.

So Kelly in her short life made a bit of a mess, and made lots and lots of mistakes. I for one wrote her off as I’m sure many others.

But she turned it all round and is now much closer to her true authentic self. I’ll be following her progress very closely from now on and wonder what initiatives will come out of this new found personal strength

Good luck Kelly, this quote from Confucious sums it up for me.

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”.

If you want to see how your leadership skills measure up, contact me for a free tool which will give you great insight.

emma@emmaransonbellamy.co.uk

Viva La Revolution!!!

It is said that if you do what you have always done you will always get what you have always had.

This can be taken 2 ways. If you are a failure in life and you keep on doing what you have always done then you will get what you have always got, namely failure.

If you are a success in life and you carry on doing what you have always done the ‘saying’ would suggest that if you keep on doing it you will continue to be successful.

I do not believe as we approach the second decade of the new millennium that this is true.

Change is happening so quickly in every part of business. I used to work in the engineering industry and in the 80’s would visit companies in heavy manufacturing that no longer exist, but at the time were the pillars of our society and had been for almost 100 years before.

It started with the MP’s expenses. We are now seeing the big banks about to reduce bonuses across all companies and the newspaper reading public is falling and so are there profits as ad revenues filter to more immediate forms of communication.

These industries had seen success doing things a certain way for generations and as a means of survival are going to have to change. They have a huge challenge on their hands but I have no doubt the best will come out stronger and be able to continue to serve us for years to come.

We live in uncomfortable times and whilst we change there will be painful transitions which will impact on us culturally as well as personally.

In the last 6 months I have many conversations with clients who are going through times of change and their leadership skills are being tested to the max.

I have a tool about to go live on my website www.erbcoachingsolutions.co.uk, a leadership wheel to gain insight into your leadership ‘act’. It will be free to download and comes with instructions. If you would like to get a copy before everyone else Please e mail or tweet me.