FastCompany.com - Where ideas and people meet. Empathy Is The Most Powerful Leadership Tool. Anything we’re trying to make happen as a leader involves other people, and the fact is, most people don’t have to follow us.
They don’t have to believe in our great ideas, buy our great products, or do what we want them to do. Even when we have authority--as parents of teenagers will tell you--our power doesn’t go very far without others believing that what we want them to do is in their best interests. The pull of connecting to others and their interests is far more powerful than the push of control, especially when we find the intersection between their interests and our goals. Get To Work By Meeting Procrastination Head-On. There’s a huge distance between the physical energy it takes to run on a treadmill--the muscles, calories, and breath--and the often larger emotional energy it takes to head to the gym after a stressful day.
Just ask a guy who gained 40 pounds during graduate school. Rory Vaden is now much more trim, and quite focused on evangelizing the power of self-discipline in books like Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success. But back in graduate school, it wasn’t really laziness that kept Vaden him from the gym, but self-criticism. HBR Blog Network. The Rhetorical Journey.