A Leadership Lesson From My 99 Year Old Grandmother!

On my recent trip to Iceland, I was buying a postcard of incredible geyser eruptions I had just seen, to send to my 99 year old grandmother who lives in New Zealand. The geyser eruptions reminded me of trips to NZ as a child, visiting Rotorua which has similar eruptions and sulphur smells…a feast for all the senses. Isn’t it amazing how our senses can take us immediately back in time…about 25 years later and on two opposite ends of the planet?!

Whilst I was buying the card, a friend asked me who I was buying it for, I answered; he was amazed that she’s 99 and still in great form and asked what it is that I most admire about her. I knew right away and thought I’d share this with you, from a leadership perspective.

My grandmother, Esma, appreciates everyone and everything to her core, she believes she’s inherently lucky, she never complains about a thing…and when my grandfather was sent to fight in WW2, (they’d been recently married and had a child on the way), she wrote to him every…single…day and as she says “we never once had a cross word with each other in 63 years of marriage.” Everyone who comes into contact with her calls her Wonder Woman.

With Grandma in New Zealand, March 2015

Imagine, as the leader of your very own life, of your team and/or business…imagine the efficiency, ease and excitement with which you’d operate if you chose to focus on nurturing your personal and professional relationships to the point where bottlenecks, arguments, miscommunications, re-work and stress were a thing of the past…because you choose to appreciate, whole-heartedly and specifically…because you choose to believe you’re inherently lucky…because complaining is no longer part of your modus operandi, because you have a commitment to your goals and dreams and you know that none of us get there alone, so the first place you must focus, always, is:

1. Your relationship to yourself
2. Your personal relationships
3. Your professional relationships

Is there enough Trust, Respect and Listening in each and every relationship?

If not, it’s pretty much guaranteed you won’t achieve the results you wish to achieve in the time frame you require. So, next time something’s not working, ask yourself “what’s missing?” and 9 times out of 10 if you go to work on the level of Trust, Respect and Listening in the relationship in question, results will improve by osmosis.

The reason I include your relationship with yourself first, is because it is not one that many of us often consider, yet it is the most important of all and few of us really think about be~ing the leaders of our own lives, rather more we see leadership as something that’s done to us. The truth is you do lead your own life, beyond 18 no one else does that for you!

So choose to appreciate others, build strong relationships of Trust, Respect and Listening, believe you’re lucky and make complaints a thing of the past…so you can step into be~ing you’re very own Wonder Woman (or Superman!) and live joyously to the ripe old age of 99…or 100…we are all so sure she’ll make it…I’ll keep you posted!