Years before, I’d given him the metaphor I often use with clients: “Take your seat.” “Sit like royalty in your leadership seat,” I say. “Sit as if you’ve the right to be there.”
Jerry Colonna in Reboot
I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).
Years before, I’d given him the metaphor I often use with clients: “Take your seat.” “Sit like royalty in your leadership seat,” I say. “Sit as if you’ve the right to be there.”
Jerry Colonna in Reboot
Learning to lead ourselves is hard because in the pursuit of love, safety, and belonging, we lose sight of our basic goodness and twist ourselves into what we think others want us to be. We move away from the source of our strengths—our core beliefs, the values we hold dear, the hard-earned wisdom of life—and toward an imagined playbook listing the right way to be.
Jerry Colonna in Reboot
“I am not what has happened to me,” taught Carl Jung. “I am what I choose to become.” But choosing requires knowing. It requires knowing how what happened to us influences the choices we made and continue to make. Again and again I ask my clients, “How are you complicit in creating the conditions of your lives that you say you don’t want?”
Jerry Colonna in Reboot
Our co-founder has quit. Our investors pull funding. Our number one customer returns the product because it simply doesn’t work. Our spouse gives up on us. Our board fires us. Such are the moments to stare deeply into our own experience. Who are we? What are we made of? What conditions are our lives in and, radically as important, how have we been complicit in creating the conditions we so steadfastly declare we do not want?
Jerry Colonna in Reboot
One of the most startling challenges I will put to a client comes from my bastardization of a Zen aphorism: This being so, so what? Things being as they are, what will you do about it?
Jerry Colonna in Reboot