The Illusion & The Game

Part 1: The Illusion

We often complicate leadership. We make it this complex thing that we must study, understand and get really good at. Most of the time, rather than help us, this approach works against us. At its simplest form, leadership, your career and performance comes down to a simple distinction, the illusion and the game.

Let’s start with the illusion.

Most of what clients come to me for has to do with the illusion. The illusion of a problem that mostly lives in our imagination and in a reality that we’ve created, though we don’t see it this way when we’re in it. The illusion in this instance includes everything that if we had amnesia, would seize to be a problem.

Let’s consider this for a moment.

Confidence. If you woke up tomorrow with amnesia, would your lack of confidence or your need to raise confidence be a problem? No, not as far as I can see. Confidence is not real in the way a chair is real. I can see a chair. I can feel a chair with my hands. I can sit in a chair. By contrast, I can not see confidence with my eyes. I can not feel it with my hands and I certainly can not sit on it. (thought trying might be a fun game).

Confidence is something that we point to, that we have a felt sense of , but that doesn’t exist in the same way that a chair exists. Why then do we give it so much credence. Why do we believe that we need confidence to do all of the things we want to do. We need it to pursue the job we want, we need it to be who we want to be, we blame the lack of it for holding us back. But when we really look at confidence, consider what it actually is, we start to see that it is part of the illusion, and not the game. It’s something nebulous that we point to when we are attempting to make sense of what is happening in our lives.

Doubt and insecurity works in a similar way. It’s an illusionary concept that we point towards to explain the circumstances that we are living. I can not put my doubt and insecurity in a bag and put it out on the curb with the rest of my trash. And yet, I look to it for why I’m not getting ahead, why I’m not doing the things that I’m certain would change everything for me. But what is doubt? What is insecurity, but a random thought that I’ve had and grabbed onto. What more is it than an element of the illusion of life. A thought-created art piece that I’ve painted, stopped to look at and analyze, and decided that THIS painting is the reason why things are not going well for me. Not noticing that I’m standing in the middle of a large gallery full of other paintings and blank canvases.

While this explanation can serve as additional fodder for yet another reason why we’re not good enough for this leadership thing, the truth is much simpler and much kinder than that. It’s simply part of how we are designed and understanding this seems to make a huge difference in our experience of it.

Once we see that we are living in the illusion (rather than in the game - more on that later), we can decide to not grab on so tightly. We can lean back and see it for what it is. A simple painting that we’ve created, and rather than walk past it to the next painting, we’ve innocently stopped and stayed longer than is useful. We’ve mistakenly decided that our life IS the painting, rather than notice that we’re in a gallery with an infinite number of paintings to choose from. At its core, we’ve forgotten that we are not the paintings we create, but rather the powerful painter with the ability to create a new masterpiece in an instance.