Enter the Dragon

Morning friend.

The door to my small balcony is slightly ajar.

I can hear the Adriatic rolling towards the shore and feel the cool breeze slowly replacing the stale air of my hotel room.

In the distance, the medieval walls of Dubrovnik are lit against the darkness. Faint reflections dancing on the waves. Small moving lights trace the hillside, people heading to and from the city.

It is approaching midnight on Saturday.  I’m tired from a few long days of travel, on-stage energy and the three desserts I put away with the help of my friend Matt and Sir Kevin Sinfield.  Perhaps he fuels his ultra-marathons with cheesecake.

In the version of my life where everything goes to plan, I write this Briefing at my desk on a Wednesday afternoon, with time to think and a cup of tea.

In the actual version, sometimes this is where it happens.

Around 1,500 people read this newsletter each week. Among everything else competing for your attention, you give a few minutes to something I’ve written.

That is a privilege I’ll never take for granted.

So, before I go to bed, here we are.

On Thursday, I was at Reading Football Stadium delivering a keynote on my ABCs of leadership and high performance.

Yesterday, Friday, I was on my way to Dubrovnik.

Between the two, I had about twelve hours at home.  Time still to squeeze in a few hours with the boys, hit a workout, pack a bag and navigate a minor domestic disagreement about a missing pair of boxer shorts.

Merino wool ones, since you ask.

They were eventually discovered in my eldest son’s drawer.

Apparently, my influence on his life now extends to an appreciation of expensive underwear.

I owed my wife an apology.

This evening has been rather more peaceful.

I’ve just returned from dinner with about thirty people in a restaurant on the beach that we had entirely to ourselves.

We were supposed to be out at sea on a sunset cruise, but Mother Nature had other ideas.

Having spent rather a lot of time in a rowing boat over the last few years, I have learned that the sea has very little interest in what is written on your itinerary.

Fortunately, the company mattered more than the venue.

I’ve been connected to this leadership group for five years. Today, I delivered a session I called The Next Chapter.

I asked people to share their stories and understand a little more about the person sitting beside them.

You can know what somebody does for years without knowing much about the life that brought them into the room.

Today was a chance to have that second conversation.

And to let a group I trust into some of the experiences that have brought me to this point in my life too.

We used my Four Spaces principle to examine where our time and energy had gone over the last year: Home, Work, Self and Others.

I wrote about it in transmission #032 which you can revisit in the archive.

Twenty coins divided between those four spaces, making visible something we rarely stop to examine.

Then we looked ahead.

What did we want to be different twelve months from now?

And what stood in our way?

Enter the dragon.

This morning, we walked through the old town of Dubrovnik in the rain, visiting some of the places used to film King’s Landing in Game of Thrones.

The weather was doing its best to make the experience authentically miserable.

It did, however, give me a useful creature for the afternoon.

In stories, dragons often guard treasure.

In my session the treasure signified something we wanted for our lives. The dragon was the thing we would have to face to reach it

I asked everyone to think about their own version of that.

Throughout today’s conversations with Kev Sinfield, Drew Broughton, Jamie Jones-Buchanan and others, we kept returning to the word fear.

Sometimes it arrives as anxiety before we speak, as it did for me today and on Thursday. Sometimes it presents as stress when we consider what it might actually be like to face the dragon standing in our way.

They are all familiar human feelings from the same family of emotions, even if we aren’t always very good at admitting we feel them.

Yet we can so often treat their arrival as evidence that perhaps we aren’t capable of tackling the scary thing in front of us.

It’s safe to acknowledge fear without treating it as an instruction to stop.

Before I spoke in Reading on Thursday, the national sales manager asked everyone in the room to line up according to their years of leadership experience within the company.

Between them, they had 1,070.

He pointed out that the Bayeux Tapestry was younger.

Near the least experienced end of the line was a woman called Daisy.

Part of my talk was about authenticity and courageous leadership.

I believe the first job of a leader is to create the conditions in which a community can thrive.

People need to feel safe, seen and supported enough to be themselves and offer what they have.

There is a lot of good in teams that is simply never shared because people are too busy protecting themselves.  

Dragons exist in business too, not just the ones with piles of money on their desks.

Yesterday, Daisy tagged me in a post on LinkedIn.

After I had left the stadium, she had taken her place on a panel.

She wrote about how anxious she had been, and how something I’d said had given her the courage to step forward.

One of the youngest leaders in a room containing more than a thousand years of experience, taking her seat, contributing and adding real value to the community.

She hadn’t suddenly acquired another twenty years of knowledge.

She hadn’t needed to.

Daisy faced her dragon this week and won.

Today, I also showed the group two photographs from ROW4MND and described some of the dragons we faced while rowing around the UK.

The first image was of our team together just before pushing off for the final leg.

The second, us rowing towards a sunlit horizon.

The photographs were taken minutes apart. What they don’t show is everything it took to get us there.

Looking at them again today, in a room full of people sharing their own stories, I was reminded how much easier it is to face dragons when you don’t feel you are facing them alone.

Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to debrief together:

When did fear, anxiety or stress last stop you doing something that mattered to you?

What would help you approach that moment differently?

Your mission this week (if you choose to accept it):

Choose one thing you genuinely want to do before next Sunday. 

Name the dragon standing in the way, then take one first step towards it. 

If you need someone beside you, be courageous enough ask.

That’s enough for now.

More next Sunday.

Mike

Hold the Line · Do the Hard Things