If you’re striving to sustain growth or want to get more colleagues up the mountain with you, you may be ready to go beyond being effective to leading and influencing others. It’s not easy and requires developing comfort with discomfort. Should you want help, the Ripple Affect would be honored to guide you using our independent approach for developing Strategic Alignment, Affective Leaders and Meaningful Impact.
When I
told the first dozen people I named my consulting practice the Ripple Affect, they
all responded with a sound – not a hmmm?
in confusion, but a declarative hehh! Something clicked. Yet when I began handing out business cards, people
looked at me like, ‘poor dear, effect is spelled wrong.’
There’s
something predictable about dropping a pebble in water and see it ripple. It’s
simple, like changing your shoes, and it fades fast. What’s not simple is building organizations
that are leaders in their fields and solve complex problems.
Are the
waters of your organization muddied because the flat sandy bottom get kicks up
with every change? Or does your organization
have great depth and distinctive subsurface features like mountains and deep currents
that bring high-nutrient marine life to the shallows where all can access this
rich diversity?
After my
recent trek in Nepal up to Everest Base Camp (17,500 feet), I was taken by the
similarities between my below-the-surface business approach and
mountaineering. Each day, after we
reached the tea house where we would overnight, and had some food or rest, we
would then ‘enjoy’ an acclimatizing hike. These extra few hundred or 1,000
vertical feet brought with them the most lightheadedness of the day. Then we’d go back down to the tea house and
sleep at a lower elevation.
In mountaineering they say, Climb high, sleep low.
The next
day, it was much easier to regain the same elevation from the prior afternoon and
climb even higher. Was it easy, no?
Comfortable, definitely not. It
wasn’t painful, though, just uncomfortable.
And it was definitely worth the discomfort to be at 12,000 feet, looking
through red, yellow and green prayer flags at 22,349 Ama Dablam with its
distinctive double summit framed by cobalt blue skies. Or seeing the black and white top of Everest
as I trudged up the lower portion of Kalapathar and back down to sleep at our
highest tea house in Gorakshep (16,942).
Days
like these change you.
