Leadership by the Cup: Be Present

I've been drinking a lot of Yogi brand green tea in the past 24 hours as part of a travel regimen I do to stave off fatigue and general unpleasantness that sometimes accompanies me when I fly. Combine that with the fact that I'm at the American Library Assn.'s Leadership Institute (http://www.ala.org/transforminglibraries/ala-leadership-institute) in Chicago and I start thinking about what tea has to teach me about being (and becoming) an effective leader.

If you've never had a cup of Yogi tea then you probably don't know that the little tag at the end of a tea bag's tether has a meditative or zen-like sentence on it. This morning's tea bag said, 

"Those who live in the past limit their future."

Not yet having adjusted to central standard time, I was wide awake at 5am and so I started to think about how this might be true for me right now. 

The question. How am I living in the past and thus limiting my future? 

The situation. The first thing that came to mind is how I've been through two other extremely positive and influential leadership institutes in the past 3 years: the Maryland Library Leadership Institute (http://www.mdlib.org/leadership/) and Leadership Washington County (http://www.leadershipwashingtoncounty.org/). As a result, I have caught myself guessing how this current leadership institute is going to be and what sorts of exercises we will do. 

The effect. This is limiting my future because if I keep thinking this way I won't approach and receive this new leadership program with fresh "beginner's mind" like eyes and heart. Assumptions will get in my way of having a truly new and fresh experience, one that has the potential to be "life changing," as Maureen Sullivan told me she is envisioning it to be. 

The solution. But how to do this? How to break free from those assumptions for the next four days and how to shed those layers of leadership residue* left over by previous programs? 

Well, you know what they say: admitting that I have a problem is the first step. My confession is above so, I can checkmark that. 

The second step will be for me to write about my assumptions in order to consciously identify them so, I'm going to identify and write down my assumptions before each session begins. To help me reign in that goal, I'll be more specific and say that before each session (each content chunk as outlined on the agenda) I will write - in this blog - one sentence that describes one assumption I have about the upcoming session. Afterwards, I'll finish the blog post by sharing what we did, what I learned, and how my assumptions were proven to be unfounded. I don't want to write about how my assumption are proven - if that were even to be the case - because that would reinforce my assumption-making and that's exactly want I don't want to do. 

Thirdly, I'll continue to do what has always helped me to stay in the present moment, and that is to meditate. Hooray for private hotel rooms! As much as I would have loved to have shared a room with one of my leadership classmates, not having a roommate makes it 100% easier to meditate. So, on that note, I'm going to go sit and breathe and be here. 

*I use the word 'residue' in the most positive way here.  I think of going through any type of professional growth and development experience as seasoning a cast iron skillet. You just keep cooking in it with only a mere wipe of a cloth in between uses. Can a cast iron skillet ever be clean? If it were to ever be clean would it cease to be a cast iron skillet?