Tag Hesitation

Weak Leaders – Part Two

Steve Keating 3 Comments

Strong Authentic Leaders make decisions. Perhaps surprisingly, so do weak leaders. What separates the two is that strong leaders act an those decisions almost immediately while weaker leaders hesitate…if they act at all.

There are lots of reason they hesitate. The biggest is fear of failure. They somehow get it in their heads that trying and failing is worse than not trying at all. Nothing could be further from the truth. All successful people fail, at least temporarily. The fact that they tried allows them to try again. Again and again, until the failure is behind them.

Not trying at all means that failure, and make no mistake, not trying is a HUGE failure, it means that the failure will always be with you. Never to be left behind. 

The first step in an action plan is often the hardest. Strong Authentic Leaders know that heavy trains often require an extra engine to get started. That’s why they aren’t afraid to ask for a little help to get going. It’s amazing the momentum that can be created with a single step. Unfortunately, weak leaders too often don’t take that step.

Weak leaders often use patience as an excuse for not starting. They are waiting for “just the right time” to begin, perhaps not realizing what they are doing is actually procrastinating. Patience is the acceptance that things can happen in a different order than you had imagined. Procrastination is waiting for the sake of waiting. Patience can provide benefits, procrastination simply kills opportunities for success. Strong Authentic Leaders know the difference. 

Strong Authentic Leaders do the hard jobs first. They know that there are only three options available when facing any challenge, they can delay, dodge or do. Strong leaders do. Weak Leaders do too but they do the easy things first hoping somehow that the hard things will either go away, be handled miraculously by someone else or that no one will notice they were never done at all. 

Weak Leaders are slow to start because they see risk in every opportunity. Strong Authentic Leaders are always moving forward because they see opportunity in every risk. Risk is a requirement for progress. Risk is a part of success. Strong Authentic Leaders are willing to take a risk, a well calculated, considered risk, in order to have a chance to lead. 

If you’re in a leadership position and find yourself hesitating then you need to ask yourself why. Are you risk adverse? Fearing failure? A wee bit too lazy to tackle the challenges of leadership? Or afraid of appearing weak by asking for help?

Well none of those are valid reasons for hesitating, they are excuses. The kind of excuses Strong Authentic Leaders do not make. So instead of making excuses start making decisions and taking action to make things happen. It won’t take long before you wonder why you weren’t doing that all along.

They Who Hesitate….Seldom Lead

Steve Keating 4 Comments

I used to shoot trap…a lot of trap. For those of you unfamiliar with that particular activity here’s a brief explanation.

Trap shooting (or trapshooting in North America) is one of the three major disciplines of competitive clay pigeon shooting (shooting shotguns at clay targets). The other disciplines are skeet shooting and sporting clays.

It’s only my opinion but for me trapshooting was by far the easiest of the three disciplines. The more I practiced the better I became…and I practiced for hours a day. It was normal for me to shoot at least a case of shotgun shells a day. 

I shot competitively all over the country and it wasn’t unusual to go a long time without a miss. A good shot was measured in the target being turned to dust less than a second after it appeared. Any other kind of hit was better than a miss but not by much.

One day I was invited to go trapshooting with my uncle and a few of his friends. They had never seen me shoot competitively but had heard I shot a lot of trap. So we got to the trap range and I was the 4th shooter out of five. We were on our third round of 25 targets when I finally broke a target into several bigger pieces. All the other targets were what a trap shooter would call “smoked.” I wasn’t even close to missing a shot.

My uncle and one of his friends suggested I was shooting too fast. I asked, “too fast for what?” They said you can’t keep hitting targets if you keep shooting that fast. We were shooting from 16 yards, the shortest distance on the trap range. It was almost inconceivable to me that I could miss from that distance. 

I asked for their reasoning on why I should hold off on pulling the trigger once I had the target lined up. They said something about haste making waste to which I replied “he who hesitates misses the target.” In trap shooting by the way that’s exactly true. The longer it takes you to line up your shot the more likely it will be that you will miss. That’s true for a lot of reasons but one of the main reasons is the pellets in your shotgun shell are more spread out. That makes it easier for the target to fly right through them. 

There are not many areas of life where hesitation pays dividends. That’s true in leadership as well. One of the five most common characteristics of weak leaders is that they hesitate. They wait for everything to be lined up perfectly before they are willing to pull the trigger. Many times they wait so long that they don’t pull the trigger at all. 

That’s not leadership!

Authentic Leaders possess the courage to “take the shot” when necessary, even without everything being perfectly aligned. They take a risk to chase success knowing full well that they could wait forever for the perfect opportunity to arrive. 

Authentic Leaders recognize windows of opportunities that lessor leaders fail to see. In fact, if Authentic Leaders don’t see an opportunity they create one. What they don’t do is hesitate. 

What they also don’t do is mistake patience for procrastination. One could create a bigger window of opportunity while the other, procrastination, slams the window shut. The most successful leaders, really the most successful people, are careful when using their patience. They know all too well it can easily become procrastination and procrastination is frequently mistaken for hesitation. 

The most effective Authentic Leaders do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. Whether it be dealing with conflict, making a difficult decision, or trying something new they know that delay frequently leads to a missed opportunity.

Don’t wait for the perfect time to lead. Use the information you have today. Use the skills you have today. Use the resources you have today to take action today. The key to success is likely in your hands already, hesitating to use it only makes it less likely that you’ll use it at all. 

Don’t miss your shot, be bold, don’t hesitate, Lead Today!

Why Are You Hesitating?

Steve Keating 5 Comments

There are many things that can limit a person’s ability to lead. Hesitating when action is required is one of the more common characteristics of weak leadership. 

 

There is rarely a perfect time to act. If you wait for that perfect time when all the stars are aligned and every conceivable obstacle has been removed then it’s likely you’ll never act at all. Sitting still makes it impossible to go anywhere so unless you’re already exactly where you want to be you better do something.

 

Some leaders hesitate because they are afraid of risk. Well here’s the deal…risk is mandatory if success and growth are your goals. The legendary Randy Gage (if he’s not a legend he should be) wrote a book in 2013 called “Risky is the New Safe.” The title pretty much says it all. I highly recommend this book if you’re struggling to take the leap of trying something new. It’s available on Amazon for under 10 bucks but it’s value remains priceless. 

 

The fact is the riskiest thing you can do in almost any situation is nothing. Yet nothing is what way too many people in leadership positions do when action is called for. That’s a direct path to failure.

 

Limited leaders also hesitate because they know that they need help yet they refuse to ask for it. They see acknowledging that they need help as a sign of weakness. Even the biggest most powerful trains sometimes need an extra engine to get going. Perhaps you need a boost too. It’s not a weakness to ask for help, it is in fact a sign of strength. If you need help ask anyone and everyone until you have the help you need to succeed.

 

Many failed leaders procrastinated past their window of opportunity. They may have convinced themselves that they were being patient. They were really hiding in their comfort zones waiting for the opportunity to pass. Their belief is that if you didn’t try then you cannot fail. They didn’t realize that their failure to try was their biggest failure of all. 

 

Patience is the acceptance that things can happen in a different order than you had in mind. When you don’t know what to do next just do the next right thing. The “order” of things will work themselves out if you keep doing the next right thing. 

 

Joseph Addison said “He who hesitates is lost.” He said that in 1713. I’m thinking life moved a little slower back then. Today that phrase might be updated to say, “if you even think about thinking about hesitating you have zero chance to succeed.”


Business and life in general move so fast these days that not only do you lose if you hesitate, you’re not even in the game.