There’s no single entry point into this circle, and no two clients start in exactly the same place. It’s up to me as a coach to listen and up to the client to articulate their situation and feelings in order to properly place them inside one of the six steps. Once they’re placed, off we go …

The key is understanding it’s a continuous creative process for most leaders. They need to know where they are and what they need to move forward.

See if you can take a step back, view yourself inside your current situation and place yourself on one of the following Leading Spirit Success Cycle steps. Subsequent posts will go into each step in great detail, so you’ll know what to do once your “location” is identified.

1. Engage emotional intelligence – It’s time to access and use emotional intelligence, grieve disappointment, learn from emotions and ventilate anger. My clients use the power of emotions to motivate change and help staff deal with the emotional impact of recent events. That’s the job of a leader.

2. Engage systems intelligence – Become aware of all the systemic parts: human, programmatic, procedural, structural. Step back and consider the “bigger picture” over distance, time and populations. When leaders see how all the parts fit together, they can see the possibilities. There is opportunity in every situation. What is it in this one?

3. Vision – Which new possibility has the most potential for success? What does the ideal outcome look like in the greatest detail imaginable? Courageous leaders are willing to suspend disbelief and engage all their senses in this exploratory pursuit.

4. Plan – I help my clients take that vision—their desired end result—and work backward to “now” with milestones in mind that will lead to the desired result. And to those milestones, we attach a concrete time frame, action plan, budget and other necessary details.

5. Execution — It’s time to put plans into action, and I hold my client accountable to their plans. Modifications will be needed along the way, in response to changing circumstances. Leaders build relationships with allies and involve others who will play key roles.

6. The Cycle – I help leaders to engage their intuition to instinctively know it’s time to look for that next change that’s wanting to happen … or to look at the change that’s already happening whether they like it or not. This could be at home, work, with friends, in community or some combination of them all. Change is a continual process, so leaders must become flexible and skillful with change in order to work with it and influence the outcome. Once a leader recognizes what that “next change” is, it’s time to return and Engage Emotional Intelligence (Step 1).

That’s the process in a nutshell. Where are you? Think about it so you can fully benefit from the posts that follow.

A great deal has been lost in this wave of upheaval, and new opportunities will emerge as a result. But before leaders are ready to identify and embark on new endeavors, it’s essential to acknowledge that this process has been emotional. There have been lost assets, lost programs, lost staffers … and lost dreams of what businesses or organizations would become.

I think it’s natural to want to shove down all the emotion and pain and thoughts of what’s transpired. But how will you ever have the mental wherewithal to energetically and optimistically move forward without addressing those lingering feelings?

It’s helpful to come in with coaching as soon after “chaotic change” as possible. Coaching can help that grieving process happen more quickly, with less angst. The coach’s presence serves as a permission system to have emotion because those feelings actually contain important information that will help guide you from here to what’s next. The coaching and facilitation work we do can help people harness the power of that emotional experience.  You know, the term “emotional intelligence” was created for a reason.  There’s a lot of smarts in those feelings.

Leaders tend to struggle through without processing their feelings for two distinct reasons:

(1)  A lot of leaders don’t even necessarily realize how heavy-duty some of this chaotic change has been emotionally because they’re so busy right now. But once the conversations begin, it’s clear they do need to spend some time grieving in order to effectively advance.

(2)  Some leaders are afraid of getting “stuck” in negativity and stall out completely. There’s a cultural fear that if we go at all into grieving, we’ll wallow in it and never be productive again. The beauty of this work is it’s actually the opposite of getting bogged down. When you consciously and intentionally spend just a little bit of time there, it can dramatically speed up the shift. It’s more dangerous to “not go there,” because unprocessed feelings can slow you down and impact productivity-and impact your team’s productivity, as well.

With some expert support, that emotional processing can bring a great deal of relief without being the least bit ugly or messy. At Leading Spirit, we have some great tools and workshops to help people process emotion in a mature, skillful, professional way. Some people process emotion quickly, and others need more time. In either case, working with leaders is incredibly exciting. Together we begin to look for new opportunities. And when leaders begin to pursue new possibilities, they start to feel fully in charge of their destiny again.