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    The Brink: How Great Leadership is Invented
    The Brink: How Great Leadership is Invented
    The Brink: How Great Leadership is Invented
    Ebook293 pages4 hours

    The Brink: How Great Leadership is Invented

    By Mark Hunter

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    About this ebook

    “The author lays bare his own triumphs and failures while breaking down that elusive edge that turns great leaders into influencers.” —Brad Szollose, award-winning author of Liquid Leadership

    The Brink is a method for generating leadership in an individual leader and on a team. It is based on the simple assertion that leadership is created in the face of some great challenge or obstacle to overcome, rather than in a vacuum or in comfortable places with no adversity. The Brink model uses climbing a mountain as an analogy throughout for creating that big challenge or goal, and then demonstrates how to create a team to climb it with and outlines the way to create leadership in everyone involved in the process. This metaphor transfers to virtually any leadership position one holds and is organized into a clear list of ingredients essential to leadership.

    “As an adventurer, I resonated with the climbing stories and analogies in The Brink. However, the concepts and strategies are valid and powerful for anyone looking to improve as a leader in business and life. A great read!” —Heather Hansen O’Neill, author of Find Your Fire at Forty
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 15, 2014
    ISBN9781630471194
    The Brink: How Great Leadership is Invented

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      Book preview

      The Brink - Mark Hunter

      INTRODUCTION

      THE BRINK

      Leadership is not promised, born, or inherited. It is chosen, practiced, and created. This book is for those interested in taking on that choice, practice, and creation.

      Becoming a leader is not easy. It’s not comfortable or intuitive, either. As a result, real, effective leadership is scarce. Leadership requires a level of commitment and resilience that most are unwilling to practice. Many people call themselves leaders, but few live up to the title. They’re not bad people; they simply aren’t leaders.

      This book is inspired by a global gap that I am committed to closing. Today’s world is suffering from a gap in leadership. Almost every major problem in the world (financial crises, crime, violence, global warming, etc.) can be fundamentally linked to a gap in leadership. In most cases, that gap is not even clearly identified, let alone addressed to any sufficient degree.

      The tragedy, though, lies beyond the fact that the leadership gap has not been identified or addressed. The real tragedy is that on some level we all know there is a grave lack of leadership in our societies, yet few do anything about it. There are people with the desire to see change occur, but most of them behave as if it’s someone else’s job … and he or she should be arriving at any moment to make things better.

      Well, here’s the wake-up call: That someone is you. The only effective way to respond to this global leadership gap is to step into it.

      The big question is … Will you?

      The brink is a leadership development methodology that is based on a simple fundamental philosophy: our leadership is developed on the brink of our most difficult challenges. When challenged, we are required to rise to the occasion, and as a result, we grow. The process is similar to muscular development: our muscles grow stronger as a result of repairs that take place to knit back together small tears caused by exertion. The process for developing leadership is built into our lives from the time we are children. It’s an inherent gift made available by our DNA programming, but if left unpracticed for very long, leadership skills will atrophy like any unused muscle.

      Unfortunately, many would-be leaders have become addicts of comfort, safety, and security instead of the challenges that would grow their leadership. Most have become slaves to the changing weather patterns of whether they feel like it or not in each moment—or whether goals seem reasonable. They have lost sight of the power that exists in facing challenges.

      Why have would-be leaders become so complacent? Mostly because they believe that they simply don’t have to lead anymore at the level I suggest here. In the age of the Internet, quick money, the cell phone, and fear (of tough economic times, terrorism, the future, etc.), we live a remote-control life, the goals of which are to eradicate risk and to experience as much ease and comfort as possible. The impulse to stick to a challenging commitment even when we don’t feel like it anymore has been lost to an entire market of exit strategies and avoidance techniques. Over time, our instinct to press on and remain committed to our goals, even when accomplishing them is hardest, have succumbed to the seduction of what’s easy.

      I call the type of leadership that has replaced the real thing armchair leadership. Armchair leaders must first feel comfortable and safe before choosing to lead. Such leaders provide little satisfaction in a world starving for true leadership. Given the specific challenges we face in the world today, the culture of comfort addiction in leadership is simply no longer effective or tolerable.

      It’s time for you to step into leadership. A vast majority of this book is committed to the idea that we don’t need one great leader to lead us all, but rather we need to choose to develop the leader in each of us. This is not an easy solution; after all, it requires individual responsibility and a commitment to generating solutions to the very problems for which we have become so adept at blaming others.

      The word invented appears in the title of this book on purpose. Its use asserts that leadership literally can be (and needs to be) created from scratch in each moment, by each of us, in order to meet the challenge that is currently at hand. Leadership is not a generic solution to anything or something that exists separate from the individual wielding it. Instead, it is a way of being and a practice that one chooses to take on and generate from within.

      I write this book because I have used the process I will describe in the pages that follow to develop leaders for well over a decade, and it works. It works if you are willing to step to the brink and start climbing.

      KILIMANJARO

      In 1999, while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, I came across parts of myself that I had buried and hidden away for the first 29 years of my life—parts that I had been scared to confront but that the side of that mountain demanded I face and conquer. Those parts included fear, discomfort, self-loathing, success, anger, pain, and my tolerance for each.

      At 19,341 feet, Kilimanjaro’s one of the few 18,000+ foot peaks in the world that is accessible without supplemental oxygen and technical gear (for some routes). The route I took is called the Marangu Route (called the Coca-Cola Route by the locals because of its popularity and accessibility). I declined the option of supplemental oxygen, since the gradual ascent along that route allows climbers’ bodies time to acclimate to the altitude as they climb.

      This gradual ascent creates an interesting effect on the climber: the cruel illusion of multiple peaks. Along the five-day ascent, I glanced up hundreds of times and said to myself, "That has to be the top." But each time, it was not.

      You get there, or to a ridge line near to it, and realize that you are not only not close but you also don’t seem any closer. In addition, for the second half of the climb, you can see the peak itself, and it appears deceptively close. The mental challenge is that it is actually so far away that you never appear to make any progress toward it.

      The final stage of the climb begins at Kibo Hut, a camp located at 15,520 feet, just below the scree line. (Scree is volcanic ash, which appears like black baby powder piled a foot deep in every direction around you. The scree line is the line above which the mountainside is covered in scree.) At that altitude, your breathing is labored due to the lack of oxygen, it’s bitter cold, and you’re exposed to high winds on the side of a treeless moonscape at aircraft cruising altitude. Edema (fluid in your lungs and brain) is a possible lethal effect of spending too much time and exertion at that altitude, and yet, you’re about to take a lot of time and make a lot of exertion there.

      At this base camp, your job is to somehow sleep upon arrival in the mid-afternoon after climbing for over four days already to get there, through your shortness of breath, exhaustion, and pain. The idea is to wake up at 2 a.m. the next day and climb 4,000 feet to the summit before the sun rises. Then this part you will never forget: you spend eight hours climbing at a 30-degree angle in shin-deep scree. For every three steps you take, you slide back one. As you also contend with sleep deprivation, exhaustion, lack of oxygen, high winds, and bitter cold, this backsliding is emotionally devastating.

      Your mind screams at you to turn around. Your body demands that you do so and shuts down occasionally by making you dizzy and clumsy, with bouts of dry heaving. Your circumstances and the environment are completely unreasonable and irrational relative to what you are familiar to.

      And that’s exactly why you keep going. Each footstep and subsequent footslide become deliberate acts of defiance fueled by curiosity about the unknown. You throw everything you’ve got at this mountain over and over, and it seems to never end—but somehow you know it has to.

      You think to yourself, I know there is a top to this thing, and if I can just put one foot in front of the other a few more times, maybe I’ll find it. And if I don’t find it after those few steps, I’m gonna take a few more. There’s a simplicity to it that’s both maddening and comforting at the same time. Your emotions and mental state run the full range. There are rage, elation, tears, and joy at seeing the grandeur of the earth with the naked eye. Then you feel mild insanity alternating with courage, resolve, and terror, followed by calm surrender at the certainty that you will die there. Ultimately you experience a powerful and paradoxical mixture of pain, resilience, resignation, power, and a sense of presence when you realize you are still alive. Close to the peak of Kilimanjaro, I felt this sensation so poignantly and distinctly that I have drawn on it regularly over the 13 years since then in times of adversity and challenges that I could not see the other side of.

      That type of challenge teaches you a great deal about yourself, and it changes you. The truth is, you’ve either experienced that part of yourself, or you have stayed in your comfort zone and avoided it. In the thick of a painful challenge that requires all you can give, you either move forward through it, or it eats you up and breaks you. Either way, you discover something deeply intimate and primal in those moments; you learn that that experience has a unique value that can only be accessed through the immense challenge of it.

      I spent seven days climbing that mountain: five days up, two days down. I only spent 90 seconds at the top, but 90 seconds was more than enough. It turns out that the brutal physical conditions, the incredible views, and the height of the peak didn’t ultimately matter. What stays with me today, rather, is having discovered exactly what it took to get there. The real ascent took place inside myself while climbing Kilimanjaro, and it changed me forever.

      The poet Kahlil Gibran wrote, Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars. What I discovered in the very dark places I visited on the side of that mountain were the depths of both my despair and joy, the breadth of my being, and the resolve within to do the impossible—discoveries far more important than any view.

      Not all mountains are measured in feet or meters. Some mountains are measured in adversity, possibility (or impossibility), fear, a self-selected challenge, a promise, pain, a declared goal, joy, the depth of the unknown, or the scope of one’s vision. Both before and after Kilimanjaro, I have faced many mountains along my path. Some I intentionally created for myself, while others were thrust upon me. But all of them changed and shaped me into the leader I would eventually become.

      In truth, there have been such mountains at every turn of my life: the violence I saw growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s and 80s; the sudden death of my mother when I was 20; the Wilderness First Responder Training I took in 1997 and used at Ground Zero in 2001; becoming a certified rescue diver; the multiple companies I have started, sold, or lost; Cross Fit; trying out at Development Camp for the 1993 U.S. National Lightweight Rowing team; and taking on the coach and leadership training programs I have completed and currently lead. All have been gifts in their own way, though inexplicably painful and seemingly impossible at times. It is this act of facing internal challenges out in the external world that creates true leaders. This is what the brink is about.

      Leadership is a term thrown around in the world today in a very cavalier way, but I’m certain that it means something much different for those of us who have suffered the gift of climbing a mountain of our own to get there.

      Play this game with me right now: list the three biggest accomplishments you have created in your life. Write them down on a piece of paper and take a good long look at them. Be present with them again, with the process you went through, the struggles, the challenges, the elation, and the sense of accomplishment. Now ask yourself: At the beginning, did each of these endeavors strike you as easy, comfortable, or safe? Next ask yourself: Was your struggle worth it?

      I’m guessing that your answers were No and Yes, in that order. Now ask yourself: Are you willing to give up on your next great accomplishment to avoid being challenged, getting uncomfortable, or feeling unsafe? If your answer is No, you are already on your way toward creating purposeful leadership in your life and in the world. We will take the next steps together in these pages.

      Now, think of the highest height you believe you can climb—the point to which you believe you can succeed or grow. Moving through that point, not around it, will be the key to your success as a leader. In his book The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks calls the point at which we perceive we cannot stretch any further an upper limit problem, but I call it a habit. Too many people have developed the habit of, in effect, only placing bets on races they know they can win—but this only impedes their path to greatness.

      Mountains are picturesque and enticing to look at from afar, and like most large endeavors, become more imposing as you approach. They can become terrifying as you start to climb. It is through facing those fears and continuing to climb that you develop yourself and your capacity for leadership.

      If you are willing to make the climb despite the uncertainty, this book will serve as a guide to encourage you and help you overcome the obstacles to reaching the summit.

      THE BRINK PRINCIPLE OF LEADERSHIP

      Definition

      brink [brink]

      n

      1. the edge, border, or verge of a steep place—the brink of the precipice

      2. the highest point; top—the sun fell below the brink of the hill

      3. boundary - the greatest possible degree of something

      4. the limit beyond which something happens or changes; a crucial or critical point, especially of a situation or state beyond which success or catastrophe occurs—the brink of war; the brink of disaster

      Typically we think of being on the brink of something as a dangerous place we’re about to fall off of, or an edge we are about to slip down. Unfortunately, that’s also the way many people relate to leadership. This attitude is defined by their attachment to power, title, status, influence, popularity, or emotional reaction to events. Let’s take a moment to address the eight most prominent leadership myths you will likely encounter.

      THE BIG EIGHT LEADERSHIP MYTHS

      Myth #1: Leadership is either born in people or not.

      Of the many myths about leadership, this one is the most rampant and

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