What do I mean by that and why is it important in organisations, teams and developing people?

You can be good at what you do and have experts and have competency in what your skills are, what your profession is and you can achieve some levels of success. You can get written up in journals or featured in articles, but if you want to be great you need a level of honesty and acceptance.

Love is all about honesty and acceptance

So yes, there’s the romantic bit of it, there’s the aspiration for this fantastic, new and brilliant destination, but in order to get there, we have to have a depth of understanding and honesty about what is really happening.

We must accept this is what reality is so we can see the gap between where we are right now and what our hopes and romantic version of the future might be, and those things;

Love, Honesty, Acceptance, are all really difficult.

So let’s take honesty first.

Mostly we’re not honest, we don’t say to ourselves Well really you’re operating at 30% of your brilliance and should do something about that, or we might do it the opposite way round. You’re shit and you’re rubbish, instead of saying Okay you’re good at these things, that thing you could be great at, if you tried harder, if you got the right help and support, and this thing, it’s not your bag! Let it go and let’s hire someone else who could do that.

We’re not honest with other people as we really want them to like us. Underneath it all, the main thing is we want to be liked and that stands for a good 90% of the population. So unless you’re pretty unusual, you’re going to be one of the people saying but yeh, who doesn’t want to be liked? I can’t have people disliking or hating me, just because I don’t have the same view about something.
It doesn’t mean you can’t be friends, it doesn’t mean you can’t go for a beer, it doesn’t mean you cannot lead together.

It just means that you need to understand more. Why does someone take a different position to you? Don’t fight them or persuade them that you’re brilliant and you know better. Suspend that, accept they have a different point of view and get curious.

Why do they have a different point of view? What’s going on? What do they see that I don’t?

Get nosy, investigate, and get in the mud with them!

What does their view look like? Because until you accept that someone is in a different place to you, you can’t possibly get curious about what it is they see without being in a space of I’m better, I know more than you.

So that is why acceptance is important.

Acceptance and honesty are core parts of getting to love, getting to the place where you can do something extraordinary and build something beautiful, magnificent, relational, that contributes to the world.

For your New Years Resolution, try a bit more honesty, a bit more acceptance with a good dash of curiosity and get a lot of LOVE!