Effortless Thursdays #23: Life's unexpected turns
Leadership: connection, eating and listening
Welcome to Effortless Thursdays.
Last weekend as crowns were being placed gingerly on heads in Westminster Abbey so they wouldn't fall off (the crowns, not the heads!), my husband and I had an aborted attempt at Day 11 of the Pennine Way.Â
It’s a 20-mile / 32-km route from Dufton to Alston, which the National Trails website describes as follows:
There’s no gentle way to break it to you: today is the toughest day on the Pennine Way … It’s the sort of day where, if the weather forecast is foul (and talking of weather, England’s coldest temperature and strongest wind gust were recorded here) a rest day wouldn’t be too cowardly an idea.Â
The weather forecast was for clouds and rain – not foul, but not ideal.
So we switched and stayed closer to home, walking out of the front door, and up towards Fairfield Horseshoe. Normally it's a 6-7 hour round hike, but this time, we took a detour before reaching the Horseshoe summit to Red Screes.
The vantage point from Red Screes looks down over the Kirkstone Pass, the Lake District's highest pass – at 1,489 ft / 454 m – that is open to vehicles.
In the distance, Brothers Water and Ullswater sat nestled in the valley floor.
There's lots of speculation in the Lake District about why Broad Water was renamed Brothers Water. In the 1855 'A Complete Guide to the English Lakes', Harriet Martineau gives us a clue:
'Brothers' Water derives its name from the accident - which is said to have happened twice - of brothers being lost in it, in the attempt of one to save the other. On one of the two occasions, the accident happened through the breaking of the ice, when the brothers were making a venturesome short cut across it to church.'
Sitting at the top of Red Screes tucking into a thermos of warm-enough homemade minced beef curry with carrots, I was reminded of the tragic, avoidable accident of the 60-year-old Patterdale Mountain Rescue volunteer who fell 500 ft / 150 m trying to rescue a man who was suffering from chest pains.
That fall left the volunteer rescuer with life-changing injuries that were avoidable because the two men who called for help had travelled from Leicester and Liverpool during one of the COVID lockdowns when such travel was not permitted.
Three unexpected turns, each with their own genesis and story. Who knows what might have happened instead?
It's possible to think of all the possibilities, and the "what-ifs". To ruminate about the Pennine Way hike if the weather had been sunny. To query if the brothers hadn't sought out the shortcut to the church, what would have happened? Or what if the tourist hadn't suffered chest pains?
When life takes unexpected turns, we can choose to query what other paths we could have taken.
Or we can choose a compassionate path to be in the present.
The right now.
However challenging - or life-changing - that is.
To Lead Well, Eat Well
Continuing my theme of refocusing more on health and its role in leadership, this week, I published an article about being a better leader.
If you’ve been on leadership training programmes or any personal development programme, you’ll be familiar with the problem. For some reason, when you try to utilise the skills and knowledge you’ve learned in situations that really matter - like showing empathy when you’re firing part of your workforce - those skills seem to slip through your fingertips.
In this week’s article, I share how when you eat well, you can also lead well because your brain has the right fuel to connect to others with energy, vitality and presence.
And when you have that, the skills you learn in personal development and leadership training programmes finally become useful – in high-stakes situations when it really counts.
If you missed it yesterday, You can find it here 👇
How do you listen?
Listening is a key skill in creating connection. My coaching colleague, and friend, Rik writes eloquently about listening.
His Substack is a great resource if you want to upgrade your listening skills (perhaps after you've eaten well!).
Here’s one I found really useful.
That’s it for this week!
As always, I appreciate your feedback on Effortless Thursdays.Â
If Effortless Thursdays resonated with you, I'd be grateful if you told just one friend to subscribe. They and you can always unsubscribe using the link below.
What did you think of this week’s edition? How can I make it more useful to you? Let me know in the comments, by email, on Twitter or on LinkedIn.
To your health and success!