Core Strength: Perspective
The four commendable traits inherent in the person who demonstrates the core strength of perspective include being perceptive, discerning, objective and logical. These are all skills of the mind and are closely related to intelligence. There is a world of difference between a person who is smart and a person who is wise, so the development goal in this core strength is about being able to look beyond the surface facts or symptoms to see deeper cause and effect relationships. As someone recently pointed out to me, decisions are a solitary activity..something one does alone. And leading is about decision-making. The first step in an effective decision-making process is about gaining clear perspective.
In order for a leader to make good decisions, it first requires that they are able to filter emotions so that they can see things clearly in a logical way. Every time I feel emotional about a decision, for some reason, I know I am not being reasonable and have to explore the feelings before believing I can come to any reasonable decision. That’s not to say that the emotion isn’t a very valuable aspect to my human experience of living..indeed it is sometimes the very thing that makes the decision meaningful in the end. But, I am very aware that I want to delay the decision until the emotions have been cleared away and I can think about things with clear perspective. In the coaching vernacular, we call this “truth saying”. And in leadership this ability to speak the truth as one sees it, is an important trait to value.