Find Your Peaceful Core

Excerpt from “Real Leadership: 9 Simple Practices for Leading and Living With Purpose” by John Addison (McGraw Hill; March 2016).

Human beings mess up. Regardless of your particular philosophy or beliefs, that is one basic fact of life you can’t really argue. There’s just way too much empirical evidence. We try, and we do some great things, but no matter who we are, inevitably we do stupid stuff. So does everyone else.

The world is always going to be a messed up place. You’re going to have calamities and chaos and crises and catastrophes. All kinds of things will go wrong. It’s just the way the world is. You can’t control that. But you can control whether or not there’s chaos on the inside.

If you let that outer chaos seep into your mind and heart, if you have a storm of struggle and confusion whipping around in your inner self, then hoping to be effective in the outer world is going to be a losing battle. To achieve anything of substance, you have to reach a point where you carry a sense of peace at your center, regardless of whatever craziness is going on around you. Otherwise, it all will drive you crazy.

In his classic, “The Power of Positive Thinking,” Norman Vincent Peale titled one of his chapters, “A Peaceful Mind Generates Power.” I believe that’s one of the greatest leadership secrets anyone’s ever been able to pinpoint.

A sense of inner peace acts like the gyroscope in an aircraft that enables it to adjust its flight path and stay on course. The only way you can make it through all the chaos intact is by having a peaceful

core, a place inside of you that is content in who you are with all your best intentions and all your imperfections. If you reach that point of peace, then you can weather the storms.

Many people develop this peaceful core through their faith and religious practice. Some read the Bible or other inspirational readings every day. Some people swear by meditation, or practice martial arts. One way I do it is by spending time in the country.

Over my years in business, I’ve put in a lot of time on the golf course, relaxing with associates and sometimes talking over some critical issue or other between greens. But to be honest, golf is not my idea of recreation. I’d much rather spend the day digging in the dirt, planting trees, working on my garden. Even at the most hectic times in my career, I’d spend all weekend every chance I got messing around on my little farm. Right now, as these words hit the paper, I’ve got a big raised-​bed garden with 43 tomato plants I’ll be putting in tomorrow. There is nothing I love as much as getting in my truck, going to the nursery, buying up a ton of plants, and filling the back bed with them, then coming back and spending the day digging and planting. It’s the one thing I can do where I’m not worried about anything else or even thinking about anything else.

Not long ago, I had the chance to talk with Winston Churchill’s great-​grandson, Duncan Sandys (pronounced “sands”), who lives in Atlanta. Duncan told me that when he was going through all his great-grandfather’s​ papers, he couldn’t help noticing how much the man talked about painting. Churchill was an accomplished painter who produced more than 500 works. (One of his most famous, “The Tower of the Katoubia Mosque,” he painted as a gift to Franklin Roosevelt during World War II.) The remarkable thing is that Churchill never took a single formal lesson and never held a brush in his hand until the age of 40.

Duncan said his great-​grandfather talked a good deal about how, when he was going through times of trial and struggle, the thing that most kept him at peace was his painting. Standing in front of a blank canvas and creating with oils was Churchill’s way of finding that peaceful core.

“If it weren’t for painting,” he wrote in his book, “Painting as a Pastime,” “I could not live, I could not bear the strain of things.” I know just how he felt. That’s how I feel about digging in the dirt.

As a leader, sometimes you deal with the challenges and issues that other people caused, problems that aren’t your fault and that you had nothing to do with creating. As a leader, that’s your job description: dealing with stuff you didn’t cause but needs fixing anyway. And sometimes you’re dealing with the fallout from stupid things you did yourself. Happens to all of us.

But that’s okay because a peaceful core generates the power to deal with all that.

Knowing and practicing this has been a crucial force in my life. It has allowed me to stay sane and calm, especially during times of stress. The greater the stress, the more I depended on returning to that peaceful core.

Excerpt from “Real Leadership: 9 Simple Practices for Leading and Living With Purpose” by John Addison. Reprinted with permission from McGraw-Hill. Copyright 2016.

John Addison is the president and chief executive officer of Addison Leadership Group, as well as the Leadership editor of SUCCESS magazine. During his more than 25-year tenure at Primerica Inc., he rose in management and served as co-chief executive officer from 1999 to 2015. Addison was critical in steering the company through many changes, including Primerica’s separation from Citigroup in 2010, which resulted in one of the most successful IPOs of the decade. A speaker and motivator, Addison shares his business acumen and leadership insights through speaking engagements, consulting opportunities, and new book, “Real Leadership: 9 Simple Practices for Leading and Living with Purpose” (McGraw-Hill, March 2016). To learn more about Addison, visit JohnAddisonLeadership.com or follow him on Twitter: @JohnAddisonGA or Facebook: JohnAddisonLeadership.