From Strength to Strength | Book Review

Use things.
Love People.
Worship the divine.
(p. 215) 

Arthur Brooks' deeply personal reflections chronicle his journey from super individual achiever to a wiser, happier older adult. He posits there always exists the ability to redesign your career less on innovation and more on instruction as the years pass, thus playing to your strengths with age (p. 28).

Consider life (Indian culture) in four stages (pp. 149-151):

• Brahmacharya - the period of youth and young adulthood dedicated to learning
• Grihastha - when a person builds a career, accumulates wealth, and maintains a family
• Vanaprastha - when we purposively begin to pull back from our old personal and professional duties, becoming more and more devoted to crystallized intelligence, teaching and faith
• Sannyasa - the stage totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment

This book is for the leader as coach or mentor, or  "One who desires to adopt the third order of life, vanaprastha, [who] should enter the forest with a peaceful mind." (p. 158) Let's set up a construct how to do this. In 1971, British psychologist Raymond Cattell distinguished two types of intelligence that people possess, but at greater abundance at different points in life (p. 25):

• Fluid intelligence, the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems, associated with both reading and mathematical abilities (p. 26).
• Crystallized intelligence, the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past, which tends to increase with age through one's forties, fifties, and sixties -- and does not diminish until quite late in life, if at all (p. 27).

Application | Coach and Mentor

An ideal application of crystallized intelligence is coaching and mentoring. Let's weave Brooks' findings with those in our Academy Leadership Coaching to Develop Leaders workshop:

Characteristics of Effective Coaches

Base Coaching Relationship On Trust

Imagine a profession or life without relational capacity. Loneliness at the top comes from an inability to make deep human connections at work as a result of the leader's position (p. 123). Not surprisingly, the top two loneliest professions, according to Harvard Business Review, are lawyers and doctors (p. 120).

Optimistic About Human Nature

First let's recall what makes people unique. Humans are naturally interconnected -- biologically, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually (p. 113). Second, consider our instinctive, or motivational needs. My brain hadn't been wired to be motivated by passion, meaning, and purpose (p. 90).

Encourage People To Take Risks And Learn From Their Mistakes

Recall in our Setting Leadership Priorities workshops, the opportunities created when focusing on the genuinely important yet not urgent. Clayton Christensen calls this allocating time well ahead of time (pp. 138-139).

Provide Candid Feedback In The Right Size Dose

A common individual or coaching challenge is the Reluctant to Delegate Subject Matter Expert (SME). You must state your desire to lighten your load with pride's opposing virtue: humility (p. 61). Once freed from being the endless expert, we can celebrate short-term wins. Each present moment, in turn, provides small satisfactions we miss when the focus in only on bigger and better (p. 167).

Cultivate Personal Accountability

Our Energize2Lead profiles inform us we each have multiple energy dimensions, including instinctive or motivational needs. When we're aware of and share our sources of energy: Physical, emotional, mental and spiritual; We can greatly improve the quality of feedback with each other. Golden nugget: Women generally base friendships on social and emotional support, whereas men are more likely to base friendships on shared activities, including work (p. 132).

Know Their Strengths And Limitations

Consider one of Brooks' three good questions (p. 48): Do you fail to reserve part of your energy for your loved ones after work and stop working only when you are a desiccated husk of a human being? A empathic coach explores the entire person and their relationships both at work and at home.

Are Continuous Learners

Very early in the work, Brooks reveals that people maintain and grow their vocabulary -- in their native languages and foreign languages -- all the way to the end of life (p. 24).

Mentors:

Model Mastery In Professional Areas That Others Wish To Obtain

Knowledge sharing may be the most underrated leadership behavior. Little by little, however, he settled into this role and came to love the fact that sharing what he had learned in life was creating significant value (p. 202).

Guide Others To High Performance In Changing Scenarios

We live in a time of continuous and perhaps accelerating change; technology is just one example. A mentor's wisdom can offer a broader aperture. Even unwelcome transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than they are in real time (p. 194). The Baby Boomer era of "One job, one career," is long gone. Consider Spiral careers, more like a series of mini-careers -- people spend many years developing in a profession, then shift fields seeking not just novelty work but work that builds on the skills of their previous mini careers (pp. 209-210).

Advocate, Critique And Extend Corporate Culture And Wisdom

Brooks cites Kant: As soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function (p. 53). We should consider this an early warning against a scarcity mindset, or envy. It remains true today, as researchers have long found that social comparison lowers our happiness (p. 59). Gratitude and appreciation may lead us out of this trap. Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things (p. 92).

Endorse And Sponsor Others Without Having Formal Power Or Having Control Over Them

Perhaps the golden rule of coaching: It's not about us anymore. Brooks offers an improved definition of satisfaction (p. 86):

Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want

He urges we shrink the denominator during our vanaprastha stage.

Facilitate Professional Development And Organizational System Development

Given multidimensional and rapid change, continuous training and development are warranted. When we think of our identities as fixed and unchanging -- we're shutting ourselves off from many of life's possibilities (p. 169). Evaluation can be much more than identifying shortcomings. Weakness is also an opportunity -- to connect more deeply with others; to see the sacredness in suffering; even to find new areas of growth and success (p. 187).

Summary

Cicero believed three things about older age:

First, it should be dedicated to service, not goofing off. Second, our greatest gift later in life is wisdom, in which learning and thought create a worldview that can enrich others. Third, our natural ability at this point is counsel: mentoring, advising, and teaching others, in a way that does not amass worldly rewards of money, power, or prestige (p. 31). 

The most transcendent of all the Greek concepts
of love is agape: the love of man for the divine. (p. 145)

Thank you Jennifer Meyers for leading me to this book.