After his success in business, he devoted his time to advising a range of American presidents, including Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, on economic matters for more than 40 years. Baruch was highly regarded as an elder statesman. He was a man of immense charm who enjoyed a larger-than-life reputation that matched his considerable fortune. Baruch is remembered as one of the most powerful men of the early 20th century.
When asked about his long life and success, Bernard Baruch said he discovered the key when he was younger. He said, “In the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.”
What? Ourselves? Not overcoming outside obstacles?
Here is another way to look at the hands-off manager’s shift in inner awareness. Imagine going to the airport with a huge suitcase. You don’t even consider trying to take it onto the plane with you because you know it won’t fit or be allowed. So you check your bag and let the airline take care of it.
But what if you tried to board a plane the same way you try to live your life?
You’d be carrying all your heavy, inappropriate, disallowed baggage onto the plane! All your hurts and resentments and tiny betrayals get carried around with you. Imagine going through the airport and picking up other bags, not even your own, and trying to carry all of them onto the plane with you! Your spouse’s baggage, your kids’ baggage, and all your direct reports’ baggage.
Is there even enough room on this plane?
This may sound like a slapstick comedy, but it’s how many of us who play micromanagement roles in society live today. Just keep this in mind: If you did this with your baggage in an airport, you would not be allowed to fly.
And the same is true with your career. By trying to carry all this baggage (by trying to remember who has done you wrong, whom you don’t trust, who disappointed you, what department you don’t get along with), you are too burdened to fly.
Take your hands off your life to allow success and allow yourself to fly.
Allowing your career to take flight
When my son Bobby was a little boy he was always asking me about various sports figures and superheroes.
“Dad, who would win in a fight between Arnold and Bruce Lee?”
“Bruce Lee.”
“Who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman?”
“Superman.”
“What if Arnold and Superman fought Rocky, Chuck Norris, and Spider-Man?”
“Okay, time for bed!”
We are actually fascinated by questions such as these, which is why such fictional heroes as Rambo and Superman endure. And the internal power that can lift you up through your organization is more akin to the power Superman has than the external power Rambo tries impose on events. Rambo is a human being who can be brought down by a bullet. And if he were shot in the heart, he’d die; there’d be no more Rambo. But one of Superman’s abilities enables things to bounce off of him. He has a power beyond that of Rambo. If someone fires a bullet, he just pushes it away with his hand and moves on; it doesn’t affect who Superman is. That’s why his archetype calls to us. That’s why he endures and speaks to the inner hero in children and adults.
He has the power to deflect rather than overcome.
You can shift your whole way of leadership thinking. You can shift your awareness to be totally in tune with what’s happening with others, and what’s happening with you. And whenever you see something come up that doesn’t align with you, you don’t fix it; you accept it, deal with it, deflect it, and move in a newer, healthier direction.
Deepak Chopra once wrote that when you get “bad news,” it becomes good news if you suspend judgment. It was always good news anyway. It was just in disguise. “If you don’t get what you expected, look at what you got,” says Chopra. “Where is the gift in what you received? Is there a way you can transform it into an opportunity to learn? In this approach, change is accepted, not denied. A sense of spaciousness enters in.”
The spaciousness he describes is exactly the shift in awareness we are talking about. It’s a shift from narrow, judgmental, constricted awareness to a bigger, more spacious, hands-off allowing.
Chopra concludes, “On a profound level, every event in life has two possible causes. Either what happens is positive, or it is bringing up something you need to learn in order to create something positive. It’s the same with the body. What happens inside a cell is either healthy activity or a sign that a correction is needed. Although life can seem random, in fact everything is pointing to a greater good. Evolution is not a win-lose crapshoot, but a win-win journey to transformation.”
You’ll learn your true nature this way, by being free from the effects of everyone else’s nature. It’s a way of giving yourself space, of giving yourself the freedom to live out your true professional potential, to discover what’s possible for you!