Preparing with Purpose: Part 2

Calm is Contagious

When you’re leading a team or organization, people will often mimic your behavior. They may even amplify it!  So you want to make sure you’re modeling what you want people to do.  Taken from his talk, “Calm Is Contagious,” first presented at Leadercast Live, former Navy SEAL Commander, Rorke Denver, shares tips from his training days that transformed his purpose-driven leadership.  See what it can do for yours.

Rorke explains a Navy SEALs training exercise in which each class must execute a mission within very tight time constraints.  He says, “The instructors gave us the mission and we did all of our practicing and planning.  But about midway through executing it, we realized we weren’t going to be able to complete the mission on time.  Our class leader was running around the compound screaming at people: ‘We’re not going to make it! We’re not going to make it!’ And because of the fevered pitch of the entire group, it became impossible to make effective decisions.”

Following the failed exercise, the most senior ranking chief in the Navy sat the class down.  Rorke recalls, “He told us he was going to give us an invaluable piece of advice that he’d learned from another master chief.  He said, ‘This is the best advice you are ever going to learn in SEAL training.’”

Rorke says the whole class was really excited.  This master chief whom they all looked up to was taking the time to share his most important lesson. And this is what he said: “Calm. Is. Contagious.”

Rorke says, “All of us were thinking, ‘There’s got to be more to it than that.’ But there wasn’t. And over the years, I’ve never seen this advice proven false. As it turns out, you can substitute any word for ‘calm’ and it also proves true. ‘Panic’ is contagious; ‘chaos’ is contagious...”

“Calm is contagious” is a critical leadership lesson that you can apply to your own world.  Try these next steps:

• Ask a friend or colleague for some honest feedback about how calmly you lead under pressure.  Ask for specific instances in which you did well and those where you could have been calmer.
• Choose another positive behavior to incorporate into your leadership style, and start modeling it this week. Pay attention to how those around you react and respond.