It’s been a while since the last Leader Spotlight, which focused on Leslie Higgins (from Ted Lasso). But last week I watched another TV character that models an important and beautiful (even if possibly a little strange in format) leadership trait: taking what IS and dealing with it without the emotional charge from the stories we have about how things unfold.
Cory Ellison plays the head of a TV network on The Morning Show, which is a position that experiences extreme tumult in the course of the show. He is already a bit of an enigma, often sharing unique perspectives or quirky responses, indicating there is more to him than meets the eye. But whatever is going on under the surface, the way we see his character react to challenges is with a lot of calm and handling it straight on. His reactions remind me of the way one might experience a move an opponent makes on a board game – a bit of a detached, observant response that takes in the information but doesn’t create a story about it.
While I’ve watched the show for a while now, only recently did I have the experience of really noticing Cory’s way of being when these big, sticky situations arise. I recently was in a situation where I received a lot of last-minute cancellations for something planned and I had a default reaction to get upset. But having just watched an episode of The Morning Show, I thought – OK wait, just look at this as a move on a game board, and decide: now that I’ve seen this move and the outcome, what move do I want to make?
What if instead of getting riled up – and possibly fully distracted – by our feelings about a situation, we just treated it like an innocuous input of information we can use to make a next choice? What if we could separate our stories from an experience and just look at it for the objective reality of what unfolds? What would open up for us in our ability to respond with that extra energetic space?
**I just realized both these Leader Spotlight blog posts have been on characters from Apple shows…interesting. Apple, enjoy the free promotion! 😊
