Measuring how antifragile you are

Measurement is an important part of all our lives: both for defining our objectives and tracking our progress towards them.

Creating inspiration and becoming antifragile might seem more difficult to measure than many other things but measuring them still matters. After all, it’s good to quantify our strengths and weaknesses. And it’s important to know whether the tools of *Inner Leadership* are making any difference.

So the book asks us to rate our abilities at each of the seven abilities or competencies that make us antifragile: the seven skills that enable us to shift our inner state from ‘Churning’ to being able to use change to become stronger and more inspired.

We start in the bottom left hand corner, in a state of ‘Churning’.

Here the tools of Chapter 1 enable us to become ‘Centred’ and ‘Grounded’: connected with what matters most to us and who we are at our best. This is the first skill or competency we need and the better we are at it, the higher we can climb up the first step on our journey.

Once we have become at least reasonably good at this first step, our second step is then to shift our inner state to feeling ‘Confident’ or ‘Sure’. We achieve this by being able to make clearer sense of the situation. Chapter 2 shows us two ways to achieve this.

In Chapter 3 we realise that every challenge we face contains opportunities and we learn how to find the ten types of opportunity that might exist in any situation. Now we have a wider range of options to choose between and our inner state can shift to ‘Optimistic’. We have taken the third step in learning to use change to become stronger and more inspired.

Our fourth skill is the ability to choose our best way forward, even when the situation is unclear and the outcome is difficult to predict. The tools for this are covered in Chapter 4. Once we have learned to use these tools, our inner state can step up again: we become ‘Directed’.

In Chapters 5 and 6 we review our purpose and our values and create an inspiring description of the outcome we most want to create. Now we can inspire ourselves and other people to long to make this happen and our inner emotional state becomes first ‘Determined’, then ‘Inspired’.

Finally, in Chapter 7, we learn to maintain and build our inspiration in the face of the obstacles that will inevitably arise. With this skill in place we are ‘Ready’ for whatever comes our way.

Each of these steps, on its own, is simple and straightforward to learn. Combined in the right order they become a transformational staircase that anyone can climb. And the more you then strengthen your abilities at each of the seven competencies, the more antifragile you will become — more able to lead yourself and other people through change, in ways that make you stronger and more inspired.

Do you want to use this time of change to become stronger and more inspired? To begin now, rate your current ability at each of the seven competencies (on a scale of 0–10). Ask yourself what a ‘10’ would look like for each skill. Where would a small improvement make the biggest difference to your life today? Are you ready to open that chapter of the book and teach yourself those skills?

Adapted from *Inner Leadership*: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.

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(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also have to do the practice.)

Photo By William Warby via StockPholio.net