This life, which provides so many wonderful blessings and gifts, can be hard. We've all experienced traumas of health, family, love, and finance.  These events often cause true anguish, the deep kind.

The simple, renewable and most powerful form of lift a leader can provide is gratitude. Just offering sincere thanks can pull people up.  It shows that we know how challenging life can be.   Thanks for the extra effort. Thanks for watching my back. Thanks for your selfless commitment, day after day. Thanks.

A CEO client and friend for many years, despite a horrendous work and travel schedule, regularly offers a type of thanks too rare in these times.  He never lets more than a day pass before replying with a handwritten note of thanks in the giver's mailbox for any gift.   No matter how small the gift or how busy he is, he takes time to say thanks.  His is a powerful action of lift.

Looking out of an airplane window is a remarkable way to see the world.  That lofty vantage allows us to gain a different perspective.
 
Just as an airplane lifts us to a different vantage point, leaders can provide a measure of lift for others to see things differently too.  It's easy to allow obstacles in the present - a tough meeting, a tense relationship, wanting to take back something said in anger - to actually become an obstacle to seeing our way to the future.  Being confronted by obstacles, both real and perceived, is pretty much the daily reality of most.

Lift, the act of increasing airflow over a curved wing, calls leaders to keep minds and hearts, yours and theirs, focused on possibilities for the future - not just staring at obstacles in our paths.  

In the movie Forrest Gump, Forrest begins jogging across the country.  Once the media notices they begin making conjectures about why he's doing it.  What must his deeper meaning be?   For Forrest, running had no deeper meaning; it had just become a routine.
  
Sometimes we can be like the character of Forrest, running around in our lives without connecting our actions to a deeper purpose.  We're running because we're running. Ever feel that way?   That doesn't energize, doesn't provide lift. Remember the concept of lift - accelerated flow of air over a curved wing?  The greatest source of lift for one's work and life comes with connection of our actions to deeper meaning.  
  
This is more than just working toward praise, pay raises or promotions.  It's about re-connecting our actions with our values, spirit and dreams.  Once we can look past the daily routines in front of our eyes and remember what motivated us originally, we'll feel a lightness and a new energy from the lift this deeper meaning gives us.

On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright were credited with the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight.  A century later, we all know now that planes fly due to lift. Increased air speed over top of the curved wing lowers the pressure and the plane rises.  Defying logic, at takeoff a 747-400 can carry 450 tons of weight effortlessly into the thin air.
 
Great leaders provide lift to their teams in much the same way.  They increase the airspeed (clarity, vision, coordination, confidence) over a curved wing (the team's apparent and latent capabilities) to lift the team to unexpected, and perhaps unforseen heights.  
 
In the weeks ahead we'll explore lift in a deeper way.   Lift isn't about new skills or quick tips.  It isn't about haranging or charisma.  It is about how you show up as a leader.