Kaila Colbin on pressure and care
I spoke to Founder and CEO of Boma Kaila Colbin, who also leads on the Crusaders Leadership Programme on Challenging the Game podcast. Here's some thought-provoking moments.
Probably the biggest learning and the thing that I am obsessed with right now is a concept I got from Razor, which is ‘pressure and care’.
It’s an idea that we can both strive for and hold ourselves accountable to high performance and care deeply for each other and see the person before the player.
That is the world that I want to live in.
I want to live in a world where we show up because we get joy from achievement. We get joy from accomplishment, from effort and from the things we pour our hearts into.
We can do that with people we love and build relationships with.
Time is the most sacred, precious and scarce resource we've got. There is no recovering it. The way we choose to spend every single moment, that's our life.
That's all we've got.
Right now we have this kind of societal expectation that you're going to be miserable five days out of seven.
As far as I'm concerned, that is criminal. Yet most of us expect that as the norm, like ‘TGIF’ and ‘Monday blues’.
My whole focus and the focus of the business that I'm building is how do we normalize a new kind of leadership that is centered on pressure and care?
I got that directly from the Crusaders and specifically Razor.
If I feel like my only job here is to get through this. I hate every minute of it. That's one thing.
However, if I feel like I am working towards something that is super hard and is pushing me to my absolute limit and that’s part of my motivation, that is different.
They might look the same. It might look like the same number of reps or the same number of sprints.
However, there’s a different mindset, there’s a drive to do it. Rather than a need to get through it.
There is a very common myth that pressure and care are inversely correlated. Partway through a program on courage and empathy is someone will say inevitably, ‘you can care all you want, or you can empathize as much as you want, but at some point you have to perform’.
My answer is always: you can empathize all you want and perform. These things are not mutually exclusive.
That is the core message that I want to bring out to the world. We can hold ourselves to account for the highest of standards or ambitions, while caring deeply and seeing people as human beings.
Pressure and care are not incompatible.