Stop what you're doing. Review the last sixty minutes of your life: What have you been doing? How have you been doing it? What kind of mood have you been in for the last hour? How have you felt about yourself during that time? Would you say that the last hour has been time well spent in the context of today's priorities and your bigger goals? Now: What have you learned from the questions you've just reviewed? Whatever learning that might be - and surely we are learning step-by-step all teh time - take it, file it with all your other learnings, take a couple of deep breaths and get going in the here and now. However good, bad or indifferent that last sixty minutes were, they no longer exist - by virtue of this short exercise they are merely there to inform us as we move forward.

Today's video rounds off The Leadership Series - ten short videos that, I hope, have given you a little more insight into how we can go about leading our own lives and making an impression on others. As ordinary-minded people, we're not easily disposed to leadership. Mountains of research catalogue how we crave the sense of worth and belonging that the so-called herd mentality offers us. Psychology also tells us that we change averse and like the comfort of our so-called comfort zone, regardless of how uncomfortable that might actualy be. Again, the ordinary mind is set in its ways when it comes to performing habitual tasks - we go about our days on automatic pilot without any real care for what we're doing to ourselves or others - today's Normal Crazy People story is but one example of the result.

In short, leadership is in very short supply. In my line of work, where you might expect to encounter it with more regularity than otherwise, leadership is a rare and beautiful thing. There is an in-built assumption in organizational life that a good doer will make a good manager and that a good manager will make a good leader - this line of thinking is fallaceous from start to finish. Leadership has to learned and it's like learning to drive a car: complicated, unnatural, exasperating, dangerous and, quite possibly, likely to end in a car crash! But, like learning to drive, once you have it, you have it effortlessly.

In France - I don't know about anywhere else at this stage! - you learn how the car works as part of learning how to operate it. It's the same with learning leadership. I hope that, through these videos, you have a grasp of how the mind works - often against us! Unlike learning to drive, understanding how our mind works enables us take a couple of small steps to get it to work for us, in the present moment, in the only place and time that we can actually live our lives. And, once we make this small adjustment to how we use our minds, we change our perspective on how we see ourselves and our world... and all else changes, effortlessly.

This is not some kind of wishful notion of how we might lead our lives - it's not plucked from some half-assed best-selleing self-help book - this is hard science: the science of how you and I can take small (tiny) steps that will literally restructure our brain, transform our perspective and change our lives... utterly and effortlessly.