“A leader is someone who sees what others are not able to see”- Sadhguru
After an incredibly unique year 2020, where we were able to realize how fragile is our world and humanity, it is a good time in the start of 2021 to recall some issues of what leadership should be,
these are my insights.
Any leader is always looking for transformation, he is a dissident, starting from the desire to transform actual reality into a better one. A leader has the quality to see things that others cannot
see, and the ability to bring people together to make them work jointly for a common purpose, aiming to a better life.
A leader does not have to be a superhuman, not even wiser or better prepared than his followers. People can reach the position of leadership by simply being born in the right family, by a political
election, or selected by the management of a corporation, or by building an organization with a personal idea in any way, it is circumstantial. We are all leaders one time or another, but all leaders share a common ground, they are responsible to guide a group of people to attain a common goal.
A leader can have an extremely high mission or maybe one mundane, but he or she can communicate, convince, or manipulate, and motivate others to achieve the goal, making it desirable for all.
In my professional career, I have been able to lead companies in four occasions, from “scratch”, starting from zero, to become the largest and best in class in their market, and I had thousands of
people in those organizations reporting to me, these people were more knowledgeable and even more intelligent in many ways, and my only job was to make them aim to the same goal and motivate them to use their knowledge, energy and best talents to meet our goal, making all part of the same dreamed journey.
A leader must turn an individual concern into a larger mutual concern. Most Leaders do not know much about details, but they can see clearly where they want to go.
In a leadership position an individual has impact in many people, so every thought, every emotion, or any action will affect them, sometimes they are millions. This is a big responsibility, and That is why the leader behavior is so important. You can learn management skills, or how to inspire people, but the most important is how a leader “is”, a leader should be trustworthy.
We must understand that we cannot produce what we are not, we can only be what we are. All our thoughts, emotions or actions will be in accordance with what we “are” impacting many lives. This principle tells me that a leader must be constantly transforming himself searching for the best of him. Transformation and leadership cannot be separated.
People can become leaders in times of thrive, wanting to go beyond their own wellbeing reaching to others, his involvement becomes larger than his own needs, amplifying their cause. Other times, a personal ambition may propel someone to become a leader, or by default, if you are in the right moment in the right place, as someone born in an entrepreneurial family.
The essence of any leadership position is independent of the business or activity you are in, basically it is to make life easier and improving human wellbeing. if we are in the Software industry, or making computers, or in clean energy generators, or construction services, or a Fintech, your goal is always to make life easier to others. It is only the scale and scope that changes in every leadership position.
The scope and scale are defined by the impact we are aiming, if we are interested in our wellbeing, our family, our community, our state, our country, or the whole world.
If we perform a leadership role in search of our own aspirations, eventually it will take you to a spiritual dimension, not in a religious sense, but as a concept of expanding our horizons of our perceptions and physical experience, beyond our life, as conscious beings that we are. In a way that our life goal is enlarged further than only self-preservation. A real leader must be looking not only how to make life better, but what is the contribution to make things better for other people and even for the world and cosmos we live in.
What does it mean to expand beyond yourself?
In an extremely simplistic way, we are biological entities, and our physical boundaries are our skin and outer cells. We know that we are and what we are not, simply by our senses, we can touch
our hand and feel the pressure, but if we touch something outside our own body, we will not feel it, that is the definition of our “physical me”. Whatever is within the boundaries of your sensation
is “you” technically.
Now, what happens if you hold a glass of water, it is not “you”, right? but if you drink it, then it may become you. What we are today is not how we were born. When we were a little baby, we were ridiculously small, our actual size was built from what we have gathered in time, through food and water. What we are right now was a part of the earth before, and when we assimilated nutrients in our body, so they became ourselves.
In addition, our physical body boundaries are not fixed, just rub your hands for a few moments and face one to each other a few inches, do you feel the energy between them? Have you ever become so joyful that you may have even cried? Have you noticed that you could feel your energy expanding beyond your chest eight or nine inches away and you can actually feel it? This happens when you are exuberant.
Do you remember holding hands when you are in love, felling as you have become one person? This happens again when you are exuberant.
Another way to understand this fact of sensory body is for example when somebody had a leg or arm amputated, it is a medically recognized fact that for some period, these people still feel the
leg or arm that is not there anymore.
Our sensory body then expands when we are exuberant, and it contracts when we are depressed.
If any of us have a clear understanding of what we “are” and our physical boundaries, would we have to be taught not to harm our own body? Did somebody had to explain when you were a baby that you should not cut of your finger or harm your foot? Obviously not, because we have a natural intelligence for self-preservation.
If we suppose that we can expand our sensory body to larger scales, as our body was short time ago a part of the earth, it was lent to us temporally to become part of our physical body. So, If we
can think ourselves as an extended “me” and integrate our physical body as a part of our family, community, city, country, world or to the whole living earth. Would it be necessary to explain to us
not to harm someone else, or not to harm nature? Of course not, we would perceive it naturally. In this consideration, it would not be necessary to teach morality or ethics, because each one of us
would be a caring person for others and the world.This is what inclusiveness means.
So, if you want the best for all life in earth and for the other beings, you are a natural leader, because that is what a leader should be doing. Because you are experiencing everything as part of
yourself and you are doing all you can do, according to your capabilities, to achieve the best for everybody.
When you are exuberant, joyful, and peaceful your whole body and being functions at your best. This is a scientific recognized fact. We cannot perform well when we are sad, angry, depressed, or
stressed.
What is reality?
All that we experience is within ourselves. Our life experience comes through our sensitive organs. Everything we see, hear, touch, taste or smell is a perception of external things translated by our sensitive organs into something understandable for our intelligence. We all know that light reflects over opaque surfaces and enters our eye lenses, it is projected upside down and our brain through the image printed in the retina converts it into a vision. The same happens with the rest of our senses. In summary, we have never experienced anything outside, everything in our life is
captured by our sensitive organs and translated into a perception that is only ours.
Everything we perceive is in comparison to something else, for example, we perceive light, it is because there is darkness, we hear sound, because silent exists. So, what we perceive is the way
our body is capturing things, but not exactly reality.
If I want to define light, for example, we can describe our experience, but if we could ask an Owl, that is a night creature, her description would be totally different. Who is right the Owl or me?
Things are relative because we depend on our perception of reality for self-preservation and survival.
Our lives develop in a world that is not exactly real, we see it from our own personal position and senses, and it will never be as exactly as we want it to be, it does not follow our wishes, only
happens as it should.
It is impossible to control what happens fully, but I believe that at least our life or the way we react to what happens should be in our personal control and we should at least be capable of managing our experience, our emotions, and thoughts.
In other words, why would anyone follow someone that is not even able to control him or herself? Let us suppose that we can control our own experience of life. Then it is prudent to ask, if this is a fact, what would you want your life to be, pleasant or unpleasant? Obviously, the answer would be pleasant and joyful.
The world outside may not be one hundred percent the way you wanted, but at least the experience that you have in your being should be as you want it to be, pleasant and joyful. If we all were joyful and pleasant, we would be inclusive with all the Universe, as it would bring a deep sense of inclusiveness, and that is the nature of leadership, to bring peace and joyfulness to all and when you are in search of people wellbeing then naturally people would follow your leadership.
The very source of creation is within us, we are part of it, if we think that our body has an intrinsic intelligence and memory that if we drink water, or eat a piece of bread, within a few hours it becomes part of us. This is a miracle that we see every day, if it is eaten by a woman it becomes a woman, or even if it is eaten by a dog it becomes part of that dog, all living creatures are capable of this miracle. If we see this, we can see that God, the absolute, the source of creation is within us and we are capable of incredible things, but we sometimes do not realize it.
You do not have to “learn” leadership, you can learn techniques that may improve some aspects, but we all were born with great capabilities, we are part of this great creation and we have the
wisdom within us, although we may not be able to explain many things, at least logically. We are all-natural leaders.
We do not notice who is leading things within us, the world or even the Universe, but is not that the way of a great leader, that you do not notice he is there, and everything works fine. If everybody notices the leader, he may be a tyrant, but a good leader should be almost invisible. Nobody even sees who is managing things, this Cosmos is so perfect that we even can argue if there is a creator or not, because it works so fine and nobody notices the hands managing and making everything work perfectly well.
Our human body is the most sophisticated machine ever created in the planet, and we are in constant transaction with the cosmos without noticing, we are inhaling oxygen produced by other
organisms, and what we are exhaling or disposing of, is used by others, all this happens because we are all connected, this is inclusiveness.
The problem is that we do not see this fact as a reality, we take it for granted.
If we all lived contemplating inclusiveness, nobody would have to teach morality, or ethics, what is right of wrong, as we are part of the same Cosmos. Doing the best that we can do for all. If we lived joyful, peaceful, and pleasantly, we would be at our best performance and great leaders, but I do not think that many people are able to live one day without stress, hesitation, anxiety, anger, agitation, unhappiness. Therefore, if we cannot control our own life, should we be leading others? Or saying it in other words, if even our own body is not taking instructions from us, why others would?
We should be able to lead our own life to become good inclusive leaders.
I will end with a leadership story:
There was an old farmer who had an old donkey or ass. One day this ass, being a normal ass, he was distracted and fell into an open well, the well had no water, dry and it was very deep, so the
donkey was unable to climb up the well.
The old farmer went to look at the situation, and he thought: This old donkey, he was about to be retired, and the well has no water and is useless. If the ass were a working ass, it would be worth
to save, but it is not, the expense and effort of pulling this ass out was not worth it.
So, he called up his neighbors and ask them to help him to fill up the well, fulfilling two jobs in one shot, they will bury the ass and fill and useless well that was dangerous for anyone passing by.
They started shoveling earth in the well, with no hesitation.
The farmer had no job for a retired ass, but obviously the ass did not think the same way and he was staring at all these men directly in the eyes, looking for some compassion. The three men
were not impressed by the sad donkey eyes, begging for compassion, and they kept ruthlessly shoveling earth to the well.
After some time, this ass started doing something amazing, every time he received a shovel of earth on his back, he will shake it off and he took a step up the new ground below him, everybody
was astonished of how this bright ass was doing that. This is a smart ass they thought, as the donkey took one step up, one more step up, one more, one more, and finally he came up to the
ground level.
By now, the farmer was full of admiration of the smart ass he had, he wanted to hug and bundle it, and he tried to put his arms around the ass, so the ass promptly turned around and kick him in the face.
The moral of the story is: If you want to be a leader, one thing that you should not do is to spend your life trying to cover up your ass, because if you do so, one day it will turn around and kick you
in the face.
What is expected from any leader is that at least he is straight, people do not appreciate when they are manipulated. You do not have to be a genius to be a leader, you do not have to be brilliant all the time, you do not have to be a superhuman, but at least you must be straight, your integrity has to be 100 %.
When you are truly inclusive you will be naturally will have an interest in everybody and people will gather around you.
A leader is there to resolve issues for others, he will not be able to do it if he is an issue himself, so we must work out our own issues to become a good leader.
Success is not necessarily measured for how much money you make, it is a factor, and it will determine how comfortable is your life, but not the quality of your life. Your quality of life depends of how joyful, peaceful and blissful you are, how exuberant, when you are you can resolve other people issues and they will follow you.
Nobody is indispensable, but a good leader becomes someone that is so important for the progress of the group that he becomes highly valuable.
My best wishes for the starting year of 2021, become a great Inclusive Leader this year.
