I’m sitting with a guy today over breakfast and we are discussing some of the 360 degree feedback from his work associates. I can hear the inner struggle of owning the condition of what we are when we are conscious of our wholeness - our being both good and bad. Eastern thought uses the word “co-emergence” to explain the idea that at any one time both good and bad is present. . .the question is how unconditionally present are we with our saintly AND sordid ways? Augustine’s Soliloquies suggests that true recollection (the re-collecting of) leads us always to confession. It is only when we embrace not just the wholeness of our historic experience, but also when we see what we have done with this experience, do we truly choose ourselves and engage life with a threefold presence of repentance, renewal, and offering.

To accept ourselves seems to require that we look beyond the light we so freely offer others and forage into the shadows, guilt, and sins and thus to the truth of “Who?” and “What?” we have been. To be with another in ways that are transformational to each, asks that the relationship emerges from the truth of our personal and collective stories where an honest rendering of both light and dark is accepted with repentance. . .a repentance that opens to the inner life of things that link us all. From my experience, this place that moves us well beyond being transactional, is in itself neither religious nor redemptive but an honesty that takes us to something even beyond ourselves.

Worthy leaders of great impact do not have the self, or its betterment as the ultimate goal, but rather, what is revealed in and through the experiences of our lives. There is a consciousness that can be experienced with others that expands beyond our self-interest. The way to leading well within corporations, schools, churches or homes necessitates a personal and shared repentance that tunes us into the collective truths of what we have in common. This presence opens us to renewal and to offering what is good as it relates to both the situation and to others.

My early morning leader has a choice. . .as do each of us. . . .