“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”  

Henry David Thoreau

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice  -  though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles.  ”Mend my life!”  each voice cried.  But you didn’t stop.  You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its fingers at the very foundations  -  though their melancholy was terrible.  It was late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones.  But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do  -  determined to save the only life you could save.”

In the darkness, the eye begins to see

This first task of a leader is to lead themselves. Dee Hock the former CEO of VISA and noted author of “The Chaordic Organization,” talks about the necessity of 360 degree leadership. He states that we lead up (meaning our supervisors), we lead out (meaning our peers), we lead down (meaning our direct reports), and we lead in (meaning ourselves). The distribution of time to each of these areas looks roughly like this: Up 20%, Out 15%, Down 15%, and In 50%. Dee Hock states that leading “up” is to clear the road for the work of our team while also keeping senior leadership informed. Leading “out” is about collaboration, synergy, and processes. Leading “down” is about equipping, teaching and coordinating. Leading “in” is about addressing those things about ourselves that need to be managed in order to be successful with the changing opportunities and challenges.

The question I see as paramount for all of us as leaders is: “Do we lead what we are or do we lead what we have, or by what we have?” The difficulty for the majority of us is that we have so little real understanding of what it means to be ourselves. The constraint isn’t that we lack knowledge of what we can do as much as we lack understanding of who we are. Said differently, we are more than just the tool making animal that thinks and has self-awareness. Our shared ignorance is not in that we lack knowledge, but that our knowledge is false. What we believe about ourselves is too often fragmented, distorted and merely a historical rendering of our experiences versus a description of a deeper essence. Here is the problem related to the acceptance of a false identity: we largely become what we think of ourselves.

In leading “in,” we are not looking around to see if whether or not “we’ve got it,” as if “it” is something that we can obtain, rather the question is: “Have we accepted an adequate model of ourselves that describes our humanity, our task, our endowment and choice? What is the critical point of this?…the adedequacy of our idea or model and its’ governing effect. Psychologist state that we don’t perceive the world directly, but through a lens. As we do the work of self perception, let us first determine if the interpretative lens we use is adequate and helps us see and know what is both permanent and transitorily true about ourselves.

For too many, the notion that they have of who they are is constructed. This is the first and greatest mistake. There is indeed a cause and effect in some fashion out of the experiences and events of our lives, but who we are in my idea is NOT something largely constructed, but rather given. . . and what is given is a statement of our intrinsic value, and that value is one of divine appointment. What is needed are images, encouragement and discipline to resist both the panic and the seductions of the spirit that come from a society that mainly knows about specialness and value in terms of what we achieve or possess.

How does this idea or model shape the choices we make as leaders whether addressing personal or professional matters? If we understand that we are more than our grades, more than our titles, more than what our parents or social network have said about us, or more than the latest performance eval, and gain clarity of the Imago Dei (Image of God) in ourselves, then our leadership becomes bounded, purposeful, strong, love based, and able.

Regularly, we will be with others who escape from the real because we fail to know the truth. Often, we will see others coping with a form that is familiar at the cost of a life liberated and expanding. This day, we will spend far too much of our time as leaders managing distortions - our own and others - more than proactively advancing as worthy leaders of great impact. Too cynical for you to accept? For me, it just speaks of how deep we are in the illusion.

Today I will listen to my sons wrestle with issues of identiy, adequacy, and intimacy. Today I will listen to my wife wonder if she has enough in her to accomplish what she sees as her dreams. Today I will attend a funeral of a young man who was an absolute delight as a human being but struggled to know that for himself. Today I will talk to a senior leader who has gained the ground of his professional life through his life long rage against being abandoned by his father. Today I will call my dad who struggles with Parkinson’s and too often asks “Is it worth it?” Today I will attend to my own intrapersonal conversations about “who I am,” and at times have to course correct because of my own fears and immaturity. Although it is true that each of us have limits of what we are ultimately capable of doing on our own, the foundation of identiy is far more formidable and complete than our typical tools of determination and critique.

The first task of a leader is to lead themselves. How are you doing with that task? Before you can contribute as a worthy leader of great impact with those above you, alongside you, and those still as emerging leaders, you must address your own ideas of yourself.

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. . . .

“The most visible creators I know of are those artists whose medium is life itself, the ones who express the inexpressible - without a brush, hammer, clay, or guitar. They neither paint not sculpt - their medium is being. Whatever their presence touches has increased life. They see and don’t have to draw. They are artists of being alive.” -J. Stone