Leadership & Responsability
What determines our influence in the lives of others?
In the last couple of months, I’ve had the possibility of working in different projects, where I was in the position of advising the leaders from some project groups. That got me thinking about today’s misconceptions about the meaning of being in a leader’s position, and the way that we are supposed to take charge of that position.
So I decided to write my perspective about what being a leader means, and how I like to think about our duty in the development of the people that are with us in our projects.
What does it mean to transform someone?
In my opinion, our capacity to influence and transform others depends on our capacity to inspire. Well, at this moment I’m sure you’re thinking something related to how vague is this concept, and I agree with you; The concept of being inspiring to others is incredibly volatile and frequently misused, for that reason I’m going to talk first about what isn’t to inspire, so we can be on the same page about what do I meant when I said that our capacity to transform is determined by our capacity to inspire.
To inspire is not to dazzle
We live in a society with and misfortunate culture, so superficial and sentimentalist, that we are in danger of calling inspiring almost anything.
There’s a phrase by Oscar Wilde that talks about this.
A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it .
With this, I’m referring to people that want to be on the top without doing anything to get it, trying to get any shortcut possible.
Maybe this explains the abundance of motivational speakers at corporative events. I’m not saying that these people are bad, or something like that, but I feel a lack of values and concepts.
The problem with this is that the only things that we get from their speeches are free sensations, ephemeral experience, and this experience isn’t going to stick with us for a long time, it’s just matter of a couple of weeks before we forget what we “learnt”.
So, what is to inspire?
To inspire people is something much deeper; someone inspires us when we are moved by them to change our habits, transforming who we are.
So, Do I have the capacity to transform others habits? Do I even know if I can change my habits?
We can put habits in two simple categories; positive and negative habits.
Positive habits are the ones that we can consider as virtues, things that help us to be healthy, for example. This kind of habits requires a good amount of effort because we are “forcing” ourselves into situations that we aren’t comfortable enough.
Negative habits are the opposite pole, these are the ones that we can consider flaws. These habits lead us to physical and psychological deterioration. The most important thing about this kind of habits is that we don’t need to do anything to create them, they don’t need any kind effort to take over our routine.
Creating new habits isn’t an easy task; that is why I think that no one is going to transform the way they are only by listening to conferences and speeches about transformation, and personal development. I don’t deny those videos and conferences can be a good help, but we also need to work by ourselves.
The Capacity to inspire
Our capacity to inspire depends on how do we perceive ourselves, how do we feel about our values, the structure of our integrity. I think this is one of the most important things talking about inspiring others because of the way that our values work to determine who we are and how do we act.
You’re looking for three things, generally, in a person: intelligence, energy, and integrity. And if they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two. Everyone has the intelligence and energy — you wouldn’t be here otherwise. But the integrity is up to you. You weren’t born with it, you can’t learn it in school.
When we don’t feel up to our values, inside ourselves we feel the weight that means to carry ourselves, in consequence, we adopt a life much more conservative, so we demand such high expectations neither to the others nor to ourselves. We don’t even feel comfortable with our lives like there’s a lack of something.
How can we recover or integrity?
First, we have to remember that a leader must help others to grow, that could be in their specific area of work, or a general concept.
If we have that on mind we could say that the next step is to forgive ourselves.
Forgiveness liberates the soul, it removes fear
The last step would be to accomplish specific compromises, so we can clear our goals, we need to know what we are fighting for.
Rewards of integrity
In this point, I’m going to talk more philosophically. When we “accomplish” the feeling of being ready for taking charge of people and help them to get better; we are going to experience the first reward of integrity. The way that we see changes, we get a different perception, a different sight of our world.
Now, we admit the possibility of change and improvement in ourselves and on the others.
The gaze of the one who loves is not realistic, it is a projection gaze
In conclusion, I think that to be able to change others and to be able to help them accomplish their goals, we have to truly care about the people that we have around. I think is more of a matter of loving a caring, that only leadership skills. Don’t get me wrong, I think conventional leadership skills are super important, but those aren’t enough if we don’t care about the people that are in our projects.
