Authentic Leadership

"While you are proclaiming peace with your lips,
be careful to have it even more fully in your heart."

St. Francis of Assisi

 

"So if we are going to find lasting solutions to difficult conflicts or external wars we find ourselves in, 

we first need to find our way out of the internal wars that are poisoning our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward others. 

If we can't put an end to the violence within us,
there is no hope for putting an end to the violence without."

 
Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict

www.wisdomatwork.com

Dale Johnson   www.dpreview.com

Authentic Leadership Required

     "A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to project on other people his or her shadow or his or her light. 
     A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being-conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. 
     A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

      The problem is that people rise to leadership in our society by a tendency towards extroversion, which means a tendency to ignore what is going on inside themselves. Leaders rise to power in our society by operating very competently and effectively in the external world, sometimes at the cost of internal awareness.
      I've looked at some training programs for leaders. I'm discouraged by how often they focus on the development of skills to manipulate the external world rather than the skills necessary to go inward and make the inner journey."                                 Parker J. Palmer

WisdomAtWork.com

Steve Grodin   www.dpreview.com

How Do We Take Care of Ourselves?

     I think we all take care of ourselves, but HOW do we accomplish this?

     When we crave junk food, if instead we eat a healthy meal, we are actually denying ourselves - at one level.
     How often do we try to satiate our "hunger" with "junk food"? I suspect far more often than we realize. Shopping, eating, drinking, travel, work, all manner of entertainment - even real junk food. None of these, in themselves, in moderation, is necessarily unhealthy. However, insofar as these are regular substitute, fake gratifications for what we actually hunger for, they're all a waste of time, energy, our very life.

     So what do we really need? What has real meaning for us? How can we let go of junk food and live more authentically?

Steve McCurry   http://stevemccurry.com/

Authentic Undivided Life

     "Our colleges and universities need to encourage, foster, and assist our students, faculty, and administrators in finding their own authentic way to an undivided life where meaning and purpose are tightly interwoven with intellect and action, where compassion and care are infused with insight and knowledge. In some contexts it may make sense to distinguish between facts and values, but they should never be reified into divisions that fragment us and our world.”
 
         Palmer PJ, Zajonc A. The heart of higher education: A call to renewal. Transforming the academy through collegial conversation. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010.

     See also: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/02/no-boundaries.html

Photo: harlanlampert   www.dpreview.com

Authenticity

     “Michael Kearney, an Irish psychiatrist and hospice physician, defined suffering as ‘the experience of an individual who has become disconnected and alienated from the deepest and most fundamental aspects of him or herself.’ Psychiatrist, Victor Frankl … asserted that: ‘Man is not destroyed by suffering, he is destroyed by suffering without meaning.’
     Coulehan J. Compassionate solidarity: suffering, poetry, & medicine. Perspect Biol Med 2009; 52(4): 585-603.

     “authenticity (is) the unimpeded functioning of one’s true self in daily life … is positively related to such important outcomes as self-actualization, self-concept clarity, and self-esteem.”
     Schlegel RJ et al. Thine own self: true self-concept accessibility and meaning in life. J Pers Soc Psychol 2009; 96(2): 473-90.

     One definition of spirituality is … “every person’s inherent search for ultimate meaning and purpose in life … including a relationship with … transcendence; relationships with others; as well as spirituality found in nature, art, and rational thought. Critical to the definition is that spirituality underlies the very nature of the relationship with our patients and each other.”
     Puchalski CM. Spirituality and medicine: curricula in medical education. J Cancer Educ 2006; 21(1): 14-8.

     “If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.”
        Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life