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

Am I Strong or Weak, a Success or a Failure?

     Don't we feel that our family, friends, and society in general expect us to work very hard, be very busy, very successful, wealthy, famous (at the very least locally), and acquire as soon as possible, most but preferably all the signs of success: million+ dollar MacMansion home, prestige cars, designer clothes, prestigious club memberships, private schools for the kids, prestigious summer home, large sail boat, fine wine cellar, regular exotic vacations, etc? The need to be seen as knowledgeable, to be seen as competent are very much part of our personalities - to be seen as successful is almost certainly also part of our makeup.
     And if we never acquire most of the (above) obvious external trappings of wealth, will we be perceived - by others & even ourselves - as weak, lazy and perhaps even a bit dull - a failure? How do we deal with this? Can we allow it?
     Not long ago, showing off one's wealth was considered to be in bad taste, uncouth, crass, "nouveau riche."
     What proportion of health-care professionals can - from practicing good medicine - earn the money required to pay for all that "bling" above? And of the tiny proportion who do, how hard do they have to work to do so? What must they give up in the process?

     If one's top priority is to be seen as "very successful" by material standards, many things can, and do go wrong.
     Constant dissatisfaction with our possessions, is a nightmare created intentionally by big business through advertising. One would hope that health-care professionals are wise enough to realize that "the one who dies with the most toys wins" is a joke, not our true calling.

     See also: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/12/250-presents-presence.html
     and: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/11/220-hows-work-working-for.html

 

Photo: UncleFai   www.dpreview.com