Leadership

How many people, do you think, are completely comfortable with calling themselves a leader? I’ve come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us. We’ve made it into something beyond us, we’ve made it about changing the world and we’ve taken this title of leader and we treat it as if it’s something that one day we are going to deserve, but to give it to ourselves right now means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we’re not comfortable with.

I worry sometimes that we spend too much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do, that we’ve convinced ourselves that those are the only things we should celebrate. And then we start to devalue the things that we can do everyday and we start to take moments where we are a leader and don’t let ourselves take credit for it and we don’t let ourselves feel good about it.

How many people, do you think, have a moment where someone said something, to them, or did something, for them, that they feel, fundamentally, made their life better? How many people, do you think, have told that person that they did that? Why not? We let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it. Every single person has made someone’s life better by something that they said or did and if you think you haven’t, you’re just one of the people who haven’t been told about it.

It can be so scary to think of ourselves as that powerful. It can be frightening to think that we can matter that much to other people because, as long as we make leadership something bigger than us, as long as we keep leadership something beyond us, as long as we make it about changing the world, we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day from ourselves and from each other. A famous author once said: “Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” So, is it our light and not our darkness that frightens us?

This speech is about the fact that we need to get over that. We need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be to each other’s lives. We need to get over it so we can move beyond it and we can start to value the impact we can have on each other’s lives; an impact more important than money and power and titles and influences. We need to redefine leadership because we’ve made leadership about changing the world. There is no one world, there is only almost 8 billion understandings of it and, if you change one person’s understanding of it, one person’s understanding of what they’re capable of, one person’s understanding of how much people care about them, one person’s understanding of how powerful they can be in this world, you can change the whole thing.

It’s a simple idea but it’s not a small one.