Reply To: Exercise 1: Personal Essay
by Beth
in
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Leadership Step by Step
Personal Essay
October 23, 2024
Feeling invisible comes with the territory of being third of nine children. This may have had something to do with cultivating ambitions to stand out from others and to assume leadership roles early in life. In those roles, I felt seen and experienced myself having something of value to offer the world. I was a person who others came to for support. I remember this as early as ten years old when I was a girl scout and in a youth group at church. If there was organizing to do about cookie sales or church bake sales, I was in the middle of it. Friends with boy problems or family problems would ask for my “advice” or just want to talk about what they were going through. I was often a speaker at church group retreats and in class projects. I don’t remember anything about what I actually said, but I remember feeling supportive and caring about what other people were going through. I also felt I mattered.
I had a strong sense of compassion that I believe others felt from me. What I was less good at was seeing myself with compassion. My mother was a strong woman with a strong personality. While she taught me a tremendous amount and loved me fiercely, in her wake I often felt not good enough and intrinsically “bad”. I believe it was my own struggle with these feelings of doubt that made me compassionate toward others and gave me a unique perspective. It also instilled the drive to feel worthy. These are the underlying experiences that drove me to assume leadership roles in most arenas throughout my life.
In my different roles as a manager, my style was more team focused than authoritarian. I solicited the ideas of others in developing solutions to whatever issue was being addressed. I think most of the people who worked with me in a manager role would say that I was open and respectful of the value of each team member. When I wasn’t in the manager role, but team member role, I was still seen as a leader. I didn’t hesitate to communicate my ideas, at times more energetically than people might have liked. When I taught in nursing school, we taught in teams and had weekly team meetings. At one point I brought socks to give to the team members to give to me when I needed to pipe down. The socks were used on more than one occasion. As an instructor in the hospital, my first question to a student after being in a room with a patient in which they performed some skill was “What did you do well?”. No matter, they always proceeded to tell me what the did wrong. Helping people see the good in themselves while still addressing the shortcomings has been a thread in how I operate in positions of leadership. We have to address what needs to be corrected but let’s do that in the context of recognizing the good, too.
These thoughts are part of the kaleidoscope that colors my mind as I consider what leadership is to me now and why I am interested in this particular class in Method Leadership. I am 71, looking at what leadership is and how I want to further develop leadership “skills”. I feel less inclined to prove anything about who I am or who I am not. I am more inclined to listen to whatever you call that thing inside that guides me toward using this life and breath to love. The guiding light of my life is that love is the foundation of everything we long for. Whatever great things we accomplish, if we don’t love ourselves and express love for life and each other in the process, we will feel disappointed. We are left with a hole that is never filled by achievement or triumph. I think this is how I ended up with the project for the initiative class, Love Merida. It is a project that creates opportunity for connection and community building. Will that change behavior or will changing behavior be the impetus? I don’t know.
This process of looking deeply at what I’m doing here leaves me with some ambivalence because I don’t feel inclined to try to influence others’ behavior as much as I want to connect with them. I like Josh’s definition; leadership is helping others do what they already wanted to do but didn’t know how. The question is, what is it that someone else wants to do and doesn’t know how that I am interested in encouraging with my “leadership”? What I am becoming clearer about as I look more deeply at my own motivation is that I have no interest in trying to “change” people. I do not like being with people who want to change me. And while the definition of leadership we are using doesn’t include changing others, it seems that the focus can drift that way, and that leadership is still measured by how effective we are at shepherding others in the direction of our goals. I DO want to be a force for good in my community. I DO want to offer an avenue for others to discover what is in them to participate in community. To that end, I would like to be best equipped to do that and I think this class can help me do that.
In terms of my role models, John Lewis is always the first person who comes to my mind. As a young black man in the south, his experience of discrimination (such an inadequate word) led him to act. His actions were brave and resulted in great bodily harm. He just kept stepping. No roadblocks put in his way stopped him. His eventual election to the US House of Representatives gave him an avenue to move toward correcting the inequalities he experienced, the most consequential of which was the Voting Rights Act. I think what is most inspiring to me about him is that he saw himself as a link in the chain of generations of inequality. He knew he would not ever see his vision of equality fully realized, but it didn’t stop him. It didn’t make him cynical. He dealt with every person respectfully without making public derogatory remarks. He called it like he saw it, but he stayed focused on the goal, the idea that every single human being is of value and deserves to be treated with dignity. He spoke of “making good trouble” and called out injustice without demeaning others dignity. He always appeared to me as someone who was always acting out of love, love for himself, his community, his country and his ideals. I think about him when I think something is too big, too hard, or too much trouble.