Spirit On The Margins

I really yearn for the kind of leader that David Brooks defines in his most recent column in the New York Times.  Of Abraham Lincoln, he said “He came to terms with his weaknesses, control his passions and achieve what we now call maturity…In Lincoln’s day, to achieve maturity was to succeed in the conquest of the self…The young Lincoln had been encouraged by the culture around him to identify his own flaws…He knew he was ferociously ambitious and blessed with superior talents — the sort of person who could easily turn into a dictator or monster.”

New York Times David Brooks

“This concept of maturity as self-conquest didn’t survive long into the 20th century…Self-discovery replaced self-mastery as the primary path to maturity, and we got a thousand novels and memoirs about young peoples’ search for identity…In the last few years, we may be shifting toward another vision of maturity, one that is impatient with boomer narcissism. Young people today put service at the center of young adulthood. A child is served, but maturity means serving others.”

“And yet, though we’re never going back to the 19th-century, sin-centric character-building model, for breeding leaders, it has its uses. Over the past decades, we’ve seen president after president confident of his own talents but then undone by underappreciated flaws. It’s as if they get elected for their virtues and then get defined in office by the vices — Clinton’s narcissism, Bush’s intellectual insecurity — they’ve never really faced.”

“It would be nice to have a president who had gone to school on his own failings. It would be comforting to see a president who’d looked into the abyss, or suffered some sort of ordeal that put him on a first-name basis with his own gravest weaknesses, and who had found ways to combat them.”

I couldn’t agree more with this point of view. Janet Hagberg, in her book Real Power talks about going “through the wall”, as a stage in leadership development - when a leader confronts his or her own shadows. (Read “George Bush” who seems incapable of introspection)

Parker Palmer, in his book, Let Your Life Speak, describes 5 shadows often encountered in leadership:

1. Insecurity about identity or worth.

2. The belief that the universe is a battleground, hostile to human interests.

3. The belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with me.

4. Fear of the natural chaos of life.

5. The denial of death itself (seen most often in the fact that all things must die in due course). This underlies so much of our fear of failure.  (Read, “Hillary Clinton” in her refusal to concede the race to Barak Obama when he had won the majority of the delegates)

Again in Real Power, Janet Hagberg defines 13 practices that develops one’s capacity for leadership from one’s spirit - beyond ego. One of the ways is to find a mentor on the margins of society. “Then you can look at your own homelessness, your own inner prisons, and your own addictions in a new and more compassionate way.”  Then one can lead from a place of wholeness that has integrated both shadow and light. This has certainly been my experience.

This is the premise of a new leadership program City House is developing - to connect mainstream leaders with a mentor on the margins of society - to deepen her / his capacity to lead from a spiritual center.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under City House Direction, Servant Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.