HealthCommentary

Exploring Human Potential

7 & 7: Lead vs. Follow.

REFLECTION:

Leading is more about reaching one’s full potential than subjecting one’s will on to reluctant followers. To see in yourself an unmet dream, a chance to become, words to be written, deeds to be done, and to do them places you in the lead of yourself. You are neither slave nor master. You are just you. Pursuing your own potential rarely can be done in isolation. It is more commonly an immersion, a connecting, requiring many roles, and many learnings, often of the same reality examined and reexamined from different points of view. It involves blending in, not sticking out. If there is leading, it is through the force of ideas not the force of force, touching many bases, not just one. The movement toward full potential, the pathway to this point of growth is eased by those who assist, who respond to your call and provide support. The journey then is underway. The mystery is that without coercion or diminishment of any kind, the leader leaves behind a group of volunteers more willing and more likely to lead themselves.

MUSES:

Why should I deem myself to be a chisel, when I could be the artist?
J.C.F. von Schiller 

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
Abraham Lincoln 

Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat.
Socrates 

I don’t believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them.
Harold Geneen 

We are governed not by armies and police but by ideas.
Mona Caird 

The go-between wears out a thousand sandals.
Japanese proverb

The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going.
David Starr Jordan

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
Walter Lippman

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