To set your expectations, I am fully aware that my thoughts on the subject of Leadership, as with any other subject in life – it’s all limited.
I don’t know everything. I don’t think I want to know everything. But I’ll be damned if I stop learning.
There’s not much to being a leader.
You lead others when you lead yourself. And you lead yourself by being yourself.
Simple as it seems, there’s a lot of depth to being, and there’s a lot to learn about yourself.
Copying other leaders will only get you so far. You are who you are, and your style of leading may be familiar to that of other more prominent ones, but you are the only one with access to your precise style. You couldn’t lead exactly like anyone else in this world, nor can anyone lead the exact same way you do.
To have peace with this is to have peace with every other aspect of your being – you embrace where you know other people are better at, just as much as you move, knowing full well where you excel.
Knowing yourself may help, but it’s in the being that you know for real.
And to be honest with you, that’s been a concern of mine ever since I’ve been speaking once a week at church, with nobody to sub for me… especially in the Practical Love ‘story arc’ (in my mind, a fancier way of saying the theme for this quarter of the year). I’ve been wanting to share my message of how God’s love is expressed practically in… well, a practical way! And what I mean by sharing practically is really just living instead of talking about it.
So I’m saying it’s in being yourself that you know yourself. I want to teach by living because I know you definitely learn by living.
And just flowing with this, going back to the first words I had to share today, you can certainly say that there’s a lot of learning in leading. You live, and you learn by living, and in your learning, you’re actually leading; As you learn, others around you observing would learn…
In Tagalog, pagbigyan nyo na ako. Bear with me, because I have a lot in my head, and I want to just flow right now.
And other people who are in tune with this same train of thought, or have a similar mindset, would learn from you, if not WITH you, or even learn by way of teaching you, these people being aware of something that you’re aware of as well – that if you teach something, you learn it twice.
And here I was thinking I’d go as far as being yourself… and in our flowing, we went further, but as we went further, we ended up going back to the start.
You lead others by leading yourself.
You lead yourself by being yourself.
You be yourself by living to learn.
As you live to learn, you learn to live.
As you learn to live, you form a community.
And from this I see that leading isn’t a step-by-step process. I’d like to think that we’re all in one or more phases in this crude ‘cycle’ we’ve established so far.
More than one phase, you ask? Consider that some of us do not have the luxury of shying away from leading others, and are doing so out of necessity, but are still trying to understand what it means to live to learn. But I don’t think knowing where we are is even the point, more than it is to appreciate that we’re already somewhere in it, before and after we realize it.
And it may not necessarily be in the same words that I stated, but the concept is something we’re all grasping in some way or form.
You’d think that at some time or at some point in this article I would go ahead and pull Jesus out of a hat and see how He connects to all this… but I won’t go that far. I’m not saying being in one step is better or worse than the other – I can say with confidence that we can enjoy wherever we stand in this spectrum knowing that we aren’t alone in our journey of leading ourselves and others.
Christ is with us, and we are with Christ.
I never mentioned that that set of statements, that loop or spectrum would not leave the rest of our beings hurt in any or all ways or forms. We would face adversity, and sometimes the thrill of seeing it all as learning wouldn’t weather what fear we may have at the time. We are certainly not exempt from our own shares of hopeless scenarios and pain that makes it hard to think, much less speak.
We may live to learn, and learn to live, but there will be as much heartache as there will be heaven.
But again, through it all, and in it all, we have Christ. Indeed, in Him, we have been made new, with new mindsets, and we are held together, not with cushy promises for better circumstances in this reality, more like we are embraced by true, everlasting Love which is for us, now and forever.
We lead with humility and power, not out of fear and insecurity.
We learn with awe and wonder, not with pride or the pressure to be better then others.
We live – Yes, we live! We live because of perfect love.
No longer are we scrapping a ‘life’ out of fear, it is perfect love demonstrated to us through Christ and His finished work – by His death, we have died to sin, and by His life, we have been made truly alive, and alive with no less that perfect love which will never leave nor forsake us!
I guess I went ahead and did it anyway, but I hope you got what I had to say… even if you aren’t religious.
If I may share, just one last time:
You lead others by leading yourself.
You lead yourself by being yourself.
You be yourself by living to learn.
As you live to learn, you learn to live.
As you learn to live, you form a community.
And wherever you are in this whole ‘cycle’ of sorts.. Know that you are loved.
Actually, you can forget the rest of the ramblings I had to share here, and you can get a lot from that already:
By Christ’s finished work, you can know the absolute Truth – That God loves you with an everlasting love.
There’s not much to being a leader.
JB's Personal Brain Defragmenter 
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