Leadership Lessons

I have been looking over a number of entries in my personal journal over the past few weeks, and there are some things to talk about that I feel would enrich people who read them.  A lot of it is based on my own history, and the life lessons I have learned, as I feel they are important to maintaining stable leadership traits.   If more politicians learned this stuff, as well as corporate execs (see an upcoming blog on that one!) I think the world would be a better place and self-serving people would not be tickling ears to get elected to public office only to sit with their thumbs up their bum while collecting over-inflated salaries at the taxpayers's expense.  So, as I recollect the information I wrote a couple of months ago, I will attempt to share it here.

One trait I have had since I was a kid was collecting things and pursuing such a collection to its fullest extent.  I remember, for instance, at around the time I was 7 years old, and I began to get these little toy prizes out of vending machines - they still have those around today, a small trinket that comes encased in a little plastic egg that pops out when you stick a coin in and turn the lever.  I kept all that stuff in an old lunchbox I had in first grade that I no longer used, and ended up collecting quite a stash of those things.  In those days, you could get all sorts of neat stuff out of those machines - little cap pistols, miniature lighters, tiny spy cameras, etc. - as well as just plain crap such as plastic rings and Scooby Doo magnets.  I collected it all for some weird reason.  In time, that penchant began to fade as Mom got me for Christmas one year a cowboys-and-Indians plastic fort panorama set, along with a WWII naval battle toy panorama too - then I got into that, and practically built a small civilization out of it in a very short time.  Much earlier than that - around 6 or so - I was into a Noah's Ark play set, and had a HUGE paper grocery bag filled with plastic animals that at one point I could line up, two-by-two, around my great-grandmother's house in Hendricks, WV.  In time, the Noah's Ark playsets, the cowboy and Indian figurines, and the stash of vending-machine trinkets became passing fancies, and I began to pursue more sophisticated interests as I began to transition from childhood into my teens, and one of those interests was the large music collection I still have today.  The reason I mention these childhood collection vignettes is because one trait I have always had is pursuing an interest I have as comprehensively as possible - I want a collection to be as complete as it can be, and I want to learn everything I can about it.  This has been a great aid in my graduate studies too, as I have utilized that same trait in researching class papers and projects.  That however leads to another trait that is related to that I want to now share.

As a kid, I was a history buff - I would sit and read something to do with world history for hours, and it was not uncommon for me to go out the next day and try to re-enact what I was reading about in my childhood play and exploration.  I even at one time wanted to form a political movement of my own at a young age that would serve as a vehicle for bringing together a group of my closest friends into a common unit - as a child we moved around a lot, and I had few close friends then, but the ones I had were scattered up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the US back then.  In Georgia for instance, there was Sim Taylor, who was my best buddy when I stayed with my dad in Brunswick during the second half of my third-grade year.  In my second-grade school year, I made two close friends in my class in Augusta, WV, their names being Joe Waybright and Chuck Butler.  Unfortunately, at around the time we were in 5th grade, Joe and his whole family were killed in a fatal gas leak in their trailer, and to this day I still feel that was a tragic loss, as Joe had two siblings, a younger sister named Tina and an older brother named Richard, and all of them had their lives tragically cut short.  However, I digress, as I want to tell you what I learned at a very young age by dabbling in reading history and trying to understand politics - the ability to unite diverse elements behind a common cause is an important factor in effective leadership, and a good leader must be able to know himself (or herself) well enough to utilize aspects of his (or her) own distinctive identity which relate to others he or she knows.  If a leader can successfully accomplish that, then said leader will prove more effective in the execution of his leadership role and its component tasks.  Subconsciously, I have lived by those precepts most of my life, although I have never really known how to articulate them in such a way as to present them to others.  But, that being said, here are a few lessons in leadership I have learned and want to now share with you:

1.  Know yourself, and as much about your own past as possible.  Do not dismiss or ignore even the most insignificant details, because in some cases when an apparently insignificant detail is recalled, it may be the key to unlocking a personal mystery about yourself.

2.  As you study your own past and reflect on it, remember that the things that have captured your interest over the years may reveal some valuable information about who you are.

3.  As you go through life, note those people who have become your closest friends, and learn why they are your friends.  For one thing, God has put these people in your life for a reason.  Secondly, what are common elements that some of your diversity of friends share that led you to the friendships in the first place?  These can be valuable later in life as you begin to form personal networks.

4.  Diverse elements can have common goals.  The question to ask here is this - of your interests and friends over the years, what common convictions or goals do you identify in the people and interests you know and have respectively?  If you plan on being more organizational in leadership, being aware of these things will aid in establishing effective leadership quality.

Of course, for all their brevity, no doubt these four things can be elaborated further if time permitted, and I could even come up with more of them if I really meditated on it some more.  However, as I have a major weakness I have self-identified of having so much going on in  my head that I need to clarify my thoughts so as to aid in organization and articulation, it will take some work.  Organization of thought and being able to communicate it effectively is definitely something I need to work more on personally too, as I have valuable insight on some things but I need to somehow channel it in such as way as to grab the attention of others.  In written communication, I have progressed somewhat well, but verbally I still have work to do, as I am not as gifted at public speaking as I am at writing.  That is why I want to encourage any of you reading this who have similar issues to add a fifth lesson to all this - keep a regular journal!  A regular, consistent journal is a valuable tool for organizing thoughts, and I will tell you something about that.  At this time, I have regularly kept a written journal for about 19 years, and its contents fill up probably 30 books at this point.  If you think that keeping a journal is a one-book deal, forget that - as a tip, it is not necessary to write down everything every day, and you can even keep it once a week if it suits your needs better, but the important component to this is consistency.  Keep a regular writing schedule, and try not to lapse longer than one month writing.  Also, as ideas hit you, keep that book with you at all times and write them down while they are still fresh, because they can be lost forever otherwise.  I would also encourage writing down your dreams - if you have a particularly significant dream the previous night that you just can't get out of your head, write it down immediately.  Dreams reveal a lot about us, but they can also convey a message at times.  I have learned over the years to take dream symbolism seriously, because even God can speak through your dreams to give you direction, encouragement, or warning - I did a teaching on that last year on my Sacramental Present Truths blog you should take a look at to learn more about that.  Likewise, you should also.  In addition to a journal, I would also strongly recommend keeping a daily planner of some sort to record your day-to-day activities - for instance, did you get something significant in the mail, or did you start a new job, leave an old one, or have some significant event?   If so, write it down on the calendar in your daily planner.  A daily planner can also be any means from a formal pocket planner to a simple wall calendar you can often pick up for free at your bank, so there is no specific criteria for one of those.   I have kept daily planners since I was about 16 years old, and I can look back over 30 years and pretty much pinpoint even the most mundane of details in my life.  This will also prove very valuable one day as your kids, grandkids, or a niece or nephew are going to come and inevitably ask, "where did we come from?" or "what is our story?"  By pulling out those planners, journals, and other records, you can have the complete story for them.  Which now leads to something else.

A huge box of planners, journals, and old photos and vital documents can be a bit cumbersome to wade through, so I would suggest somehow using those resources as a starting place for writing down your own story in a detailed fashion.  I have been actually working on that project myself for close to ten years now, and I keep finding things to add to it as I also talk to people and accumulate missing information to fill in gaps in my own records.  This is your legacy which you are preserving for someone to maybe be inspired by in the future, and although you may not think of your life as being a success or significant, someone reading your story one day will see its value and you could impact lives with it.  Inspiration is also another key factor of good leadership, and some of the best leaders today still speak to and guide people despite their own passing from this world, and why?   Because they kept records like this, wrote things down, and maybe someone thought these things to be significant and had the means to organize and package them so they could be shared with a much bigger audience - consider, for example, the martyred theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  If it wasn't for someone organizing a bunch of his handwritten notes that were smuggled out of a Nazi jail where he was being held, many people would not have learned the inspirational truth he communicated in what is known today as his classic text Ethics.  It may not be your responsibility to organize what you say, in other words, but rather to just get those thoughts on paper to share.  So, don't worry even if your hieroglyphic-like scratching is seemingly illegible; your job is not to make it look pretty but rather to express it.  Someone else can decipher it and figure it out in the future if you don't get around to it, and I am sure with the rapid advances in technology that there awaits in the wings some sophisticated gadget which can decipher bad penmanship - let us hope so, because my own writing is bad too!

I hope these little life lessons from my own "story" will be useful to you, and although the corporate world and sometimes the wider society rejects you, it doesn't mean that you don't have something important to say.  So, be faithful to exercise these principles, and it will lead to a type of leadership skill that may not get you Trump's fortune or Putin's power, but it will impact someone in the years to come.  Hope to visit with you again soon.