The best way to approach the subject of self-leadership is through personal experience.
Remember the last time you stood your ground? Where by your grit, wit and intelligence, you managed to advance through a challenge that threatened to derail you from your path? And how you connected to the bigger person in you that is joined to an awesome power – the kind of power that people throughout history connect to when faced with adversity, in their endeavour to survive and continue to evolve?
Examine the anatomy of that moment, where being inveigled by your weaknesses would have led to an undesirable outcome. These have many faces: Emotional vulnerability, over-reactivity, impatience, fragility, irrational fears, inferiority/superiority complex, the ‘freeze’ syndrome, losing your wits, sulking, pettiness… But you managed to sidestep these inner sink holes and instead, leap to that intangible inner location, the high ground of the bigger person in the person, another name for it being the higher self
Each one of us has his or her unique blend of idiosyncrasies and weaknesses. And then, there is the cognizant, perceptive, sensitive, intelligent, articulate bigger person in you that somehow, in a wonderfully measured way, acts with maturity, poise and finesse to seize the moment, prevail and succeed. In being pushed to a point of no option, the bigger person bursts into the scene, seemingly out of nowhere.
You know it’s there – always present in the background, watching over you. It’s as though you are, for a bit of time, a different person, with remarkable confidence. But it’s not a different person. It’s
the lesser you in you that is not you. One of the tasks of the bigger you is to draw you closer to it, and especially what it is joined to, to stop the feeding frenzy of the lesser you, of the unfortunate aspects that are part and parcel of living, to the point where they may no longer have their way with you where it counts, in the process of the creation of the future you.
In being aware of this inner ‘two in one’ state of affairs, the higher and the lower, we can make more space for the bigger person in us, with its incredible scope of theatres, hidden capabilities and limitless potential to improve and evolve. Every day we are presented with opportunities to exercise ourselves, to overcome the pull of the lower aspects and direct our focus and energies into the bigger person in us. It is a constant, life-long struggle that is often quite challenging at the point of need, but is also quite thrilling and so enormously rewarding in many ways.
There is much more to this story, as these two powers in us, the greater and the lesser, are connected to different worlds and realities, influenced by everyone else’s strengths and weaknesses. It could be said that a constant rubbing between the two is in play, until, by your will, the greater gains dominion, which is a great achievement considering the magnetising persuasions that constantly emanate from the world around us.
Self-leadership strives to create a state of union with that which the higher self is joined to, and the building of an evolving core that in time unifies the whole of oneself in one’s purpose.
Self-leadership summons the will to defy everything in life that says “no, you can’t; no you should not; no, you may not; impossible”, to be unstoppable, driven by the knowing present in the air that there is a way forward, that new horizons of human engagement with the future are in the process of revealing themselves.
David Gommé
1 July 2009
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