Sound-bites and pixels do not make leaders. Neither do compulsive Twitter accounts followed by millions of people. Modern-day social media enables people and organizations to flood the human mind with megabytes; where truth spinning and distortion has become an art-form.
The confusion of leadership
Leadership is a confused subject. If someone can manoeuvre themselves to a position of influence over the lives of millions of people through the clever deployment of social media, it begs the question: What is the true face of leadership? Being a leadership coach, I get this question often. Because many of us are genuinely confused. Is that 29 years old billionaire a real leader of people or just a smart high-tech opportunist riding the waves of human ignorance?
Greater and lesser causes
There are two kinds of causes in human affairs: Greater and lesser causes. The human existence is a product of the greater causes. The drivers of world affairs are by large a product of the gods of money, sex and power. The drift factor is out of control.
Leaders are meant to represent great causes. In placing a leadership under examination, the question is: What is a person or a group of people representing? Are they seeking to be agencyof a great cause? Do they have the demeanour and inner quality of process that is required for a high cause to be interested at all to channel its message through their lives?
The greater causes are not sterile propositions that can be accessed by any attitude. A high cause calls for matching attitudes and self-alignment.
The alignment dimension
How to think about self-alignment? Think about a magnet. A magnet is a bit of metal where its component atoms are arranged in a way that allows it to exhibits the property of magnetism upon other similarly natured objects.
Like a magnet, an aligned human attracts or repels energies and powers that are same-same or different to the nature of the person’s alignment. One can be aligned in a low context or a high context, thereby exhibiting matching behaviour. Consider the difference between a person whose life feeds from exercising power over others and a person whose life is aligned to serving a cause that benefits humanity in tangible ways.
It’s an evolutionary gradient
The human alignment lives inside of a gradient, from high to low. This gradient has unseen thresholds, both on the way down and on the way up. On the way down, there is that threshold that when crossed, a person or group of people lose the sense of what it means to be a human being. On the way up, there is that unseen threshold that when crossed, a person may connect to enlightening powers and influences that enable him or her to act in elevated or even supremely elevated ways. Remember, it’s a gradient that ranges deep into the realms of the human opportunity.
Congruency
Behavioural and process congruency become an important awareness here: The enactment of an intending leader of self and others must maintain a certain standard across the whole spectrum of living or else internal conflicts ensues, where if not properly contained, the lower end will eventually have the upper hand in shaping a person’s behaviour and destiny.
The higher connected, the simpler and more down to earth a developed person is able to be in perceiving and responding to the challenges of living.
The unifying principle
The higher the connection, the more deeply unifying it is in the human sense. Because at some point along this magnificent gradient, worldly insanities shrink to an inconsequential, peanut-size insignificance. A good 90% of all of the today’s news headlines carry little to no meaning in the worlds that shape the higher opportunity of the human existence. And I think that you know this full well.
The world craves the emergence of leaders that are able to unify humanity in one mission that benefits all, equally so. It’s unlikely that world politics give rise to such leadership – these dynamics are far too local, personal and lost in translation.
All the great people are gone – it’s our turn now
The era of single saviours is a thing of the past. We have entered a new era in human affairs,characterized by the arising of many modern-day saviours and networks collaborating in the process of discovering what their purpose together may be, inside of the wide-open window of incredible new opportunities. In this world – the world of spiritual evolution – having one gender dominating the other is an unthinkable proposition.
Don’t discount yourself. Being a leader of people – as many Fulcrum readers are – you can unify those you lead in ways that make the world around you a better place to be in next to improving the bottom line.
Leadership is an agency of greatness
David Gommé
World Copyright 2017© David Gommé