In the book Insights on Leadership, Parker J. Palmer has an article entitled Leading from Within. This article addresses the necessity for leaders to focus inward, in order that they may honestly reflect upon their motivations for leading. This is a crucial factor of leadership because as leaders “we project either a spirit of hope or a spirit of despair, either an inner confidence in wholeness and integration or an inner terror about life being diseased and ultimately terminal.”
Because of this reality we must turn inward, honestly assessing, and becoming aware. Since leadership is so focused on the external factors of life, it is easy to lack internal awareness. We also lack this internal awareness because leaders are faced with so much external discouragement that “they feel the need to psych themselves up even if it means ignoring their inner shadow.” A true leader must be willing to “meet the violence and terror that we carry within ourselves.” For if we do not deal with these inner feelings we project them onto other people.
Palmer suggest several ways that we can recover inner awareness: 1) strive to value the inner work, 2) remember that while the inner work is deeply personal it is not a private matter, and 3) we need to remember that we do not have to lead from our fears. We need not find new “ways to manipulate the external world, [but] find the courage to take an inner journey… [that] will take us beyond ourselves to become healers of a wounded world.”
Dibbs.
ReplyDeleteBrian,
ReplyDeleteYour comments on Leading from Within remind me of much that God is doing in my life as of late. The more I realize that God is at work in transforming me, the more I can help to invite others into that spiritual journey. I appreciate Palmer’s words that a leader ought not “manipulate the external world.” Too often, I believe Christian leadership is defined in this way—Leadership is using influence to place people where they ought to be within an organization called the church. There are numerous reasons why I disagree with such an approach to leadership, but Palmer’s words get at what Christian leaders too often focus on doing—feeding the “machine” of the Church. The Church is not to be an “organization,” but rather a group of transformed persons inviting others into this transformational process.
As to Palmer point (2)—We often think that transformation is a private affair. However, to be truly transformed, that work must begin to take residence in external affairs. This was Jesus’ points with the religious in Matthew 23. They claimed to be practicing true transformation, but rather were “shutting the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces.”