Leadership as a language of care
Leadership as a language of care
The opening line in Always Home, Fanny Singer’s tribute to her mother, the iconic Alice Waters, speaks to the way Alice lives her life. Fanny says that Beauty as a Language of Care is a practice that permeates everything Alice touches.
A Language of care.
This line has stayed with me since I first read it. It speaks to the choice we have to live our lives deeply aligned with what feels meaningful and purposeful to us. Whilst also recognising that what feels meaningful at 25 will be different to 45, or 55.
Leadership is also a language of care.
As leaders, it’s our responsibility to care for ourselves and others. What do I mean by care in this context? I mean having the courage to work on yourself, to cultivate your inner life and excavate your behaviours & tendencies, your values and virtues, your strengths and weaknesses. To know yourself, so you can begin to know and understand others from a place of empathy and kindness.
We all have our inner knots and scars, and these inform how and who we are in the world. If you are brave enough, the leadership journey can transform the way you work in the world and the contentment and satisfaction you feel in your life, because when we’re committed to doing the work, we begin to level up in all parts of our lives.
No matter what our experience, we can either allow our wounds to break us, or we can use them as a source of strength. To be a great leader requires that you get radically honest with yourself, it means being willing to shine a light on your vulnerabilities, your fears, your judgements. And you do this through a willingness to be with yourself, to practice self-inquiry, to spend time in contemplation, to approach your life and work with greater mindfulness and awareness, being present to what is, rather than wishing and hoping things were different. It’s only when we are honest about our current reality that we’re able to take action on the things we want to change. It takes grit, tenacity and radical honesty to be vulnerable enough, and brave enough to change.
A client once said to me that they really wanted to change, but they didn’t particularly want to do the work necessary to change. I admired their honesty, but I also told them that if they were unwilling to do the work, there was no point in us working together.
Why don’t we do the work to change? Because it’s hard, it’s painful, it’s uncomfortable. And as humans, we hate being uncomfortable. We’d rather distract ourselves with pointless meetings, scrolling, binge watching TV shows, eating…anything to avoid the discomfort of being with ourselves.
And yet, it’s the people I work with who are willing to feel that discomfort and do it anyway (‘it’ means being with, allowing, investigating and challenging their narratives) that create true, lasting and meaningful transformation in their lives - and it's what sets them apart as true leaders.
There are countless programs, workshops and books that dish out advice on how to be a better leader. Yet the place we need to start - the only place that matters - is with ourselves. This is the place where great leadership is born. And we are always a work in progress, just as we are.
