Successful leadership is about being YOU
Leadership is about being YOU, arguably the most difficult thing to do in the world. When you are YOU you are not pretending to be someone else, you bring yourself to the table, no matter what the situation, what the circumstances, no matter who the people around you, no matter what. This is easier said than done. Most of the time we are afraid of bringing ourselves to the table, we are afraid how someone will perceive us, afraid how family will react to us, afraid how society will act with us. We adapt to people and circumstances around us and we become someone who we are not. We become someone else, and the moment we do that, we lose ourselves.
Why do we adapt?
When we are faced with criticism, with judgement, we hurt a lot and that brings in us the fears. Fear that we will get hurt, fear that we will lose friends, family and colleagues. These fears modify our responses and we start this journey of pleasing everyone. We start adapting to all the criticism and all the judgement, we modify our thoughts, we modify our personality, we modify our actions, we modify our behavior, so that we are not criticized, we are not hated. These fears keep driving us to become someone else, a version of us that is liked by everyone. In our quest to please everyone we become like everyone else, we lose our uniqueness, we lose our very core. Now what we bring to the table is what so many others are already bringing to the table and that table is full of duplicates. To be ourselves we need to let go of these fears, fear that we will hurt and fear that we will lose people from our lives.
How do we lose our fears?
To lose our fears we must start accepting some basic truth in life, first being, we will hurt, there is no escape from it. No matter what you do, how good you are and how accommodating you are and how loving you are, there will still be people, things and situations that will hurt us. We can’t escape that. But do we want to hold on to the hurt inside us forever? Is it of any use? Holding hurt inside us is like renting out a large part of our brain to a tenant which will eventually stop us from doing anything worthwhile. When we hold hurt in our hearts and minds, we don’t want to do anything, lest we collect more hurt. This stops us from doing what we want to do and from growing. To remove the hurt tenant from our head, we need to ignore the things people say or do to us, if we are not able to ignore and it continues to bother us very much we need to tell those people that it is bothering us and if we are unable to tell them we need to forgive people who have caused us hurt. We need to forgive, because sometimes people say and do things to us which comes from their own complexes, their own issues, it is mostly about them and less about you.
We can’t fear losing, you will lose, accept that. Losing people, deals, things, life, is all a part of our journey in this universe, there is no escaping from it. Accept that you will lose and the moment you accept that you will lose, you will actually stop losing people, and things that really matter to you. This happens because the people who really genuinely care about you will never leave you, because they love you or like you for who you are. The people who don’t care about you will leave, and if they leave is it really a loss? So in the real sense you never lose anything worthwhile in your life, so why fear if you lose people and things that are not useful to you anyways!
How does this help in becoming YOU?
When you lose your fears and stop adapting to situations and people, you start acting like yourself. You bring yourself to the table. You are unafraid to think and say, and do things that you always wanted to. You don’t care about other people’s opinion, their views and their criticism. Without your fears your sixth sense is activated and you know in your gut what is right and what is wrong, without data, without your mind working overtime analyzing everything in detail. You instinctively know what is right and what is wrong, you know who are the right for you and what is wrong for you. When this is achieved you become YOU.
How is becoming YOU related to leadership?
When you become YOU, you become unique, you become one of a kind. Not a copy, not a duplicate, but an original! And when that happens people start gravitating towards you, they want to be near you, they want to be you, they want to believe in you, they want to copy you. And these people then become your followers, they can possibly do whatever you want them to do. And who are these people who can create followers and get them to do what they want them to do — Leaders! Look at the most successful leaders around you — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mamata Banerjee. They are all unique — one of a kind. Elon Musk is unafraid to speak his mind and pay the price (if it needs to be paid), no matter what, 99% of the time he is right and that is a very high percentage for anyone. Jeff Bezos is fearless, he created the mammoth Amazon, by investing profits back into the company to create new products and facilities for the future, something which leaders of large public companies are loathe to do, in their quest to always please the investors. Steve Jobs famously said “if you want to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader, sell ice cream”, he went on to create products and services which consumers didn’t even know they wanted. Bill Gates was and is still aggressive, unafraid of the criticism that he receives from people even now when he says and does things that goes contrary to conventional wisdom. Lastly look at Mamata Banerjee, a fearless leader who fought against the money power and muscle power of opposition multiple times, unafraid, and won.
Sometimes when leaders try and listen to strategists and consultants they start changing, they become sensitive to criticism and start adapting and when they do that, they stop being themselves — YOU. And when that happens all hell breaks lose and they stop being leaders, they start losing.
If you want to be a successful leader, start by becoming YOU and you shall become the leader that you always wanted to be.
