MY LEADERSHIP - 4
SESSION FOUR — THE HARNESS
This is a link to the ‘Principles’ tutorial video - ‘My Leadership - Session 4 - Principles’
Alongside the Principes video, I have included the ‘Activation Narrative’ that is part of this session in the self-guided workbooks. The stories I tell aren’t comfortable, nor are they trauma porn. They are designed to elicit a specific response from the reader, tied to the topic our clients are working on in this session.
The Fourth Golden Rule:
“No one intentionally acts inappropriately; they always have an instinctive justification.”
― Robert (Sherpa) Millar
“I would shoot right through a baby to kill a catholic.” The room went still. The men in the room looked at the speaker, then at each other, nodded, and finally glanced at me to see my reaction to this succinct explanation of their dedication to the Cause. I was in a house that belonged to the local commander of one of the Protestant terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland. In the early years of my spiritual leadership, I found myself working with these loyalist paramilitary groups, and they were trying to impress me with their discipline and dedication. A couple of weeks later, I was in the same house, where that spokesman was lying unconscious and bleeding, with his older brother standing over him. He had run afoul of the organization’s rules, and his brother had been sent to teach him that those rules weren’t optional. These young men had the power of life and death over entire communities, and my job was to lead them in exploring and expanding their understanding of power.
Fast forward a few years, and I was living in Germany, on a trip to America to a billionaire’s rural retreat with a group of multimillionaires. It was a weekend fundraiser, and my wife and I were there as full-time foreign missionaries. These individuals had achieved extraordinary levels of success in their fields and had amassed an equally impressive amount of personal wealth. Our job was to lead them in exploring and expanding their understanding of wealth.
Fast forward one more time, and I now live in America. It was 2016, and I had just resigned as a pastor of a large church in the Midwest, marking the first step in my decision to end a 25-year vocation as a spiritual leader. I had burned myself out trying to lead people who wanted to stay comfortable. They didn’t ask to be challenged; they didn’t really need a leader like me. In hindsight, my approach to leading them was wildly inappropriate for most of them.
My approach to all three groups was the same. You see, I have only one instinctive approach as a leader. It is aggressive, uncomfortable, and relentless. I am subconsciously optimized to work with people who live in extreme environments. So, if you make me a local pastor in the Midwest, I inevitably struggle to be effective in leading and will eventually fail.
In the next post, we'll explore the final link in what we call our instinctive Leadership Kill Chain— the unintentional impact on others when we are reacting to stress.
— Robert (Sherpa) Millar