By Deepak Choudhary:
Let me start by asking you a simple question, are you completely comfortable with calling yourself a leader? See, now no matter where you ask this question, there will always be a large portion of the audience that won’t put up their hand. It pains me to see that we have made leadership into something bigger than us, something beyond us, something that one day we would go on to achieve but to give it to ourselves now, would mean a level of arrogance and cockiness that we are not good with. I worry sometimes that we celebrate things which absolutely no one else could do that we have now convinced ourselves that these are the only things we should celebrate and be proud of, we choose to ignore moments where we truly are a leader but we won’t let ourselves take credit for them or feel good about it.
Let me ask you just one more question now. Has it ever been that someone said something or did something that made you feel that your life was fundamentally better? If yes, then did you let them know about it? The answer to the latter would almost be a ‘NO‘. And that’s what we need today, these moments , these moments where you make an impact on someone else’s life, moments where you make the other person feel good about themselves and the world around them. These are the moments we need.
We need to redefine leadership as being about these moments, how many of them we create, how many of them we acknowledge, how many of them we take forward with ourselves and how many of them we say “Thank You” for. We have assumed leadership to be about changing the world but there is no world, there are just 6 billion understandings of it. If we could change one person’s understanding of it, one person’s understanding of how powerful he is, one person’s understanding of how great an impact he can make on other lives, I guess we can change the whole thing.
Someone once said,”Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,but the fact that we are powerful beyond measure.It is our light and not the darkness that frightens us.” My call to action today is that we need to get over it. We need to get over it so that we can get beyond it and one day our little brothers and sisters and maybe our children see how much we value the impact one can make over another’s life more than money or fame or power or authority.
It’s a simple idea but definitely not a small one!