Ten years ago when I was 48, I started to think about that arbitrary, yet significant marker of age 50. At that stage, I decided that I would not succumb to ‘retirement’ thinking and set out on creating a path to challenge myself vocationally & personally. I had a vision to achieve. Now that I am approaching the marker of 60, I am contemplating what the vision might be for the next stage of life.
You should know there was a “disturbance in the force” while executing my previous vision.
The plan I put in place in my late 40’s and executed in my 50th year did not turn out as I imagined over the next seven years. There were twists and turns I never anticipated. In hindsight the path I walked enhanced and redirected my thinking and vocational orientation, but to be honest – this wasn’t the script I wanted to write. In fact, a lot of it hurt and just plain sucked.
Failure to achieve a vision as dreamed begs these questions:
Is it worth dreaming and executing on a vision?
Why dream about making things different in your personal or leadership life if what you start out with isn’t where you end?
Why pursue a future that may fail?
True personal and corporate leadership is less noun and mostly verb. In other words, leadership isn’t a position. It’s a risk.
Leadership by nature takes risks because to lead is to enter a process to discover the way to a place you have not yet gone. Thus not all people in positions of leadership actually lead. Many are managers. Not all people who say they want to lead their life forward actually do. Many are responders to life.
No one has a lock on the future. Despite all our geeky dreaming about time travel, no one has been to the future and sent back reports that will give you the information needed to come up with a no-fail
Many people ‘speak’ the language of risk and advance, but in practice simply manage their way forward. As an example from my world of Christian non-profits, church leadership teams can often speak about risk and mission advance to reach to the very edges of a society, but their default organizational orientation to safety, management processes, systems and orthodoxy of thinking and execution militates against their language, squeezing out those who are actual risk takers.
Risk is part of advance both personally and corporately. Real risk. Not the language of risk. That means:
Acting on your convictions. There’s a saying that in old age you won’t regret the things you did, but the things you did not do. Think about that. I have met many ‘leaders’ over the years in my work that possessed deep convictions about issues but never executed because they feared others wouldn’t follow, or they feared the potential change was too much for their organization. Some even feared they’d lose their job if they acted on their conviction. If any of these are your story, then…
…you are not a leader, you are an employee.
…something potentially significant was never birthed in or through you.
…the real you has been diminished
Prepare & Plan. Then be ready for it to change. German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke famously noted: “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”. Risking doesn’t mean ignoring good preparation. It does mean that what you started with won’t last because the future is full of the unexpected and unanticipated. You will have to adapt and change. Will the prospect of that keep you from launching out?
Learn as you go. No one can ever know it all at the start. “Risk management” while it has its place, is also an oxymoron (and likely the creation of managers). Risks inherently can’t be managed but when faced; they can both inform and guide what needs to happen next.Adopt a new perspective. A truly nomadic leader/thinker that is capable of navigating the changes life and leadership inherently contains, takes on a perspective I have taken from a book title: The Obstacle is the Way. (Author: Ryan Holiday). This perspective means we don’t view the obstacles that risk often presents to us as inhibitors to a vision but rather as the pathway to what’s next. You’ll need this if you have any hope of persevering. In fact, you’ll need this to even get started!
The next things in this world, whether it’s a cure for a disease, your personal dreams & visions, a new form of energy to be developed, a means to address exploitation, a path to get an organization ‘on purpose’, a way to bring true abundance to the marginalized etc., will ONLY come from those who say:
This isn’t right.
This isn’t enough.
It can be better.
I will try a new thing.
Be bold. God knows this world desperately needs courageous people.
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