Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up

by Jerry Colonna

The goal, then, is to help you listen to the stories of your heart so that, in the end, you can know the why of your leadership journey and become the adult, the full human you were meant to be.

Lead from the place of your truest self. Do so not merely for yourself but for those who love and entrust their careers to you.

Learning to lead ourselves is hard because in the pursuit of love, safety, and belonging, we lose sight of our basic goodness and twist ourselves into what we think others want us to be. We move away from the source of our strengths—our core beliefs, the values we hold dear, the hard-earned wisdom of life—and toward an imagined playbook listing the right way to be.

The magic, the alchemy, occurs when what we do mixes with who we are and is cooked by the heat of what we believe.

A disciple asks the rabbi: “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The Rabbi answers: “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So, we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”

The warrior stance creates the conditions in which our inner and outer begin to dance together. The warrior stance allows us to say, “Here I am, mess and all, do with me what you will.”

Brene Brown frames this a courage through vulnerability

“If you bring forth what is in you, what is in you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is in you, what is in you will destroy you.”

Hello to humans who occupy the fullness—the glory and the mess—of their lives. Hello to broken-open-hearted warriors. Hello to the leaders this broken world needs most. Hello to being the leader you were born to be. Hello to warriors with broken-open hearts.

How can I lead with the dignity, courage, and grace that are my birthright?

Let Your Life Speak showed me that I was not speaking to, about, or from my life but the life of another.

When Things Fall Apart helped me see that things are always falling apart; always. To expect otherwise is to invite suffering. Pema taught me that we must lean into the suffering and befriend it. Doing that requires just one thing: the courage to be still.

Slow down. Stand still. Breathe. Let the forest find you. Then you can begin to ask yourself the hardest questions: Who am I? What do I believe about the world? What do success and failure mean to me (and not to everyone else)? What kind of adult do I want to be? And, most helpful, how have I been complicit in creating the conditions in my life that I say I don’t want?

When you learn to stand still in lost and empty times, then the forest can find you and, what’s more, you can find yourself.

In what ways do I deplete myself and run myself into the ground?

What makes the Other irrational? Sometimes it’s because they’re downright crazy; they are dealing with extreme disorders of the mind. But more often it’s simply because the rules they live by, the ghosts in their machines, are simply . . . different.

If, as Jean-Paul Sartre observed, hell really is other people, then the truest hell is seeing ourselves in that irrational, distorting mirror.

The truest guide isn’t the mind of a guru but your broken, scared and scarred, lonely heart.

Dear Professor Campbell, yes, indeed, the pursuit of purpose is really a cover for the pursuit of a feeling, aliveness. But aliveness can come about only after integrating even the most shameful parts of ourselves—even the stories of our misdeeds, mistakes, and missteps. Integrating those and learning to forgive oneself.

Aliveness comes from living a life of personal integrity in which our outer actions match our inner values, beliefs, wishes, and dreams.

The drama of being human is great and complicated. The pathless path is pockmarked with pain and suffering. But seen from the vantage point that all steps are purposeful, all of it becomes worthwhile—a glorious, life-giving retort to those who would question our worthiness and lovability.

The Buddha taught that because we are born human, we are inherently, basically good. Far from being lazy slackers, we are born with wishes, dreams, and the desire to live in tribes with love, safety, and belonging.

When we’re brave enough to admit our fears, uncertainties, and doubts, we open the gift box.

loving the Crow release us from the lacerations of guilt and shame and allow the warriors within to claim their seat. Love the Crow and grow.

Crow is the Voice in your head

Our ability to love and be loved, to feel safe and that we belong is challenged daily by the everyday-ness of heartbreak and struggle.

True grit, the capacity to stick with something to the end, stems from knowing oneself well enough to be able to forgive oneself.

The world doesn’t really want to harm us at all. It may wish to shape us, to change us into something other than who we were born to be. It will give us facile playbooks on how to be a leader. It’ll give us subtle and gross signs that we are not what it needs us to be. But it isn’t out to eat us. It merely wants from us the ability to fill the hole in its chest.

each of us, our colleagues, our lovers, our friends all want love, safety, and belonging. They merely, unconsciously, see in us the potential to meet that need.

Yet we are more than the ghosts in our machines. We can stand still, power down, reboot the systems, and disrupt the programing. We need to have the courage to be truthful and break through our delusions and accept the “this being so” of life.

the wisdom of knowing that the act of becoming a good man is more important than arriving at that place. With that, I’ve begun mastering the art of growing up.

For the patterns we developed to keep ourselves from feeling suffering and the pain of broken hearts are what hold each of us back from being our most adult selves, the best leaders possible.

John O’Donohue reminds us, is an essential element of adult leadership. “When someone fails or disappoints you,” he writes, “May the graciousness with which you engage / Be their stairway to renewal and refinement.”

if I’ve managed to convince you that better humans make better leaders, then your open, honest questions are simple: “What is my work to do to become a better human?” “What kind of leader am I?” And, finally, “What kind of adult am I meant to be?”

For to live well, notes my friend Pádraig, “is to see wisely and to see wisely is to tell stories.”