Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up

by Jerry Colonna

My work isn’t to save anyone from the heartbreak of everyday—not my clients, not my children, not my friends, not my loves. If I were I to manage to pull it off, I would end up standing in the way of their finding equanimity. My work is to bear witness to the growth of those whom I love and care for. My work is to stand shoulder to shoulder, as when two men sat on a rooftop and found their way to the love, safety, belonging, and equanimity of brokenhearted warriors.

Taking your seat leads to equanimity. Taking your seat means defining your life. Acknowledging that which you’ve come to regret while seeing the possibilities in all that’s before you. Seat taken, you get to define your leadership and your life. Or, I suppose, your life in this moment, for the process of becoming doesn’t ever end. It’s always unfolding.

better leaders are better humans and better humans are better leaders. Leadership lessons, then, are, at their core, lessons in humanity.

In fact, forget focusing on the easy or hard; learn to distinguish between the complicated and the simple.

When we fail to grow, we hold back others, and we warp and twist the organizations we seek to serve. We turn the work of others into the work of covering up our failings, plugging the holes in our chests, and living out the commands of the ghosts in our machines. What makes all of life complicated, and not just hard, is this unwillingness to do the work that’s ours to do; our unwillingness to live the examined life.

When leaders fail to look at themselves, they turn their inner turmoil and very human contradictions outward. Further, unable to face their fears, they mask the anxiety with aggression. As my friend and mentor Parker Palmer, teaches, “Violence is what we do when we don’t know what to do with our suffering.” Violence to our planet, violence to our communities, and violence to ourselves are what we do when we refuse to look inward and work with the heartbreak of the everyday.

This being so, so what? Things being as they are, what will you do about it?

one of the hallmarks of mental health is the ability to hold conflicting feelings.

Contradiction and ambivalence, then, are not further evidence of our failings. We so fear being labeled hypocrites that we cast about for masks, lest people see our ambivalence as weakness. Just as we, as adult humans, can both love and hate, we, as human leaders, can be both terrified and excited by the future.

Leading and living in this unsheltered way invite us to take our seats as the most caring, most calm voice in the room—in our relationships, our families, our companies, and our communities.

three challenging and yet powerfully liberating questions: What am I not saying that needs to be said? What am I saying (in words or deeds) that’s not being heard? What’s being said that I’m not hearing?

How would I act were I to remember who I am? What choices would I make, what actions would I take, if I regularly said the things that needed to be said? Who would I become were I to be fully, completely, and wholly heard? What is it that I wish the people in my life understood about me? Who would I be without the myths I’ve told about myself; the stories that took hold when I was yearning to feel love, safety, and belonging?