Showing Up

What are the principles of leadership?

One principle of leadership is, that you have to “show up” and be counted, just as all of you listening to this course have done. You had to take a risk, purchase this course, or attend a seminar. You had to have the desire and the passion to learn, to grow beyond your present frame of reference.

To be a leader, you also have to “show up” in your life, home and business. “Showing up” is about being present, being aware and awake. It’s about having the presence of mind, heart and soul to be doing what you came here to do in life, not just talk and theorize about it. It’s about walking your talk. It’s about thinking with your heart.

Too often people allow their fears, insecurities and scarcity consciousness to block them from opportunities presented to them everyday. Being successful involves recognizing the fields of opportunities before they manifest. This is a common trait of successful leaders.

Sharing Risk and Reward

Another principle of leadership is about sharing risks and rewards. All successful people must be willing to share both risks and rewards. It comes with the territory. If you accept the challenge of an opportunity, then you must accept both the risks and rewards. Leaders take risks with both success and failure. For what is failure except the opportunity to learn from one’s mistakes. Leaders are willing to make mistakes where others fear to fail.

Success is not the absence of mistakes or failures, but the willingness to keep going when others give up. Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before he succeeded in getting the first light bulb to work! Imagine the consequences if he had given up.

Take Risks with Others

Leaders take risks with other people. When you’re showing up as a leader and being seen and heard in a bigger way, suddenly people start acting and treating you a little differently.

They may respect or disrespect you – based on your image and communications style, based on what you may be teaching, or how seriously you may be challenging them and their belief systems. So if you want to live in the normal comfort zone, then being a leader is probably not for you.

Great Rewards in Leadership

There are also great rewards in being a leader, especially in your own life and the life of your families, communities and close associates.

You get to be who you are without compromising. You get to go places and be seen and heard. You get to touch into people’s lives that otherwise would be barred to you. You get to live the dreams most people only dream about because they are too scared, too ignorant, or too comfortable and secure.

Leadership is about excellence and contributing greatness to the emerging consciousness of the world-at-large.

Detach From Approval and Disapproval

Another principle of leadership is to detach from approval and disapproval systems and being yourself.

People may or may not like and approve of you in your leadership role. Your friends of old may not like the insecurity of having their perceptions challenged, and may even cease being your friends.

Family may not approve of your unfamiliar and unconventional ideas. And other people will be so enamored with you that they’d follow you anywhere.

You must detach yourself from approval and disapproval and do what you know is right and true regardless of what other people think. What I like to say is, as Terry Cole Whittaker said; “What other people think about me is none of my business!”

Success is the willingness to keep going when others disapprove of you. And not to be ego-fed and distracted by those who would approve of you either. Success is the willingness to stay focused on the goals and objectives and not get derailed by approval or disapproval.

What Have We Done to Our Leaders?

In modern times, we have done horrible things to our leaders. Herein lie the paradox and the risk of leadership.

Most people have expected far more of our leaders than we ever have of ourselves. We have separated ourselves from our own natural leadership and then put our leaders on pedestals – only to knock them down when they no longer please us.

We put our leaders under the microscope of social and political judgment, examining every detail of their personal lives with fascination, worshipping them like gods or celebrities, before we crucify them.

Most people cannot tolerate the mistakes of our leaders, nor do our leaders dare to confess their mistakes under the scrutiny of such judgment. In extreme cases, we have even killed our leaders when they have too strongly challenged our lies, deceptions and untruths. Look at Ghandi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, and so many more.

It’s time to take a healthy look at leadership, and to expect as much of ourselves as we do of anyone on the pedestal of leadership. True leaders don’t want followers, but want to inspire leadership in others.

In summary, some of the principles of leadership include:

1. Show up and be counted
2. Sharing risk and reward
3. Taking risks with others
4. Acknowledging the inherent risks of leadership
5. Detaching from approval and disapproval of others
6. Expecting as much from ourselves as we do of our leaders.

Get a Finger on the Trimtab

As R. Buckminster Fuller taught, a trimtab is a small lever the size of your thumb that steers huge, megaton steamships on the ocean. You could push the boat all day with thousands of people and never move the ship. But put your finger on the trimtab and it steers easily. You and I must get our thumbs on the trimtab of our lives. What effort and ease is most effective to steer our lives in the direction we’d like to go? Do you know what you want? Do we as a people, a nation and a human race remember what we really want?

Here are a few examples of trimtabs which can facilitate global, personal and interpersonal transformation:

• Transcend the Taboo of Knowing Who You Really Are.
• Educate about Seven Aspects of Freedom – Physical, Emotional, Mental, Spiritual, Economic, Legal and Political.
• Design a Sustainable Business Strategy in Free Enterprise.
• Manufacture and Produce Renewable Energy Technology to Eliminate Dependence Upon Fossil Fuels.
• Build a Global Resource Center to Coordinate Communications, Networking and Entrepreneurship.
• Design New Finance Models in Free Enterprise to Create Opportunities.
• Produce Conscious Media: Films, Podcasts and Music to Awaken Human Consciousness.
• Create a New Global Republic of, by and for the People of All Nations.

Future of Free Enterprise

Old paradigm business and finance systems based on usury, exploitation and the exponential expansion of debt are in collapse. New equity-based, free-enterprise systems are emerging. Sustainable development and true prosperity will not be achieved through top-down, centralized, state-managed socialist or fascist economies.

The future of commerce, business and banking is in the resurgence of true free-market economies based on natural laws and principles, sustainable production-oriented products, services, media and information.

Free trade under GATT and NAFTA is not free-market, but monopolistic in its inception and application. Controlled economies are all heading for bankruptcy similar to the meltdown of the Soviet Union. Continue to bury your head in the sand or step up to the plate and start a project and business in free enterprise. Become an entrepreneur, find a need and fill it.

Truly free markets allow every individual or small company, entrepreneurs, innovations and creativity to participate in the economy from the bottom-up. With the advent of the Internet as a communications and marketing tool, everyone can become a producer, small or large, in the system and take leadership in their economic lives.

When there are thousands of new and established companies and organizations willing to collaborate and exchange products, services and information, a new economic order will emerge. Then We the People can begin to live in a new paradigm reality.

Power and Significance of Communications Networking

Thirty-seven years ago after being inspired by the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog, I began networking people, projects, programs, organizations, information and media on the leading edge of social, political, economic and creative cultural change. This information was gathered and organized into a massive database for a single purpose – to build and connect the leadership of the future. The future ain’t what it used to be. The future is now!

Information seeds planted over many decades are now germinating after the turn of the new millennium. Many successive waves of change and new generations have come, left their mark and gone. Many of those great beings who came before gave us insights, wisdom and highly refined tools and processes to bring about the inevitable global and personal transformation which is coming down the track.

Crossroads of a New Paradigm

All of us alive today are on the precipice, the edge, the crossroads of a new paradigm reality emerging in consciousness planet-wide. All you have to do to participate in this global event is to open your eyes, look and see the marvelous miracles and innovations in the primary areas of food, water, air, shelter, energy, environment, technology, communications, education, health and wellness.

As the classic line in Star Trek goes, “resistance is futile!”

Instead of assembling mass resistance to keep the old speeding train from going over the cliff, a better strategy for a smooth transition is to get far enough in front of the train and lay some new track (before the train wreck of course). Look around. Old belief systems (sacred cows and taboos), power structures, obsolete technology, irrelevant political ideologies, religious fundamentalism and classic economic theory are all in collapse simultaneously. There is no way out of this mess we’ve made, only through.

Emerging Consciousness

You and I must become the change , indeed the very transformation we want to experience in our world. Take the reigns of your freedom. Take personal responsibility and reclaim internal authority over your life. Take hold of the reigns of your precious life and ride into the future. Through communications and networking, empowerment, entrepreneurship, leadership and mastery, you and I will emerge into states of consciousness only the avatars knew. This is an exhilarating journey!

Those who fail to acknowledge the profound changes occurring in our world; those who cannot see; those who will not take their heads out of the sand and those who fail to act, will be left in the dust.

Step into leadership of the future beyond your wildest imagination and harvest the fruits of your life’s purpose. Live your dreams instead of sleeping them away. This is success beyond the limited idea of material accumulation and comfort, a true prosperity consciousness of abundance.

You and I came here with a purpose. Leadership and mastery is about creating alignment with these powerful forces of change, getting connected with each other and building a foundation for the life you’ve always wanted to live -possibly creating a project or business in alignment with your life’s purpose. The choice is yours, always yours and mine.