The Leader Is In You

Joel Bravette
3 min readNov 20, 2023

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“It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

Emiliano Zapata

An aerial view of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City on Oct. 11, 2023 (Yahya Hassouna | AFP | Getty Images)

There is no let up in global affairs.

No matter which way you look at it, major shifts are happening, accepted narratives are being derailed and war is being waged on emotional, spiritual and psychological levels in tandem with military forces.

That apparently ‘serious’ institutions have even given credence to a term like ‘wokeism’, and now centre it in their critique of society, is the loudest canary in the coalmine of holistic, authentic human development.

The term, in and of itself, is a bastardisation of the concept of being ‘woke’ which is, as literally as it sounds, the opposite of being asleep. The biggest gripe that the ruling classes have with the rest of humanity is that we are no longer sleeping through our subjugation and are daring to wake up and ask questions.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

The ‘accepted wisdom’ is that we continue to be corporate debt slaves and offer up our children as sacrifice to land-owning, private jet-travelling, humanity-eroding sociopaths who gaslight us by telling the rest of us that our relatively small existences are the reason for all the planet’s problems and use their client technology and media services to convince us that we are bad people in need of tightening our belts whilst we watch our lecturers live in luxurious largesse.

Even at a secondary school level, we are able to critically analyse these behaviours in mediaeval monarchies and earlier iterations of the church with horror and yet we still serve these same institutions dutifully and wholly today. Why would these architects of terror ever change their blueprints when the foundations of their old buildings still stand so strong today?

Charles Windsor sits as he receives The St Edward’s Crown during the coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey, in London, May 6, 2023 (Jonathan Brady/POOL via AP)

The idea of us ‘waking up’ shakes those foundations to the core.

Everything the ruling classes have built is on our sleeping backs and you can never know sovereignty whilst unconscious.

The challenge, the mission, the call is there for all of us.

Waking up has been weaponised to make you believe it is better to stay unconscious but in your heart and soul you know this is counterintuitive. You may be breathing, eating, working, sleeping.. but are you alive?

The daily commute to (more often) Bullshit Jobs

Leadership is in your DNA awaiting activation.

There is a wild you, a primal you, that follows its own accord and not the diktats of a diseased system. There is a version of you that seeks fulfilment, purpose, joy and love with no barrier or boundary.

There is an opportunity, in the dearth of leadership that we are witnessing, to take back control at an individual level, to ignore the manipulatively distracting noise and truly self actualise. Once we take up that baton, we also become lightning rods for our families, friends and communities, leaders by example, inspiration for others to activate and actualise.

Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.

Are you ready?

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

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Joel Bravette

philosopher | innovator | speaker | entrepreneur | vegan | empath