What Defines a Leader?

Many outstanding leaders have made their mark in history by overcoming great adversity and crises. But what enabled them to achieve what many others could not?

When faced with a challenge, most people would default to the easiest choice, the path of least resistance. What would make leaders want to take the more difficult choice that comes with stress, pain, anxiety and suffering? What sets them apart from others?

Sean Kong, Chief Training Officer at Halogen Foundation, thinks it goes back to two crucial factors.

The psychology of choice and the strength of one’s conviction.

The Psychology of Choice

Sean notes that people are naturally wired to take the path of least resistance, and we usually do what feels the easiest. We rationalise our choices, which come as excuses. To put things in perspective, consider how we have differing standards of cleanliness. But given a choice, if we had to clean the room ourselves, or if we had the option to get someone else to clean it up for us, we would almost always ask someone else to clean it up for us simply because it requires little effort from us.

The same can happen for leadership, when people see something wrong but turn a blind eye to it. However, leaders stand out because unlike most others, they resist going down that path of least resistance. The stories that we are proud to tell come from making tough choices, rather than the easy ones. Leaders could have walked away from these situations and their stories would have been very different.

So what gives us the power to make those tough choices?

Volition, Passion and Courage.

Volition, also known as willpower, is defined as the purposeful striving towards a goal. It is the act of taking active steps towards a goal that is meaningful to you through regular and incremental steps, even when there may be resistance.

For something to be identified as a goal, it must have some meaning or significance for you. To work towards these goals, you would likely choose to put in time and effort to get it. For instance, if you want to run a marathon, you will go through a training regime to prepare for it. A more contextual instance would be Greta Thunberg, who wanted to speak out on environmental issues. As such, she took steps to use the UN as a platform to publicly speak out, even while subjecting herself to much scrutiny and criticism.

An important distinction to draw would be that volition is different from motivation, as motivation is the feeling of wanting to do something, but volition is the commitment to achieve something.

So, what is stopping us from having the drive to achieve our goals?

Psychologists say the lack of volition can be due to two reasons.

The first would be the lack of suitable goals. With a lack of aims and desires, you will always take the easiest path while finding excuses along the way. It may appear as if you have weak willpower, but if there is something significant to you then you will work towards it, even if you don’t feel like it.

The second reason that may hinder our ability to achieve our goals with volition is a lack of suitable ideals and standards. To have strength of volition, we first must have a meaningful goal. Without which, we will again default to the path of least resistance.

Pause and reflect: What is a meaningful goal for you?

However, even after you have identified it, it is important to recognise that just because we have a meaningful goal, it doesn’t mean we will pursue it with great intensity. How strongly you will pursue this meaningful goal depends on whether or not we are passionate, which leads to the second factor of what compels leaders to make tough decisions.

Passion, in a contemporary sense, is defined as an intense and barely controllable emotion. However, the modern meaning has lost some of its original essence. The root of passion is the Latin word ‘pati’, which means suffering, or enduring. In ancient times, people understand passion to be something that you are willing to suffer for, to the point of even dying for it. Passion is such a deep intense feeling that is born deep in the depths of our hearts.

Two key emotions can shed some light on what we are passionate about: love and hate.

In an imperfect world, where there is love, there must also be hate. If you love something, you will hate its opposite. They are two sides of the same equation. For instance, if you love life, you have to hate death.

Pause and reflect again: What does your heart long for? What does your heart break for? How willing are you to suffer for each of these causes? The strength of your “yes” is the strength of your passion.

The last factor that compels leaders to make tough decisions would be courage. When leaders do anything worthwhile, there will be difficulty, objection, obstacles, adversity and even crises. In the face of these things, it is natural to feel fearful. However, to overcome fear, we need courage. As Sean quoted, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but taking action even though you are feeling fearful.”

Courage stems from the strength of our passion. If we love something badly enough, we will overcome anything that can potentially hold us back, including our fears. Courage comes from the strength of our passions that overpowers our fears.

Consider the dilemma of a firefighter. Every fireman has two fears. The fear of losing their own life, and the fear of someone else losing theirs. Each time they dash into a dangerous situation, it’s not because they are fearless. It’s because the fear of someone else dying is greater than their own fear of dying.

The fear of someone else dying is in context of their passion for saving lives, while the fear of losing their own life is in context of the current situation. Courage is mustered when the passionate fear is greater than the situational fear. A helpful way to deal with fears is to see it in the greater context of your passion, where you would rather go through or overcome the fear than to see your “heartbreaking situation” happen.

Ultimately, courage is also a choice, an act of volition, empowered by your passion.

Take some time to reflect: What are the goals that are meaningful to you? What is an area in your life that you can turn your passion into a source of strength and courage to overcome your fears? With clarity of passion, power of volition and the courage to overcome fear, you can also achieve the impossible.

Sean Kong is the Chief Training Officer at Halogen Foundation Singapore, where he first started out as a volunteer. Today, he oversees curriculum and programme design, research on youth trends and consults with schools to help them achieve their student leadership development goals.

These tips were shared as part of the Leadership Masterclass series, held in collaboration with The Birthday Collective. You can find out more about this year’s Leadership Masterclass right here.