The Leaders That Have Inspired Me and Why
“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you look back at your life, there are certainly people who have inspired you, made an impression on you, a mark that will last a lifetime and beyond. You may forget what they said or what they did, but you will not forget how they made you feel. In moments of fragility, moments when you’ve stopped believing in yourself, moments of transition, they’ve entered the scene and said something or done something that has given you hope, hope in yourself, hope in life, hope in others.
When I look back at my life, several people have inspired me. All at the right time. Somebody who was inspirational and had an impact on me when I was 18 is ten years later not as inspirational. So I’ve come to believe that different people and leaders inspire and have an impact in different phases of life. For me at least, I search for community and I search to learn from others, and depending on my life situation that will look quite different in different seasons.
When I was in high school, I had several really good teachers who inspired me. It was not so much what they taught but how they taught. Their love for their subject and their ability to connect with students at our level was amazing. They saw me in the classroom and encouraged me to learn more and continue to grow.
Without running through every encounter I’ve had with leaders both in person and via some kind of medium (book, podcast, or the retelling of their story) let me tell you some of the stories of the leaders that have inspired me and why.
When I wrote my senior thesis in high school (yes, there’s such a thing in Sweden), I had a teacher in the Social Sciences who had a Ph.D. in Sociology who was my advisor. Unlike other teachers, you could tell that he was a Ph.D. He had a rougher style when he was teaching. More focused on the subject matter than on the how of teaching. His dissertation was on the apartheid system in South Africa and he loved talking about Nelson Mandela. My thesis was about a conflict in an ethnic group from the Middle East who had settled in Sweden in the ’70s. He saw reason to ask questions about the conflict and whether there was a leader or several leaders who could facilitate the conflict. For him, and later on for me as well, Nelson Mandela’s leadership affected me deeply.
I learned from him that Nelson Mandela’s father was a tribal leader. Nelson used to go with his father to the meetings when the tribal leaders would meet. The lesson that left an impression on him was that his father was the last one to speak. Whenever discussing an issue, his father would listen with curiosity and intensity to what the other tribal leaders had to say. So leaders speak last was the take away from his youthful lessons of leadership from his father.
The effect that this has is that you get the sense of everybody in your community. If you also treat them with respect and follow up with questions I believe that this strategy creates a community. This type of leadership was needed in South Africa, at least it was the one that Mandela applied.
There was no ”other” for him. Rather, he listened to them. In the process of listening, truly listening to one another, the ”other” fades into oblivion. The other becomes part of your community. And once you have a community you can shift the conversation to how to create a future that is bright for a diverse population. In the South African context, as I understand it, it was about moving beyond racial inequalities and being able to live next to one another despite the dark history.
A healthy future cannot be built on inequality, systemic racism, hurt, rape and murder. It has to be built on a healthy community. So for me, I learned from Mandela that speaking last was more about simply speaking last. Listening with presence and curiosity was a cornerstone of building a healthy community.
After graduation from high school, I went to social work school at Örebro University in Sweden. The program for becoming a social worker in Sweden includes fieldwork. They had a program where you could do your fieldwork in India in the so-called Swindia (Sweden+India) Project.
For a whole semester, together with other students from Swedish universities, we would visit and study how social work was done in various contexts. Local leaders and social workers lived with one foot in hell and worked with the lowliest in the Indian society. The experience was too full to describe in one shot, yet in the people I met, and in the visits we made the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi was felt and seen.
His legacy was seen everywhere. For once, we visited one of India’s biggest prisons in Pune, Maharashtra. In that very prison, Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru had been imprisoned. The founders of the Indian republic. Their prison cells had been restored and kept as a museum part of the prison for visitors to see. This was among the first weeks in India. Thereafter we saw his house in Mumbai and saw the letter that he had written to Hitler during WWII and visited many other places that had been founded on the inspiration of Gandhi. Gandhi’s soul was clearly still part of the Indian self-awareness and ideal.
He was famous for his devotion to non-violence and for walking the talk. This probably goes for both Mandela and Gandhi. Both of them were truly conscientious leaders. They led by example. Gandhi’s recurring fasting shows not only a person who has immense discipline and persistence and spiritual strength. It also shows a person who leads by example, a person who is the change that he wanted to see in the world. Among the memorable quotes by Gandhi are:
”Be the change you want to see in the world”
and
”In a gentle way, you can shake the world.”
For Gandhi happiness was achievable when a person has integrity, that is, when ”what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.” A very different understanding of happiness than the hedonistic understandings of happiness in western culture today: happiness is achievable through having more, enjoying more, making more money, etc. Consuming.
Another thing that was characteristic of Gandhi’s appearance and leadership was his hope. Again, I think this applies to Mandela as well. Even in the face of great oppression and discrimination, Gandhi is famous for having said:
”You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”
Being able to keep hope and a positive outlook in the face of personal adversity, organizational turmoil is one of the greatest challenges one could face in life. I believe that there are practices one could employ to keep up this hope regardless of your previous experience, traumas, and genetic predisposition.
For me, that’s where Thich Nhat Hahn, one of the great Buddhist teachers of our times, comes in.
Thich Nhat Hahn is considered to be one of the most influential teachers of Buddhism in the west. If there is anything he was great at expressing and living was the importance of being in the present moment. In the present moment, there is peace. Peace is not something that is found somewhere else, rather it is found here. Our lack of peace is often accompanied by an imagined future that we cannot control, a memory of the past that we cannot change, or other circumstances in ourselves or the world that we truly have no control over. It is the attempt at controlling that leads to suffering.
When you lose hope it is usually in the face of adversity, external circumstances that kill your hope. You focus on what is wrong and the suffering in the world. Buddhism starts with the idea that there is dukkha. There is suffering in the world. But that is not a cause for losing hope. Instead, with Gandhi we could say, let’s be the change we want in the world.
Thich Nhat Hahn is so bold to claim that ”each moment is a chance for us to make peace with the world, to make peace possible for the world, to make happiness possible for the world.”
That is a bold statement. I don’t believe that his or Gandhi’s starting point is to avoid suffering. On the contrary, their insight is that there is no way to avoid suffering. But despite the suffering in the world and ourselves, there is a way out. There is another side to the coin. What is, is. Who we are and what we are, we can work with.
Takeaway
Who has inspired you in your life and why? Leave a comment and share. I’d love to learn about more inspirational leaders.
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