Leadership, your owned way of being

Ask a builder how they got here, and listen for who led. I am a plumber because my father was a plumber. I went into the family business. I became a doctor because my parents said art would never pay. Years later the person is unhappy and unfulfilled, and the reason is simple. They are living someone else's life. Someone else was at cause.

Session four is about the other half of the equation. Your tribe is half of what determines whether you live your best life. Your leadership is the other half, and I mean something by that word that you may not have heard before.

You are the nucleus

At the center of your tribe is you. Always. You are never adjacent to it or off to one side. The people, places, and things of your tribe revolve around you in five circles, and as the nucleus, you are the tribal leader. In the book I am about to publish, Your Tribe, I say it as plainly as I can:

The day you were born a tribal leader was born.

No one can hold that position for you, and you cannot resign it. You can only do it awake or asleep. So I want to be intensely intentional about one word. I define leadership as your owned way of being. O-W-N-E-D. You own it. You are responsible for it and you account for it, whether you do it consciously or it is done for you unconsciously. Life will account for your leadership either way. You will attract or repel based on it.

What I do not want you to hear is follower, or audience, or team. I want you to hear you, at the center of your tribe, fully accountable and fully responsible for what happens now and next. Even when life happens. Even when something tragic or something beautiful arrives. You are still responsible for who and how you are, regardless.

Your tribe is a mirror

Here is the part that lands hardest. Your tribe is a reflection of your leadership. Who and how you are is attracting or repelling, maintaining and sustaining, or allowing and tolerating. It does not matter who and how someone else is, because you still have choice.

There is only room for one leader in one mind. You either have the steering wheel, consciously choosing and accepting, or you have handed it to someone else and become the victim of their effect. Your tribe is more about you than about anyone else in it.

Image before essence

What I see more often than not is a person who networks, builds an audience, and scales chaos. You can do it by sheer will, with the right marketing, with AI, by convincing people you have something to say. Then we see them in the news, or in the quiet cases we just see them incongruent. Most scenarios of so-called leadership build image before essence. The outside does not come close to matching the inside, and it is a house built on sand. It will crumble.

So the question in our own leadership becomes: what principles, what values, what firm foundation will I operate by? And then, right or wrong in anyone else's opinion, to be yourself unapologetically. Not to carelessly offend others, but to no longer carelessly offend yourself. You offend yourself when your image far outpaces your essence, because you can no longer get a real read on who you are.

Leadership is not management

I do not believe leadership is about causing people to follow you. I believe leadership is being the best version of yourself unapologetically, and, consequently, people may be influenced, may come along, may be on your team. The act of interacting with them is what most of the world calls leadership. It is actually management and facilitation: the organizing of effort and energy. It has its place. It is not leadership. Leadership is one hundred percent and only about you. In the book, the whole chapter reduces to one sentence:

Lead yourself well and inspire others to lead themselves well.

Imagine your life surrounded by leaders leading themselves well. A leader inspiring followers will be exhausted until they burn out. A leader inspiring leaders to inspire leaders can build something that holds.

At cause, not at effect

Everything above depends on one capacity. When someone does something to you, they are at cause and you are at effect. Why not simply: they are doing it? The dog barks. The cat meows. The cat is not meowing at you. If I hand you my phone without a word and you take it, I will ask: did you need my phone? Just because I handed it to you does not mean you have to receive it. That is leadership. The choice to stay at cause and not become the victim of someone or something else.

Who is leading when it is alcohol? When it is the death scroll? Is it the platform's fault that you are addicted? If you believe so, you will never change it. I do not excuse the algorithms. But I am the leader of my life. I am the one who addicts myself to things. Things do not addict me to them. You are welcome to apologize to me, and welcome to have remorse, but never think you are in charge of my feelings. I am. That is hard, I have not mastered it, and I am practicing it, and it starts with speaking clear language.

A participant said she can finally tell someone close to her, gently, what she needs. I love that, because humans hurt humans, and as someone leading yourself well you should be conscious of how you could hurt somebody, because that part you can control. Where we have fallen down as a society is that we have become the victim of effect of everyone else's cause. I am hurt because of the economy, the president, my circumstances, my parents. It is endless until you start to lead yourself well and own your life.

Reading the ledger

Now the exercise, and it is the one the whole conversation has been building toward. Take a sheet of paper and draw five columns. You are not designing your tribe. You are reading it. You are checking the score.

Column one, the Inner Circle: the five people you spend the majority of your time with. Not who you like, not who you are related to. With no bias, the five who get the most of your time, because what you are reading is your own allocation.

Column two, Relationship: only the people who are reciprocal with you. Nobody gets a free pass. Who is really for you, and you for them?

Column three, Connection: how far your voice carries. People outside of your relationships who hear you, listen, and would act on what you say. If you were moving tomorrow, who would show up? A person does not occupy two circles at once.

Column four, Intention: who are you currently nurturing with follow-up and follow-through, but do not yet have influence with? If this column is small, your third column will be small.

Column five, Ping: your frequent and continual interactions that are none of the above. The coffee you accepted, the call you said yes to, the barbecue you did not want to attend. Often you can see your resources leaking here. Sometimes that is as it should be. Sometimes it is bad stewardship.

Then contemplate the distinctions. Why is connection one way and not both ways? Because when it is both ways it has become relationship. Why is intention not the same as connection? Because it is connection that has not happened yet and requires activity. As you read more accurately, insights come. Oh, now I know why I have been struggling to do that thing. I have been deceiving myself about what my tribe really looks like. Or I have undervalued it.

The builder's question

Align with what is for you. Not what you want; what is for you. Is a big corporation for you? A small business, solopreneurship, a book? No one can tell you. Only you can find your way to align with it, and whenever you try to do something that is not for you, it will ultimately fail, because only the things that are for you are for you.

So read your ledger this week, and then answer one question honestly. Who is leading your life, and what would change in your build if it were you?