Posts tagged Discovery
The ‘Art’ of Leadership
Jul 15th
Thank you for dropping by! Thursdays are Servant Hearts day. Gracious leaders around the world guest post to NorthFork’s blog, A Servant’s Heart, sharing their fabulous insights regarding the serving nature of leadership. We’re delighted you’ve joined us. Be prepared for a variety of experience!
Today, we are happy to welcome John Paul. John is first and foremost a friend. He is also an artist with a great passion for photography. You can discover for yourself the Beauty that radiates from John and his work on his site, The Jeweledway. From time to time, John embarks on photographic excursions to remote places around the world. He refers to these enlightened expeditions as VisionQuests. Do join him sometime! When he is not busy with his life’s work, you are likely to find him doing his part to make our world a better place in his professional role as an IT Strategist. For John, love is the important thing and he sees all of us, all of humanity, as an ocean—an ocean of love.
Tapping into Servant Leadership
by John Paul
In the past, as I first began thinking about the process of making photographs, I became immersed in a quest for meaning. It started with a visual exploration of discovery wherein I tried to understand what was taking place in the process of making an image. The intent was to develop a watchful eye and set of techniques that could be relied upon repeatedly during the image-making process. This effort quickly evolved into a greater grasp of other forces at hand, working in mysterious ways to contribute to a final image and my understanding of it.
Somehow, unknowns would happen or “come together” that contributed to a peak experience for me in making images that celebrated, illuminated, and inspired greater seeing and the acquisition of truth. Through these experiences and the image-making of others, I have come to see this process as a key ingredient for creating great images. Sometimes these forces seemingly take on a life of their own, separate from the photographer who becomes merely an instrument of a higher creative self.
It is as if a force or other mind has orchestrated events as such that place you as an artist or, rather, a channel for the message that is to be conveyed. Art is an ever-flowing exchange of discovery and meaning that enfolds and unfolds knowledge in meaningful relationships. This meaning is different for each viewer and yet somehow meaningful. How Art conducts this mystery in such a broad way remains a mystery. It is like the multiplicity and complexity was designed in advance.
I see servant leadership in much of the same light. If we are to expect the photographer or the artist to create and define their art, we place too great a burden upon the individual to perform and, as such, things become contrived, insincere, or ineffective. So it is, too, with performance as a leader. There is a higher guiding element that, in a sense, selects a person as a leader, the type that is followed somehow magically by the multitudes. It is so uncanny that it seems like destiny has chosen the leader who is willing to select or take hold of the commission from a higher source.
We cannot contrive leadership, force its performance, or even claim it to be our own. Leadership is something that is brought upon us in such fashion that it carries the broad support of many and relates on a multiplicity of levels. In the TED video below, the poet sees her muse on a distant horizon and takes aim at claiming her work as it passes overhead. For me, this is the leadership that is authentic and so needed in our world. One does not choose leadership – it chooses you. Are you ready to accept the challenge when leadership chooses you?
Leaders Recognize Beliefs Separate Us, Faith Brings Us Together
Sep 9th
Let me encourage you to visit Lolly Daskal’s site, Lolly Daskal: Lead from Within. Her blogs—and her lovely paintings—will enlighten and enrich your life. Her recent post, Is a Belief a Fact or a Choice, resonates deeply with my own beliefs about, well, beliefs.
From my vantage point, humanity is swimming in belief systems. Beliefs permit us to be comfortable with the unknown as a means to be secure. Many beliefs promote goodness, perhaps under different names and concepts—while others herald contempt. Most are a conditioned response—a mechanism that deceives us into overlooking observations of the self because they are so generally accepted as being of great value. This casual neglect, oddly enough, detaches us. How can it be? If we are to believe something, must it not first contain truth? Yet others do not believe. Uh-oh. And, surprise of surprises, we do not always hold a fancy to another’s truth—to their belief. What’s up with that?
If we hold something to be true and believe in it, does it not retain certain value? And, at least to us, it soon represents “fact?” Yet it does not take long for another to ask, “Why?” For them, our belief is not fact. Herein lies the conundrum: our explanation may be nothing more than a speculation. Believing our speculation is THE uniquely acceptable explanation makes it incumbent on us to refrain from questioning the veracity of the explanation, unless it’s okay to be banished from our intimate circle. Said differently, when an explanation is accepted as a belief, we are either loyal or disloyal to it at our own peril.
Two notions come to mind:
First, Wayne Dyer suggests: “What you see is evidence of what you believe. Believe it and you’ll see it.” Over the years, I have come to accept beliefs are highly dependent upon perspective and circumstance. Would we hold to our current belief structure had we been born in another part of the world? For example, isn’t it perfectly reasonable to expect a child born in a Muslim country to grow up loving Allah (God, Yahweh (Jehovah), Bhagwan, etc.) through an Islamic belief system? Of course, it is. The story is similar for children born in Shanghai, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, or Nashville. We are, to a large extent, products of our environment.
Second, our beliefs typically are an outgrowth of societal norms and culture. As Lolly points out, society places a burden upon us—a very heavy burden—to accept what consensus says is so. Consensus, carefully considered, generally takes the appearance of fact; we know, however, it does little more than offer an explanation. Explanations have the tendency to engender tension. Do you recall the last time folks fought over hard facts? What about quarrels over explanations (in America, it is easy to recall quarrels over women’s suffrage and civil rights)? But a national platform is not necessary. We see them every day. Explanations must be defended because other people have their own explanation of the same phenomena—an explanation that requires a defense, too. When our belief systems are elevated to explanations of faith, we soon find ourselves in an arduous spiral.
So, is faith and belief the same thing? It may help to ask two additional questions: What separates us? What brings us together? The answer, as I see it, is elementary. A great many things separate us and very little brings us together. Said another way, beliefs separate us and faith (not talking about religion here) brings us together.
Sorry to go so long but I want to close with an observation I share with teens trying to assimilate our different beliefs to see just how much we are the same. The VERY abbreviated version goes something like this:
Like a stack of homemade pancakes, man exists within a plane of planes: Earth (flat or otherwise), the Milky Way, a galaxy, a universe. What lies beyond is certain to nudge us out of our comfort zone and, perhaps, into a brand new belief. For example, the recent Hubble Deep Field image captured hundreds of galaxies in a single view while the scientists have come to the conclusion there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in deep space—we call it the universe. But is it really THE universe? If we could stand far enough away, would we see hundreds, if not hundreds of billions, of universes comprising, I don’t know, a mega-verse? As we take the time to learn more, our beliefs must change to coincide with our discoveries. And the only option to prevent our beliefs from being turned on their head is to stop discovering. But that is not really an option at all.
The point is, if we become comfortable with our beliefs, we begin imposing them on others. When that happens, fear replaces faith and forces us to start all over again. I wholeheartedly agree with Lolly in that we do, indeed, need to let go of strict beliefs imposed upon us. As we do, fear resides and faith moves in to bring us back together. When that happens, our world becomes better for it.
