Live a whole life

Leadership is only one part of our complicated lives.

You are a leader, or you want to be a leader. I too want you to be a leader: we need more people like you.

But even the most successful are not solely leaders - they are many other things beside.

To succeed as a leader you must focus on the rest of your life as well. Leadership is only one part of our complicated lives. One minute you are in charge of your team and their careers, the next you are running after your children, ensuring one isn’t looking homeless and another is eating their vegetables. Where is all your leadership drama now?

Parents know this feeling very well. You come home from a day of virtuous striving and you are just mum or dad to your children. Parents or not, leaders need other lives.

To succeed you need to take care of the rest of you.

The different parts of our lives are like puzzle pieces both interconnected and unique. It is only when all the pieces are fitted together that we are whole. You can’t consider yourself only as a leader - partly because it’s not true, but mostly because you’ll fail if you don’t fill in the other pieces. You can’t be a great leader without balancing and building other parts of your life.

Perhaps it’s too hard for you to be vulnerable while leading, so go find somewhere else that it isn’t so hard. Go learn something you are bad at. Go be humbled by people whose achievements dwarf your won. Go scream at a football match. Learn a language. Write poetry. Go and lecture on a subject you know nothing about. Read. Walk. Create. Cook. Camp. Play. Laugh. Use other parts of your brain.

This isn’t a suggestion. It is an injunction. You can’t lead well by only working on leading. All of us are multiple people and you need places for those other people to live and breathe, independent of each other.

Nobody can tell you how to nurture the ‘other yous’ - the bits that aren’t the leader but trust me when I say it matters and that you must.

The leader in you can only thrive if the other yous are given a chance as well.

Love and Light

DAO.