Leadership, Dreams and Discomfort

When doing leadership coaching I ask my clients not about vision, but about dreams. What is it that you dream about? How does that dream look like? Is it present in your life now? Who shares such dreams?

Depending on the relationship, trust and progress, I do go further and do ask about what it is that he or she wants to see written in their tombstone. Clearly this is a question that can only be good in developing leadership when the individual has gone past a few hurdles and is ready to deal with the finiteness of their own lifetime. A person at a level of development centred around an egocentric agenda could possibly be too confronted by such a burrowing question. When addressing in all realism what one wished to have written on one’s tombstone, the vision – make that the life’s dream – does surface. Often it needs some midwifery before it is ready to be communicated outside the confidentiality of a coaching situation.

One aspect of leadership is the ability to both give gestalt and communicate a personal vision that is aligned with deep-seated visions within others who may not be so fortunate in both abstraction and communication skills and faculties.

When it comes to my own experience, I know that my dreams drive me. When I loose sight of these dreams, I still exist, but it is as though I had forgotten why I exist, and merely vegetate. This vegetative state, I call bare survival. I need to return to the presence my dream to feel truly alive and to wake up in the morning without the alarm, and knowing why it it that I get up in the morning.

My vision –  dreams  – has evolved throughout my life. The earliest one that I have a recollection of was when I was in secondary school in Faro, Portugal (liceu, lycée). it was during a break between classes, then it occurred to me that the word “impossible” could be greatly improved on, and that by leaving “im” out one does have the possible. It is in my recollection the earliest realization of the limitation of language. By then my passion for language was already very present, but also the implications and power of language were clear to me. This early image – vision – has however stayed with me. I say and write image because it is an image, it is nothing that was either verbal or auditory, and it is concrete as an image in my mind’s eye. This image does not mean that just about anything is possible. It does however mean that I can question what is possible and what is not at any time and go from there. This vision does inform the rest of my being, thinking and decisions.

More recently, on the occasion of having left JMW Consultants Inc., roughly ten year ago, without much of an idea as to what would be next I formulated a statement based on a long process of working through Stephen Covey’s book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and landed on “You can count on me to unfold leadership in building the bridges between politics, business, education academia and the arts.” While that statement is quite a mouthful, it does keep me going these days.  You can count on me to unfold leadership in building the bridges between politics, business, education academia and the arts is quite a tall order, but that is along the lines of what I want to see on my tombstone, and without that more primordial vision of the possible, it would not have been formulated, much less articulated, or came to bear fruit. I see myself primarily as a bridge builder, a social architect, and my tools are not those of bricks and mortar, but words.

I have grown uncomfortable with the status of present day organisations, and the organisations themselves are uncomfortable within our own demographic and technological challenges as a society.

Is it that visions that propagate, that is, enrol others in the unfolding of their very own possibility for a meaningful and dignified life, are the kind of visions that build bridges across our areas of discomfort?

I think that there is something valid in that last question. A vision communicates when it can establish a connection to the individual’s own bridge and aspiration for change and realization of the own dreams. This will then apply within any grouping or organisation, and it will include whatever the supply chain may be in that particular circumstance.

July 2007