Posterus Vita

 

Posterus Vita

What an inspiring course to have taken, to be able to learn and live the four pillars of Jesuit Heroic Leadership!

I love it when I can apply what I learned in class to real life. If you remember back to our 500 class, I got so excited when we learned about transformational leadership because I saw how successful and applicable it was, this is the same. I’ve been telling everyone I talk to about Gonzaga about these four pillars.

For me, living these four pillars falls into the same category of spiritual disciplines, and, for me, that means these have life changing truths in them. These are not just another leadership philosophy or theory, they are TRUTH, that has proven itself in its 400 plus year of longevity. But, the question is, how can I put this into life practice, right? I already have.

One of the people I talked to about this class was my Pastor, we were talking on our way out to Coeur d’Alene for our weekly meeting at True North Group, and he was telling me about how he was absolutely drained because the day before he was on the phone all day until midnight putting fires out for members of the church and helping them through the same issues he had helped them though many times before.

I started taking him though the four pillars and showing him how he needed to start applying these principles to his life and how we needed to teach the congregation to do it too. I started out with self-awareness and how he needs to start being self aware of himself first, so he can decide when it’s good and appropriate to help others. At the time of our conversation, I wasn’t completely sure how to explain ingenuity, but reflecting back, I’d say finding appropriate ways to help people would be a form of ingenuity. Next we talked about love and we probably spent the most time on this. My Pastor has a heart of gold and truly loves people, unfortunately, that caring love for people is often taken advantage of. I told him he first needed to love himself and his family, so that he doesn’t allow people to take advantage of him.

Let me explain, he is wired as a cooperator and helper, and when cooperators get over extended and burned out, they have a tendency to become passive-aggressive; I told him his two little girls didn’t deserve to have their daddy become passive aggressive! So, he needed to love himself and then to love others. In the process of loving others, we talked about what that might mean, loving someone enough to let them go. Some times when we try to help people, we are actually enabling their wrong behavior that got them into the mess they want help with. It doesn’t do them any good or help them grow to enable them, so if they really don’t want to change, as evident by the repeated need for help, they loving thing to do is to let them go.

Finally we talked about how when people want to change, then you can be heroic, and encourage them to be live a heroic live themselves. We didn’t leave the conversation there, he asked me to share what I had learned about heroic leadership to our congregation. I shared on how it was time for a change and the status quo didn’t work, and had to change for the sake of our Pastor and church.

I talked first about what it meant to be self-aware and how the Jesuits taught to take a few minutes twice a day to reflect back, clear the mind and ask “Where did I see God today.” We even did this exercise together as a group, I asked everyone to close their eyes and only think of Jesus; I told them “if you have to paint the word Jesus across your forehead to focus, do it!” It was really interesting hearing peoples responses to this exercise, one lady who was getting married the following weekend, told me how hard it was not to think of the wedding during that 60 second exercise and really made her reflect on her priorities and become more self-aware, that was awesome!

Next I talked about love, and how God loves us enough to let us make our own decisions but will never force us to change. He is always there ready to help us though the hard times when we are truly ready to change directions. Then I said that was how we were going to start to operate, we cannot keep asking for help time and time again, but not be willing to make the needed changes. When we keep asking for help and pouring our problems on someone else, but are not willing to change, we are merely vomiting our trash onto someone else, you have no respect for people or things you vomit on, and in our case it was our Pastor, and that was going to change. We had to be a people who loved ourselves and loved others and respected them too.

I look forward to learning more about this Jesuit discipline and finding ways to apply this all in my life and showing others how to do it as well. As I grow in my leadership, I really want to learn ways to help people live their purpose and live a better life. I truly believe this will be one of those large tools I keep readily available in my tool bad of things I’ve learned here at Gonzaga.