The 2007 Field of Dreams Speech
Leadership is, in its essence, about breaking this vicious cycle. How? Through creating a Vision for your life – a Vision of something greater for yourself and the world. Something that motivates you so deeply you are willing to work your butt off to make it happen.
The difference between leaders and those who react and release their anger on others is that while others say, ‘Don’t get mad, get even’, leaders live by the Chinese proverb: ‘He who angers me controls me.’ It’s a fundamentally different way of approaching life. Instead of converting their pain into anger, which as we’ve seen can lead to violence or other forms of abusing others, leaders convert their pain into passion.
Did you know the word passion comes from the Latin verb patire, which means ‘to suffer’? A good example is a woman I coached. She spent a large part of her childhood racked with the suffering she and her mother experienced while taking care of her father as he withered away from an incurable cancer. Can you guess what she does now? She’s a doctor. She has dedicated her career to cancer research so less families will suffer as hers did.
Think about it. What has motivated you more in your life – your desire not to suffer, or see others suffer, or your desire for happiness? Think about great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela and Gandhi. What do you think woke them up each morning? A desire for happiness, to be able to walk in the sunshine and enjoy the day, to have a delicious dinner, to go on nice vacations, or was it a relentless drive to prevent the further suffering of their families and communities because they had experienced it themselves?
How do you handle your pain? Think back to the worst suffering you have experienced in your life and you just might discover your passion. Imagine pain so extreme it would be almost unbearable, such as if your six-year old son had been abducted from a Florida department store and brutally murdered. What would you do? If you were John Walsh, you would start the television show America’s Most Wanted, put over 800 fugitives behind bars and lobby the federal government to sign into law various Missing Children’s Acts, including a national Amber Alert system to recover abducted children. In Walsh’s own words: “I’d like to be remembered as the father of a murdered child who fought back. As someone who tried to make a difference in honoring his
son’s name.”
What would you do if your mother passed away at a young age and you never felt you had the chance to express your feelings to her, and then your father sold the family piano, which was the only thing that made you feel like you could breathe, and told you your dreams were a waste of time? If you were Paul Hewson, your self-expression would become so important to you that you would sing so loudly your friends would say you were singing for the deaf, and name you after a hearing aid shop in Dublin called Bona Vox, your name would be shortened to Bono and you would become the songwriter and lead singer for the world’s most successful rock band, U2, which has won over 22 Grammy Awards, more than any other rock band in history.
While I don’t have such an illustrious story, and my singing voice causes small children to cry and pets to run away from my neighbors’ homes, a part of my personal story is that I experienced physical abuse from a step-father at a young age. Because of the feeling of being powerless in my own home, what wakes me up in the morning is to help others become powerful, to look at their challenges from various angles and overcome them.
Because of what I went through, my passion is to help people who do not have a lot of power in our society to become leaders. This has translated into two clear programs for CSL: The Leader in Youth Program for low-income youth and Transform - Certificate of Executive Nonprofit Leadership for nonprofit directors committed to social causes. As this gala is a fundraiser for the Leader in Youth Program, I will tell you a little bit about it.
[Before Tony continues, CSL’s Board member Guillermo Sohnlein of Fortivo Corporation comes to the podium to share the highlights of the upcoming Transform - Certificate of Executive Nonprofit Leadership, which takes place at George Washington University from September 24-29. For more information: http://socialleaders.org/CSL/ECPNL/ecpnl.html.]
We teach youth to become leaders so that, no matter what adversity they’re experiencing in their lives, where others see a wall they will see a door. When you have a Vision to become a doctor, to provide counseling to battered women, to develop software to help people do their work more efficiently, you create a bench, a gold standard, a reference point for all your actions. It’s this Vision that tells you when another kid comes up to you on the bus and says, “Get out of my seat,” that violence is not the answer because you would be giving up too much. You think, “I have something much greater than this.” You once again bring the Chinese proverb, ‘He who angers me controls me’ into your mind, and make a commitment with yourself to let only one thing control you from now on – your Vision for what you want to create
in your life.
