The 2007 Field of Dreams Speech
So being a leader is taking the wheel and navigating your own ship. What does this mean? It means creating your own Vision based on what you’re passionate about. It means responding to the needs of the people who join your cause. It means only committing to what you can deliver and delivering what you commit.
For you as a busy professional, it may mean changing course and shifting into what will really drive you and enable you to inspire others to also be driven. You will never inspire until you first
are inspired.
It may mean having the courage to innovate, to speak up about what you believe is right and coming up with fresh ways of
doing things.
It may mean stopping to see where your co-workers are and what they value so you know how to present an idea in a language they’ll understand.
It may mean acknowledging the insecurity within you that keeps you working all the time and ignoring the people who really matter to you. The people who controlled the wheel when you were young and impressionable told you and showed you this is the way you should live. You were probably told over a thousand times as a child: “Don’t just sit there, do something!” Yet why didn’t anyone ever say, “Don’t just do something, sit there!”?
One of my favorite stories, which I heard from meditation practitioner Tara Brach, is of a stockbroker who comes home one night at 8:30. He’s talking on his cell-phone trying to close a large deal. His eight-year old daughter has been waiting for him to come home all day so she can share something she learned in show-and-tell that day with him.
When he enters the house she screams, “Daddy, Daddy, I want to show you something!”
He says, “Not now, I’m on the phone.”
She knows her bedtime is 9, so she keeps jumping around him because she knows she won’t be able to go to sleep unless she gets to talk with him. At 8:45, he’s switched to the land-line and is still on the phone.
She starts tugging on his trousers, saying, “Daddy, Daddy, it’ll just take a few minutes.”
Finally, he looks down at her and says, “What are you doing
down there?”
She replies, “I live down here Daddy.”
For you, taking the wheel may mean charting your own course to work-life balance.
For the youth in our program, it means not listening to anyone who tells you that you can't do anything and believing in yourself. Our students help form some of these Leadership Principles. One of my former students, Latisha Brown, helped me come up with the principle: ‘Make Peace with Disapproval’. In one session she told the class a teacher had recently told her, “I don’t like you.”
“What did you do?” another student asked. “How can you work with someone who doesn’t even like you?”
Latisha responded: “Your job is not to like me.
Your job is to teach me.”
There are two precepts to the Leader in Youth Program:
1) Leadership is a distinctive skill that youth can leverage to advance in their careers and higher education. This is absolutely imperative. Why?
- D.C. has a poverty rate higher than any state in the country.
- According to a recent study commissioned by the Gates Foundation based on 2001 DCPS and charter school data, 9 out of every 100 DCPS students are graduating college within 5 years of high school graduation. The national rate is 250% higher.
- In the city with the person with the most positional leadership in the world, there were no programs teaching low-income youth leadership as a distinctive skill they can leverage to go on to college and find meaningful careers. Until CSL’s Leader in Youth Program.
2) Leadership can be taught. An example is our Leadership Principle 'Be a Clock-Builder, Not a Time-Teller', derived from Jim Collins’ book Built to Last. Leadership is much less about being a front-stage star than a back-stage architect. It’s less about being charismatic and much more about being systematic. Ernest Shackleton is a great example of that.
Based on these two precepts, the Leader in Youth is a program to help young people discover the Leader in Youth.
As we finish up our evening’s ceremony, I want to ask you to think one last time about leadership. It’s only possible to lead if you’re leading toward a destination.
I can’t fully explain what the destination looks like that we should be moving toward as we teach leadership to youth and create a stronger civic society – which are the two main goals of CSL. I can say, however, that it should be a peaceful society where the United States – our world’s superpower – lives in harmony and partnership with other nations. The strongest kid on the playground must not be a bully, but a ‘Viking with a mother’s heart’, a peacemaker and peacekeeper, a fair and equitable and inclusive partner to all.
The 60’s saying reminds, us, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” So the only way we’ll ever arrive is to practice peace right now in the only moment that exists – the present moment. When I hear people talk about peace in the future, I can’t help thinking “What future is that?” You will never in your life experience a future moment. When you get there, it will still be the present.
