MedAchievers Ivy League Volume 1 | Page 27

THE PRIVILEGE OF LEADERSHIP “Leadership means partnership, cooperation, mentoring, and support. It does not mean dominance. Dominance is tyranny.” – Sadhguru Sadhguru: Usually, people understand leadership as a position of power. But those leaders who were truly successful and loved by people lived in a position of continuous sacrice, because a leader means your life and activity are no longer about yourself. Every thought and emotion that you generate, every action that you perform has an impact on millions of people. It is a certain privilege and a responsibility, that you can touch the lives of people around you in many ways. When I say a “leader,” I am not just talking about the leader of a nation or large group of people. From a simple housewife to a grocer to a panchayat leader to a taxi driver, anyone can be a leader because anyone who comes in contact with 10 people in a day can either impact them powerfully or let the opportunity pass. People will choose the scale of leadership according to their capabilities, but everyone is a leader in some way. If you have chosen to take at least your own destiny into your own hands, aren't you a leader? Only if you are a hobo, you are not a leader. It happened once: an American tourist was visiting the UK. A local person who was taking him around showed him an estate and said, “Here lives an aristocrat.” The American asked, “What is that?” The Englishman was surprised there could be someone who didn't know what an aristocrat was. “An aristocrat means he doesn't have to do any work. Everything comes to him one way or the other. He always has a good place somewhere. Wherever he goes he has a ringside seat and he does nothing, he lives off other people.” The American responded, “Oh, that! In America we call them hobos.” So, unless you're a hobo, in some capacity you are a leader. Once you understand you are a leader, it means either you have taken your own destiny into your hands or you have also taken the destiny of a few more lives into your hands. This is a certain responsibility. If you want to lead any group of people and want everyone to function at their best, rst you must make sure all of them fall in love with you. If you want everyone to fall in love with you, rst you must fall in love with all of them. This is not a trick—“If I fall in love with you, you will fall in love with me, then you will work better for me.” The moment you do that, no one will cooperate. If you genuinely fall in love with everyone around you, slowly everyone falls in love with you. Different people may take different amounts of time but slowly, they will give in. Once they are in love with you, they will naturally do their best. Here at Isha Foundation, we have an organization with over two million volunteers across the world, doing their best all the time. This is not because we are a spiritual organization; this can even be done to a whole nation. In any organization, if the person who stands as a leader is an inspiration to everyone, leadership will happen without uttering a word. This is one thing that we trying to bring in with our INSIGHT leadership program. We are striving to bring an inner dimension to leaders. The focus is on equipping them with the tools of inner management, so that their body, mind and energy are at a certain level of strength and balance. Empowered with insight, inspiration, inner wellbeing, integrity and humility, they will t seamlessly into any organization and shape the society and world we inhabit. KNOW ME ABOUT SADHGURU Sadhguru is a yogi and profound mystic of our times. An absolute clarity of perception places him in a unique space in not only matters spiritual but in business, environmental and international affairs, and opens a new door on all that he touches. A B O U T I N S I G H T: T H E D N A O F SUCCESS Designed by Sadhguru, this annual business leadership program brings together India's top business leaders, world class faculty and a mystic, and offers a unique blend of efcient business strategies and technologies for wellbeing. The program has been instrumental in crafting success stories for over 700 leaders so far, under the aegis of the likes of Ratan Tata, Narayana Murthy, K.V. Kamath, Dr. Ram Charan, G. M. Rao and Prof. Dipak C. Jain.