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 sacrice,
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 efcient
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.