Thomas J. West Music

Today's quote came my way via this article. He makes many good points that I totally agree with, and the quote at the end of the article sums it up nicely:

A leader is someone who is willing to own not just the result, but the process.

The buzz word of the last two years has been change. As we move into the brave new world of transparency that the internet has helped usher in, there are many institutions in our society that need to give up old behaviors and adopt new ones. The system is broken is another commonly uttered phrase lately - it is the cry of the complainer who is not willing to actually do the work necessary and take the hit personally to usher in real change. I wrote a previous article on this subject here.

Change is difficult for us because change means redefining our self-image. Everything in our perception is categorized and sorted by the conscious, logical mind in ways that help us define its meaning to the mental image of "me". How does, for example, the slaying of peaceful Amazon rainforest protestors in Brazil by hitmen hired by greedy logging companies define you as a person? It is a story you can point to and judge, perhaps with internal dialogue like "Murder is horrible. The rainforest is important to the whole planet. Greed is bad." Those judgements help define how those events relate to your own definition of who you are and what kind of person you want to be.

When it's time for true change, it's time to begin by being willing to redefine who we are as individuals first. That is why a leader sets a goal and then goes through the process of change until the goal is reached, or the goal is altered.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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