On leadership

The most important thing for a leader is to not be overly controlling and manipulative. The core of being a positive leader is to allow all of your followers their full reign of creativity and intelligence. You need to interact with them as living and changing organisms, and not merely view them from a templated abstraction about who they are.  If you only see them objectified through their various labels, such as “followers”, and you try and control them thusly, you will only succeed in snuffing out their fun and vibrancy and exhausting a lot of energy on your part.

There are many leaders, some of them are energetically dead and some are energetically alive. The energetically dead people tend to be aggressive or unbalanced leaders. They control the group from a position of authority that is fueled by a feeling of strength derived from tension. An energetically alive leader uses creativity and natural love to fuel his/her interactions. He/she does not need to hold up a strong ego to do battles for him/her, but simply interacts with everybody head on, completely relaxed.

Consider a tai chi form, which is a long sequence of precise movements. Many people think their way through the form. They guide their arms and legs into position through their ideas, concepts and principles they have mentally scribed as Law for their actions. This is a poor leadership of the body, because the body parts remain dead and tense while the mind simply guides them into the correct mold. The good practitioner knows not to interfere with or manipulate his/her body’s movements. The intelligence of the body has been strengthened through the practice of tai chi and each body part “knows” what to do on its own. The mind continues to analyze, but this analyzation no longer interferes with the aliveness of the body. This is a good leadership of the mind, because it fulfills its role but maintains respect for the conscious freedom of each of its “subjects.”

Consider how a snake moves its body. Its consciousness is distributed throughout its body, so that every body part can effortlessly move in coordination with every other part. This gives the animal incredible vibrancy. While a leader must be good at guiding his group pragmatically, safely and strategically, they must also have a vibrancy of aliveness so that a knowledgeable and clever mind does not overshadow his/her direct experience of his “possy”. Thus, the integration of this tai chi  ch’uan principle can directly improve the internal balance of a leader- enhancing his leadership skills and his ability to comfortably connect to his crew.