The one time I agreed with Kanye.
I’m the youngest of seven children. By the third child, I’m positive that my parents left us to fend for ourselves, in the most loving way of course. I grew up surrounded by so many people, I don’t remember ever being alone, but I do remember having enough freedom to create my own little bubble, watching, listening, observing.
What my two parents and six siblings may not have known, is that for every advice, lesson, reprimand, or acknowledgment they each had for me at different times, there were seven other versions. Most similar in their essence, some opposite and all delivered differently.
I did not know it as a child, but I grew up surrounded by a tremendous amount of data. From the behaviours of my immediate family including a growing number of nieces and nephews, and a larger extended family, to our neighbours, friends, teachers, mentors and later, countries, languages and cultures, I had a front row seat to varying degrees of information. Which can be confusing and eventually guided me inward.
I learned a most useful skill at a very young age, the skill of observing.
Observing helps us collect data, gain different perspectives, interpret information and see patterns. Observing gets us to choose the bits and pieces that make sense to us as we begin to test out behaviours and implement ideas that help us design the life we want.
I wish I could have articulated it this easily when I was growing up to relieve feelings of isolation and confusion. But what I now know is that observing gradually puts us in the leadership position of our own lives. We get to decide based on evidence that we’ve interpreted, at various stages of our lives, who we want to be. We learn to rely on our own intelligence, not discount our own resources, or how we feel. We learn to grow our relationship with ourselves.
So when Kanye West tweeted: “The term followers should be changed to observers. We need to follow our spirit,” I agreed.
We observe others. We lead ourselves.
We all have a powerful inner resource that can serve as the benchmark to all the differing data collected in observing people, situations, ideologies and behaviours. That is the resource to cultivate and strengthen, but we tend to forget about it as we grow older, thinking that by following external resources, we are better equipped to “see “ the way: the family resource, the teachers resource, the friends resource, the books resource, the idols resource, the religion resource, the career resource, the social resource, the life partner resource, the kids resource, the any other resource but our inner resource.
We can observe and learn from these wonderful resources without discounting ours. That, is a position of personal leadership.
