![]() ![]() Most leaders struggle to find even a little time for quiet space, moments of reflection, or the spiritual disciplines that take our lives to deeper places. Both external demands and lack of time are key factors here. It took jail for Mandela to force the journey to the interior life and define his success by what he could accomplish internally. Because exteriority is so dominant for leaders, their interiority can be hard to find. Leaders should indeed create external consequences but without being defined by them. Ask yourself if the candidates you are voting for show more than external results, but also what guides their leadership - what is inside them. The degeneration into “spinning” what leaders say and do is most painfully evident in an election season like this one. And that easily deteriorates into deciding what you think by what others think or want from you - how their perceptions define your self-projection. That’s natural for leading in the public sphere, but it can lead to defining yourself entirely by the outward life - what you think and what people think of you - to the great and dangerous neglect of the inward life. Leaders’ lives are dominated by exteriority - both in putting yourself and your ideas out there and by the feedback you get in return. ![]() Leaders are often being told to “be who they need you to be,” and seldom are they invited to go deeper into themselves.Įxternal accomplishments. That is such different advice from what our candidates and other leaders get from their advisors and pollsters and boards of directors who want them to know their audience, their constituency, their potential voters or consumers - but not so much themselves. Let’s reflect on that quote, both personally as leaders in the faith, and politically as we confront a very depressing election. People tend to measure themselves by external accomplishments, but jail allows a person to focus on internal ones, such as honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, generosity and an absence of variety. “The cell is an ideal place to know yourself. ![]() I think his words are a good reflection for us as we choose our elected leaders next week: It’s about how “the cell” drove him much deeper into his interior life. I found this quote by Mandela when I visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg on my last day in South Africa. How could such a small place so change the world? Visiting Mandela’s jail cell on Robben Island was the most emotional moment of my visit to South Africa this past summer. I believe that Nelson Mandela was the greatest political leader of the 20 th century - because of his 27 years of spiritual formation in prison. ![]()
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