The Poetry of Leadership: Regaining Vision
There are days as a business leader when you will tire, and your vision will fade. As sure as you will find your way, you will lose it. At least once, or twice, or dozens of time. This is part of your growth as a leader. Good leaders fail and fall often. This is how you learn. This is how you stay humble.
When the darkness seeps in, it disorients. Challenges with clients, struggles with partners, demanding employees, and tightening cash flows can make you wonder…
Why am I putting myself through this?
Why am I putting my family through this?
Why is this so hard?
You worry you’re not cut out for this. You wonder if it would be easier to go work for someone else. To go back to the job you were good at. To step back into that place of comfort.
It’s okay; we all think these things sometimes.
When your feet are knocked out from under you it’s instinctual to flail. Desperately seeking traction, any motion feels like positive motion. In a scramble like this, you can become even more lost. Trying to make something happen, trying to find your footing, trying to prove your worth.
David Whyte, in ‘Sweet Darkness” offers a counter-intuitive invitation to slow down and invite the darkness in like a cloak borrowed from an old friend. A cloak to keep you warm. A hand to guide you home. Back to yourself, back to where you know you are loved, back to what brings you alive.
The world longs for your freedom – for you to come alive.
What conditions help you to slow down and regain the vision of what is true for you?
“Sweet Darkness”
By David Whyte
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your home
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
