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Centered Leaders Seek Peace

What's your image of an assertive leader?

We have been bombarded (and that's the right word) by images of strong, forceful leaders who get what they want no matter the cost. The image of a boss taking charge, firing people, embarrassing people, pushing people beyond their limits has shifted from normal, to unacceptable, and back to normal. Many people see that kind of boss as respectable and even admirable. A forceful, narcissistic, people-be-damned boss is not normal and it is not admirable.

Centered leaders have no need to force people. Centered leaders have no appetite for or need for coercion. The brow-beating, chest-thumping, cave man boss of the media belongs in the cave.

Declarations about carpet bombing to express our will or closing our borders to prevent immigrants from entering our blessed country do not come from a place of peace and can not lead to peaceful outcomes. Any expression of violence simply leads to more violence. Any indignity forced on a person or people plants seeds of revenge that may be slow but are certain.

I would think that by now we might have learned all that, and yet as a people we keep slipping into excuses to harm each other. There are no valid excuses to harm each other.

Disagree if you like, but please tell me how violence fixes anything? It may eliminate whole peoples, but the struggle for peace goes on. It's a struggle because we have wandered away from the way that is pure, the way of peace. Peace harms no one.

As high performance leaders we call ourselves creative. Let's prove that by creating nonviolent solutions to our problems, toward creating a nonviolent world.

It starts someplace. It starts with you. It starts with me. Let's start.

-- Doug Smith


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