Leadership: Balance of Serving Others with Realization of Self.
#S8
This story is of a jungle, which was reigned by the Jungle queen named Sarabi. With this today I would like to share a lesson of Leadership which was taught to me when I was in 4th Grade school, but practicing it had taken action in time.
So here is the story:
One day Sarabi and her minister of animal recruitment were walking together. They were preparing for the recruitment of animals into their kingdom management. So the fox goes Uh Uh No No, we can’t have a deer into our kingdom affairs, such a fearing creature it is.
Going down the list came down the turn of tortoise, fox biased his views on the agility of tortoise and said so slow the creature is, of what use will it be to us, my queen lets cross him down.
Listening to all these rejection fox was making, Sarabi said wait wait, let me run through the list once more.
Ummm.. Well dear is one of the fastest creatures of the jungle and surely we can use him as a messenger during our war time’s. The time of war when other brave and fast animals will but put to battle, deer will act as our messenger isn’t it Sarabi said to the fox.
Lets see who’s next, Oh it’s the tortoise, well on land they are slow, but the troop of tortoise can be great messengers to build connect with the aquatic world creatures.
In this manner they both went through the list and selected the members on their strengths and not only judging them by their weakness. The fox realized his mistake and apologized as he was only looking at the weakness of the animals while making the selection.
Well this teaches us about a trait of leader i.e true leader is the one who has a sense of strengths about someone, as well as the leader is aware of the weakness of the people around him.
With experience I can share that to get this quality one needs to have quality to serve others, but recently I was struggling to do the same.
So I went to self-introspection, like why is it getting a bit difficult to serve others which is my genuine interest.
Exploring for a few days, I came to this solution.
The Solution: As we grow up, we start to become more self-aware and that’s natural, we come to know what we like, what we don’t like, we realize our strong points, our weakness. In all we evolve into more self-conscious beings as we grow up. I think this self-awareness i.e our own needs comes in between the process of serving others. Here we need to apply the principle of acceptance, which comes by understanding the needs of self as a human being and fulfilling them like giving self a pause from all the hotch-potch in the surrounding. Once we come to balance of understanding self, then we will rise better and stronger to serve others.
The solution for this which I am currently applying is to first identify, self-needs like how you feel when something happens, is it good or bad, if it’s good, do things which make you feel good, n later on share that goodness with other’s. If it’s bad then see what’s making you feel bad, n take action to work on the problem, take action if it’s an actionable problem.
Even if doing something makes you feel bad and good to others you really don’t need to do it cause in the end the happiness that you give will be temporary and will end one day cause the starting point of that serving is making you unhappy. I am learning not to do such things, and would encourage you for the same.
With this I end my story.
Moral: Leadership is surely about serving others by looking at their strengths, n being aware about the people’s weaknesses. But serving others has to be in balance by understanding one’s own needs, values and becoming self-aware.
Hope you liked the story, you may share your self-introspection story which you might had gone through this pandemic times.
Here is the link to my previous story:
#S7: Humility of Hanuman
Sankyu(Thanks) For Reading.
Yours Sharer Yuvraj.
