In our last article, we discussed what it means to be a leader.

Being a leader means being the committed possibility of a future that otherwise wouldn’t happen. It means taking a stand for something.

“What are you talking about?”

Commitment to a Possibility

What exactly does it mean to be a committed possibility?

It simply means you act out of a commitment. You identify with the commitment. You embody the commitment. The space for the possibility of something coming to be exists in you. You see the world through the lens of that possibility. You associate things together in that space, where that new future can come into being.

In some significant way, we become what we say we are, so long as we speak with integrity and intention.

When we speak certain declarations, we change the world, because we change the world as it shows up for persons.

When I got married, I declared my fidelity. This was a self-defining and relationship-defining action, and my wife did the same. We then saw the world differently, out of the space of being married.

It didn’t happen all at once. But you come back to it. You re-commit, and deepen your understanding.

Choosing to be true to this declaration is an ongoing commitment. It shapes us every day.

In the same way, to be a leader is to take a committed stand to a future that has not yet come into being, and to live out that commitment. To be the commitment, in the world. To be the space interiorly where that reality can be fit together, and opportunities can be discovered to make it happen.

How then, do you become a commitment?

A Declaration and Integrity

Leadership is a way of being. It comes about by declaring your commitment to some new future, and then by living it out.

The strength of your leadership comes about through living that commitment, and intensifying it, and becoming more fully in integrity with it, and discovering more fully what it means to be it as you grow toward fidelity with it.

Integrity, in this sense, simply means honoring your word – your declaration – so that you exist with it fully.

This is not something that happens overnight, or even something that you ever finish doing.

It is something that comes to be in us in a mature and full way only through practice.

Your first attempts at leadership will likely be small, like a child’s first steps. Learning first to be in integrity with your commitments to yourself, before you are able to be in integrity with others, and to bring others into your vision.

But like the child, as you persist, your ability grows. Your efforts are refined through striving towards an ideal. And eventually, in a very full way, you embody the future as a firm possibility. As something that increasingly likely will come into being in the world.

If you start on the path, like a child, and persevere, your will be a leader.