Sunday Journal #25

Fatherhood is leadership

Welcome to Sunday Journal, a chance to start your week out with short, quiet reflections and advice for life.

This effort started with a handwritten journal I keep for each of my children, designed to give them a sense of how to become the best version of themselves. If you find this valuable, please share it with others.

Each edition contains three sections: reflections to put into practice, an inspirational quote, and an image to contemplate.

Reflection

Fifteen years ago, Simon Sinek made a name for himself with the book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. He offered these bits of wisdom, which I’ve updated with parent-related words for Father’s Day:

• Be the leader father you wish you had.

• Leadership Parenting is not about being in charge. Leadership Parenting is about taking care of those in your charge.

• Great leaders fathers are always learning and ensuring that those they lead benefit from their growth.

• Leadership Parenthood isn’t about being the smartest or the most powerful― it’s about continuously improving and helping others grow.

• The best leaders fathers invest in themselves so they can better serve and support those they lead.

There’s a temptation to believe that leadership is a position — a title, a seat at the head of the table, a name on a door. It’s the same temptation that whispers parenting is about being in charge. Both are wrong, and they’re wrong in the same way. To lead and to raise are not acts of authority but acts of care: leadership isn’t about being in charge, it’s about taking care of those who are in your charge.

The best fathers and the best leaders understand that the people in front of them are not there to serve their ambition; they’re there to be served by it.

What unites the great parent and the great leader is not certainty, or strength, or having the answers. It’s the willingness to keep growing — to remain a student long after the world has started calling you the teacher.

We can’t give our children, or those we lead, what we haven’t first cultivated in ourselves; the investment we make in our own character becomes the inheritance they draw upon.

And perhaps the truest measure of either calling is this: to become the leader, and the father, you wish you’d had. And in doing so, to make it just a little more likely that those in your charge will one day surpass you.

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