The Leadership Paradox

Recently, I was asked why I hesitate here. Yes, I am hesitant, but my hesitation comes from humility rather than a lack of confidence.

As many of you know, I increasingly see the metacrisis as a crisis of relationship: first in how we relate to ourselves, and then in how we relate to one another and the world around us. Much of what we experience as “reality” is filtered through our unfinishedness. We project unresolved aspects of ourselves onto others and then react to those projections as though they exist entirely outside of us. In this sense, many of our relationships become attempts to complete something left unfinished in our early lives.

I encounter this dynamic constantly, which is why I tread carefully. My challenge is that many people do not seem to perceive these underlying patterns. As a result, I often struggle with how to communicate what I sense to trusted others without sounding alienating, judgmental, or dismissive. Most of the time, I do not have proof, only a felt sense that something is present. Sometimes that intuition later finds confirmation; frequently it remains an open question.

This dynamic creates an inner tension. On the one hand, I have learned to trust my perceptions. On the other hand, I have also learned that perception is never the same as certainty. To mistake intuition for truth is dangerous. Yet to ignore intuition altogether is equally problematic. The challenge is learning how to hold what we perceive lightly enough that it can be questioned and refined through dialogue. This is one of the many reasons why I encourage us to seek a small group of trusted others. They keep us grounded in consensual reality, that psychic and physical place where “I end and you begin.”

Influential people, on the other hand, are often the recipients of enormous amounts of attention, one-way attention that goes from us to them. Unless that attention is grounded in humility, it can easily inflate the ego and create a blindness to one’s own limitations. This, too, seems to be part of our collective predicament.

Thus, my hesitation arises because I find myself in a double bind. I feel called to bring certain ideas and practices forward because I believe they may be genuinely useful, perhaps even necessary. Yet I am also aware that visibility and influence can stimulate the very egoic tendencies that undermine the capacities these ideas are meant to cultivate. The challenge, then, is not simply how to amplify wisdom, but how to do so without becoming corrupted by the amplification itself.

When I look around, I find remarkably few public figures who both point to and embody the qualities I believe we need more of in the world. Five public-facing people who come to mind are Audrey Tang, Cynthia Bourgeault, Nate Hagens, and my colleagues and dear friends, Joe Lightfoot and Steven Harper. What stands out to me is not that they are free of ego, but that they appear to be in an ongoing relationship with it rather than unconsciously governed by it. They seem capable of holding influence without becoming identified with it.

That quality of humility, self-reflection, and genuine openness to learning feels increasingly rare. Yet it may be among the most important capacities we need for a thriving future.

Perhaps this is the leadership our time requires: people willing to remain in relationship with reality itself and being brave enough to respond to what it asks of them — no more and no less. These are not the people who seek attention to elevate themselves for personal gain, They are the people in whose persence we become more fully who we were meant to be. In a world in which we seem to have lost our way, in their presence we may find our way home — to ourselves, one another, and this beautiful world we share.