On Leadership … with Christien Oudshoorn Joep C de Jong

On Leadership … with Christien Oudshoorn | Joep C de Jong

There’s nothing that makes us more free than to lose yourself in something that is bigger than yourself.

I think leadership today, one of the big challenges we have is in this world meeting each other and really finding time and a way to really connect to the other person with all the craziness that’s going on and all the differences and all that divides us. And I think leadership is a lot about facilitating that process. In order to really meet another person or even meet yourself, the first thing we need to do is to take a moment to stop or to slow down.

We really need to disconnect from everything that we feel that we should be doing or all the pressure that’s on us or how things should be. To stop, that’s the only space from which you can really connect to another person or really connect even to yourself.

I think society has a very clear story that tells us about what is success and when are you a successful person and when are you doing well. Most of the youth I work with, they are the losers in this story. They are the ones that don’t have an education, they don’t have economic power, they don’t have any political power. So this is kind of the story society is telling them, that whatever it is that success is, it’s not really accessible to them.

So when they come to the training, one of the things we start over is telling them this is not a course where you’re going to learn how to be a leader. You are here because you are a leader. And what we’re going to do is to find out what kind of leader you are and what you have in you already that makes you a leader.

For me, leadership has a lot to do with relationships. A good leader or a big leader is someone who is strong at building relationships. Particularly, we focus on four different kinds of relationships. One thing is a relationship with oneself. It would be very difficult to be a leader if I cannot start with having a strong relationship with myself. It allows me to build a relationship with other people, and a relationship with other people has to do with empathy – empathy with myself, being able to express myself, but also understanding what the other person is expressing.

Then of course there’s the relationship with my community. My community can be my family, it can be the neighborhood I live in, it can be my country, it can be the world. And I think a relationship that has always been important and is getting even more important in modern society is our relationship to the unknown. The relationship that we build to the unknown – it can be people that are different from ourselves, unknown can be events that we don’t understand yet, or that our world is changing more and more rapidly. And how do we relate to that?

This deep acceptance that it’s the process that’s most important. When you start seeing it’s the process that’s important and it’s the intention with which you do things, then automatically you start appreciating what comes. For me, leadership is a lot about bringing sustainable social growth or bringing people together, creating more integration. This is sort of my vision of what development is about or what leadership should lead to.

I find it hard to imagine how anyone could do that without a deep, profound appreciation for human potential. I really love people. I think that’s like, to me, working in education, it’s just a really natural thing. Because whenever I see a person, I automatically see the potential or you see the strength in this person or the beauty in that person.

I feel very privileged, let me say it like this. I think a lot of what I do comes from a very deep sense of gratitude. From feeling this gratitude, automatically it gives a big feeling of joy to share it with other people.

Credit: Transcript edited for clarity by Claude.

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