Leadership is....

Leadership is variously defined around the world. Here at Moreno, we see it as "based on the development of abilities over a long period of time. It is not based on the acquisition of techniques or skills." The following quote succinctly captures our unique and respectful approach to leadership

Progressive leadership

 

"Daring to be and to become is essential to progressive and creative living and therefore is essential to leadership. This is, of course, an enormous challenge for daring to be ensures that the leader is caught up in the willy-nilly turmoil of living and is battered and scarred. Can we dare to become something at the point of throwing ourselves into unknown territory and feeling small and exposed? Can we love ourselves to such a degree that we continue on in spite of feeling insignificant? Can we value ourselves in the midst of loneliness, aloneness, and smallness?

A leader is able to maintain creative contact with themselves and with others in life situations that are simple or complex and in reflective unpressured times as well as in crises. A leader maintains an inner harmony and stability whilst at the same time projecting themselves outward toward others. Thus leadership is based on the development of abilities over a long period of time. It is not based on the acquisition of techniques or skills.

Appreciation of Life
 

Leadership involves appreciation of life, a great appreciation of the ordinary, routine activities of people and this of course involves leaders themselves appreciating the ordinary activities of their own lives. This eventually brings about a stronger experience of love of life. It is love of life that makes it possible for a leader to dispassionately observe another person and at the same time to notice in a fine tuned way the many different aspects of their expression. When such love of life has become part and parcel of our own inner experience, when it is second nature to us, it is simple to make responses to other people that exactly hit the spot, that clearly build and confirm them in their functioning.

A section of Bertrand Russell's Principles of Social Reconstruction written in 1919 is pertinent to our valuing of other human beings.

When authority is unavoidable, what is needed is Reverence. A person who is to educate really well, and is to make the young grow and develop into their full stature must be filled through and through with the spirit of reverence.

The person who has reverence will not think it is their duty to "mould" the young, and they feel in all lives, and most in all children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. In the presence of the child they feel an accountable humility - a humility not easily defensible on any rational ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than the easy self confidence of many parents and teachers. The outward helplessness of the child and the appeal of dependence makes them conscious of the responsibility of trust. Their imagination shows them what a child may become, for good or evil, how it's impulses may be developed or thwarted, how it's hopes must be dimmed and the life in it grow less living, how it's trust will be bruised and it's quick desire replaced by a brooding will. All this gives them a longing to help the child in it's own battle; they would equip and strengthen it, not for some outside end proposed by the State or any other impersonal authority, but for the ends which the child's own spirit is obscurely seeking. The person who feels this can wield the authority of an educator without infringing the principle of leadership.
 

The truth is that we may give much to the world through developing over a period of many years a balanced life style. In the course of creating a balanced life style we are filled up with a sense of wonder and appreciation for the life in nature, in our fellow human beings and within ourselves. Such a sense of wonder and appreciation is a necessary antidote to the cold, calculating and overly analytic approach to people manifested by some who have been partially trained (as educators or leaders). A person who has been partially trained in the one method or another may over-emphasise that theory at the beginning of a conversation and inappropriately utilise its technical and often wooden language. The necessary correction may occur by a reminder that another human being is one who is seething with spontaneity and contains within themselves the seeds of creative genius. It is in many ways much easier to develop a superior stance based on the position that we are okay and the other person is not okay. It may please our ego to think that through our beneficence we will be able to inject life into another person, yet this achieves nothing worthwhile. Effective work with others is filled with examples of a leader who expresses their appreciation of life through being present with those with whom they work and through giving value to their expression."

Dr G Max Clayton.1993