Here is an Oliver De Mille paper for thought and discussion.
A friend recently told me how hard it is to teach leadership education in her new town.
“It was so easy back in California,” she said, “we had so many friends doing this and so many activities to choose from. But here in this small Montana town we just don’t have anyone to work with. Nobody likes homeschooling, much less Leadership Education. They alienate us, and it’s almost impossible to stay inspired. We feel so alone.”
That’s hard! And this family isn’t alone.
Another friend, a Buddhist, lives in a mostly Evangelical Christian environment. She ran into the normal challenges of Thomas Jefferson Education, turned to the community for help, didn’t find it, felt frustrated, and blamed it on the differences between her and the community around her. A Catholic friend living in New England called with similar frustrations. He blamed it on the secularized environment. “These people just don’t get it,” he said, “they’re close-minded and intolerant.”
I heard the same message from a Southern Baptist friend who moved into a Mormon community, and the same comments from my own children about the non-home schoolers in our church unit. A Mormon family doing TJEd in Texas said the same thing about the Baptist community. Another friend moved from the South to the West and felt alienated because he was a Democrat surrounded by Republicans.
Upon discussing this, Rachel and I discovered that we had both felt the same in high school: I blamed my alienation from certain groups of kids on the fact that I was overweight, and Rachel blamed hers on the fact that her family moved a lot and she was always the new girl.
This list goes on and on. But amazingly, the similarity in all of these experiences, and dozens of others that people have told me about, is that in each case the problem was the same — the person was feeling alienated from a larger group because he or she was passionate and committed about something the larger group didn’t share.
So when she ran into roadblocks and went looking for a community to help, she found…that she was alone.
I call this the Leadership Alienation Principle. When you come up against challenges, you see many of them rooted in the differences between you and the larger community around you.
People who are mission driven tend to look around and feel isolated, misunderstood, misjudged and even criticized because their whole life is lived in the context of an overarching passion. When the people around them don’t identify with this passion, they naturally feel isolated. They use this as an excuse, sometimes as the excuse.
They seldom stop to realize that the real issue is the fact that they are passion driven, mission driven, and their whole life is going to be different than most of the people around them. This naturally causes an “us-them” feeling about anyone who doesn’t share your passion, or disagrees with your deepest views, or is just in a bad mood.
This happens to everyone in the areas of their passion, but for those doing Leadership Education the two hardest areas are “Classics, not Textbooks” and “Inspire, not Require.”
When you get passionate about classics, people often think you are stuck up, elitist, cocky, arrogant. They think this even if you aren’t any of these things, and you have to work four times as hard to be their friend as anyone else.
As for “Inspire, not Require,” this is a problem because the easiest and quickest way to inspire is to get your youth working with a larger peer group that shares their passion for great education. When you can’t find such a group, natural feelings of frustration arise about all these people around you who just don’t get it. You need them, and they don’t seem to care, or worse, you get a sense that they aren’t ever going to accept you into the group.
So, what is the solution? Well, first of all, it helps a lot to realize that this is just plain normal. This is what almost everyone is feeling, or soon will be, in one part of their life or another. So, relax.
But secondly, people you know right now are feeling this about something — and you may be able to help. Look around and see if you are needed, and you will find people reaching out for friendship. See how you can help them, even though it isn’t directly related with your challenges.
Once these two steps are accomplished, you can get started on the third step: Get very clear on what you need to do to build your community, help your family, whatever it is you need to do, and get to work. It’s going to be hard, it’s going to take some time, not everyone will join you at first, or ever, but if it’s your role and your mission then get to work.
Of course, this is easier said than done, but it is a lot easier done than sitting around worrying, feeling isolated, fretting, wishing or whining. If something needs done in your community, and you feel called to do it, get to work.
The truth is, once you do step three, you will naturally proceed to step four: having a lot of fun making a difference.
When you run into Leadership Alienation, follow these steps and success if right around the corner.
For more help with Leadership for Executives and Community Leaders, seewww.thesocialleader.com and www.thecomingaristocracy.com.
