How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader?
If you ask youth workers, trainers, social activists, leaders of organizations, people who roll their sleeves and work at grassroots with communities and young people, there’s a huge portion of them who will not consider themselves leaders. And I can’t help but notice that we have made leadership into something bigger than us; something beyond us. We’ve made it about changing the world. We’ve taken this title of “leader” and treated it as something that one day we’re going to deserve. But to take and give to ourselves right in this instance this title might be perceived as arrogance and we are not comfortable with it. And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do, that we’ve convinced ourselves those are the only things worth celebrating. We start to devalue the things we can do every day, We take moments where we truly are a leader and we don’t let ourselves take credit for it, or feel good about it. I’ve been lucky enough over the last 10 years to work in the Erasmus+ field with amazing people who’ve helped me redefine leadership in a way that I think has made me happier.
It happens often that, after mobilities, young people approach the trainers’ team or as a matter of fact other participants and they share “You’ve been an important person in my life and you inspired me”. And this is what we call a lollipop moment. How many of you have experienced in the Erasmus+ years a lollipop moment, a moment where someone said or did something that you feel fundamentally made your life better? All right. How many of you have told that person they did it?
Yet we let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it. Every single one of you has been the catalyst for a lollipop moment. You’ve made someone’s life better by something you said or did.
It’s scary to think of ourselves as that powerful, frightening to think we can matter that much to other people. As long as we make leadership something bigger than us, as long as we keep leadership beyond us and make it about changing the world, we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day, from ourselves and from each other.
Marianne Williamson said, “Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. [It] is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light and not the darkness that frightens us.” My call to action today is that we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each other’s lives. We need to get over it so we can move beyond it, and our young people and teenagers — can watch and start to value the impact we can have on each other’s lives, more than money and power and titles and influence. We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments — how many of them we create, how many we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward and how many we say thank you for. Because we’ve made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world. There are only six billion understandings of it.
And if you change one person’s understanding of it, understanding of what they’re capable of, understanding of how much people care about them, understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you’ve changed the whole thing.
