Sorry, Not Sorry (Some thoughts on Apologies) (Part 1)

1. An apology is a basic act of remediation when our behaviour has caused harm to someone else. It reflects that we understand how we have hurt the person affected, which is important in not only mending the harm that has been produced by our actions, but also as an acknowledgement that we need to grow beyond that problematic behaviour.

2. An apology should never be scripted becomes it comes across as being insincere and having been curated by someone else. This is especially the case for famous people with a public relations team behind them. In the age of social media and artificial intelligence, the scrutiny for a fabricated apology will be intense, and no doubt more than a few eager internet sleuths will do their own investigations on whether the given apology was put together by ChatGPT (note to self, Ja Morant!). If an unscripted apology involves the display of raw emotion that is focused on the impact suffered by the other person, then it will likely be perceived as genuine. Beware though that apologetic displays of emotion can be histrionic and self-indulgent, and no one really wants to hear how the perpetrator’s bad behaviour towards others has caused them pain, or to feel a certain way about themselves, because they should not be the focus at that moment.

3. In many situations where people/organisations appear reluctant to offer an apology, or are delaying in doing so, chances are that lawyers have become involved and advised these entities not to offer an apology lest it be construed as an admission of guilt for which some form of liability would attach. The laws on this vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but there is a common acceptance that an apology offered shouldn’t be prejudicial to a defendant in a subsequent trial. No doubt, it is a sad reality that an apology can’t just be offered for conduct that has clearly caused another harm, but when potentially large sums of money are at stake in a pending lawsuit, this reluctance to do so is somewhat understandable.  

4. In most disputes, it is my experience that each party shares an element of responsibility for what has occurred. It is rarer than we might think for one person to be completely blameless relative to the behaviour that the other person has demonstrated in the situation. When adjudicating on such matters, I would tend, from a credibility standpoint, to look more favourably on the side who can accept their share of responsibility for what has occurred and apologise for their role in that conflict. After all, being willing to see one’s role and apologise for that is not only a marker of maturity, but also integrity and good faith.

5. Don’t apologise or feel guilty for things you haven’t done. None of us are responsible for acts that caused harm to others before we were alive, yet we live in an age of perverse activism where individuals are sought to be persecuted for past wrongs because of the identity markers they share with past offenders. This is clearly absurd. The sins of the father belong to the father, not to their progeny, especially if the work and way of being of that progeny is playing a role in progressing the world forward from the harms that were wrought by those sins. Those often making these claims are also not first-hand victims of the behaviour in question, yet they victimise themselves by trying to make you responsible for their perceived harm/disadvantage. Apologising to these people and pandering to their irrational sensitivities is in reality an affront to their dignity as human beings. By enabling their playing of the victim, you are denying them agency, and the opportunity to grow through the process of having to examine and correct their false beliefs. If you genuinely care about their evolution and flourishing, you will take that stand and remind them of the responsibility they have to heal their own misconceptions.  

6. How we say something to someone is distinct from what we say to them, and the manner of this communication may itself justify an apology being offered. This is something to be mindful of if you aren’t afraid of argumentation, and you tend to make your points emotively and with conviction. I have observed about myself that I can be quite uncompromising in countering positions that are rooted in ideology or prejudicial assumptions that are too general to be accurate. Having tact requires a consideration of how your messaging will land to have the desired effect. Remember, when you have the ability to just tell another what you had for lunch, this obviates the need to vomit it all over them in order to get your message across.

My New Book – Calling New Leaders: How Living your Calling will make you an Inspired Leader of the Modern World

Hi all,

My new book, Calling New Leaders: How Living your Calling will make you an Inspired Leader of the Modern World will be released at the end of this month and is now available for pre-order via the following link: https://centralwestpublishing.com/product/calling-new-leaders-softcover/

It is the perfect book for anybody who is looking to connect with their life purpose and/or evolve to become a conscious leader who can embody the universal virtues of the human spirit.

The information on the back cover of the book is as follows:

What purpose have you been given life to fulfil, and how by you living it will you light the way for others to make their unique contribution to the flourishing of the world?

CALLING NEW LEADERS provides the answers to these two separate but interrelated questions. While leadership books abound and many others have written about discovering the ‘why’ to your existence, CALLING NEW LEADERS will provide you with the needed clarity to these fundamental existential questions in one book.

Drawing upon rigorous research on the topic and real life examples of how a lived calling and leadership intersect, you will be taken on a journey to connecting with your spirit and its meaningful call to service and adventure in your life. Evolving you towards the embodiment of the core virtues of humanity that mark the peak of the personal development journey, you will move closer towards becoming the leader that you have always aspired to be.

This deepest form of leadership isn’t about enacting your personal values, needing a title for authority or playing to the crowd to gain approval. It’s about becoming the complete version of who you were created to be, for which no shortcuts are available.

Anybody can effect change, but not everybody can drive humanity forward. Are you up for the challenge? The hero is in you with this book in your hands.

Enabling is not Ennobling

One of the key tasks of leadership is to bring forth the best of what those who follow the leader are capable of being. By this, I don’t just mean the development of their professional competencies, though this is no doubt important, but more fundamentally, the formation of their character that will provide them with a firm foundation for leading themselves and others as they progress along their life journey. This quality in the leader can be characterised as ‘ennobling’, which is a term that in my opinion isn’t used enough in modern leadership discourse. Perhaps why this is the case is because in more recent times, we have become more sensitive to and cynical of the power that leaders have in relation to those who follow them. The term also sounds rather highfalutin, as if reference was being made to a monarchy or the nobility.

Regardless of this, I don’t think we should let it scare us off expecting our current leaders to embody this quality. The other day I came across a term that I have never heard before, being ‘leanability’, which was used to denote a leader who fosters the dependence of their followers in order to fortify the power inherent in their position. So rather than making their followers more self-reliant and competent people who will grow their own leadership capacity, these individuals tend to encourage their people to lean on them as they go about the process of performing their work, with the effect that they aren’t forced to grow beyond their current levels of capability or comfort. Whether such leaders do this consciously or subconsciously is up for debate, but no doubt, leading in such a way furthers the leader’s personal interest in entrenching themselves as the central node in the network from where they derive their authority.

I suspect that in a good many cases, it is the ego of the leader that is reflexively driving their practice of this leadership style. What makes this all the more insidious is that this way of leading to the untrained eye can take the guise of benevolent care or even love for those being led, when those who are meant to be cared for or loved are essentially just being smothered, or actively prevented from flourishing in the way they would desire to if they were allowed to spread their wings and taste how enriching it is to their sense of autonomy and confidence to move beyond the boundaries of their coddling. In one of its most malevolent forms, we see this dysfunctional leadership style being practiced by cult leaders who claim to be the point of salvation for their devotees against the evils of the world that lurk behind the walls of their commune. While they may profess to their followers that they desire to be a channel only for their followers’ enlightenment or connection to the divine, in reality, this is the last thing they want because were their followers to achieve that state/connection, they would become redundant as that bridge, and with that would come the loss of power to manipulate and exploit those who are so frequently abused in these sects.   

Taking this back to an organisational context, whatever shortcomings or deficits in ability that followers may have are effectively enabled in such a system of operating, which is highly problematic because an entity cannot logically be expected to grow if those who work within it are being stifled as they go about the process of making their contributions to its functioning. Instead of enabling in this sense, leaders should be equipping and empowering their people to make the contributions that they genuinely desire to make, but for this to be discovered, the focus has to become those others rather than the leader and their ego.

When I was doing my research about individuals living their calling or life purpose and how that shaped their leadership behaviour, it was very noticeable how they took steps to ennoble the people who worked with them. While they may not have described it that way, it was clear in its effect that this is what they were doing. Being more evolved in their self and spiritual awareness than the leaders described above who are more egocentric, they practiced in their own way a form of subsidiarity that distributed their power in a decentralised manner to uplift and enhance those who they felt they had a stewardship responsibility to help grow into their fullness. Bringing us back full circle to our premise of ennobling those who we lead, those who understand the idea recognise as an orienting principle that the role of a leader is to create other leaders who can succeed them and expand the horizons of what is possible, not to entrench as followers those who would seek to actualise their innate potential for leadership.

Interlude: Putting Ambition and Motivation in their Proper Place

My intention with this piece is to challenge some of the commonly held conceptions about ambition and motivation. In the fields of leadership, psychology and personal development, these notions are held up as virtues to embody if one is to enjoy ultimate success, but in the description of how they may affect this outcome I believe a great substance is lacking. While some, who are more egocentrically inclined, think that they represent the ideal, I believe there are more potent and rewarding ways to orient ourselves in the world. With this, I offer some thoughts below about what distinguishes ambition from aspiration and motivation from inspiration. On the face of it, these terms appear to be interchangeable with each other but in their character they have differences that go beyond the semantic.

Ambition: This is what you want to achieve in the world, but who is the ‘you’ that is animating this drive for accomplishment? If we are honest in looking at the part of us from which ambition emanates, we will find ego at the centre of it. The proof of this is that much of our ambition revolves around the gratification of our personal and subjectively defined desires. We might want status, influence, the corner office, money and other material accruements, so we expend energy to bring these things to ourselves which enriches or strengthens our sense of self. The ‘goals’ we set ourselves are a means to these ends, even though we may rationalise that they are an end in their own right. It should be no surprise then that as we attain them, they feel unfulfilling because as we undertook the journey our doing was divorced from authentic being. The outlet for this ambition is most often a career. Of itself, it is not bad, especially if we achieve some positive things for others and the world along the way. It also beats having no drive to action or contribution beyond ourselves. We just need to realise its limitations and deficiencies relative to what aspirations involve.    

Aspiration: This is the basis of what animates a calling or vocation. It is what yearns to be affected through you. This makes it different than a goal in that it is not ego directed. An aspiration is something that you can’t not do if you are to breathe into life, and life is to breathe into you. This is literally the definition of what it means to aspire: the action or process of drawing breath. No coincidence! On this path, the journey to becoming is itself the reward, for who we truly are (our spirit) is given permission to animate our being and guide our action as we traverse the territory that is uniquely ours to take. Through affecting this integrity between being and doing, we find fulfilment within ourselves, beyond the lukewarm satisfaction that is the best of what ambition can hope to deliver. Aspiration bridges who we are now in this moment, with who we could be in the future, so this actualising pull is a key feature of what animates us as we move forward in our lives. Whatever material rewards we may accrue along this path are given their proper place and paradoxically, we often become better at bringing them to ourselves when we are inspired by a deeper purpose and its attendant feelings of love and passion for what we do. 

Motivation: The animating force behind motivation is in the word: motive. This motive is the reason why we affect a particular form of action. The implication of even having a motive is that there is an end in mind that we are seeking to realise. For what purposes though, and what part of us is being driven towards those ends? When we hear of people being extrinsically motivated, it is typically the same things that rouse our ambition which are sought to be captured from the world, money and power etc. Clearly, it is ego that is consuming us when we are so motivated, moving us outside of ourselves to bring back the objects that we perceive ourselves as lacking: counterfeit treasures. Intrinsic motivation is a different beast altogether and despite its reputation as a benevolent driver, I believe that often it is the same force of ego that animates this form of striving. We might be intrinsically motivated to find happiness because we want to feel good in the moment, and this can lead us to justify hedonic pleasure seeking as the means of accomplishing this. Others might rationalise the desire for financial independence, or doing good to appear virtuous, in similar ways. But what internal deficits or fears born of not having or being enough, do the meeting of these ends really work to assuage?

Inspiration: Is the best of what motivation hopes to be. When we are inspired, we are being animated and oriented by spirit. It is in the word: in-spir(it)ed. In contrast to motivation, which sees us force ourselves on the working of the world, when we are inspired, we ease into the flow of life to enact the virtues that are our essential nature and the purposes that constitute our calling or vocation. The highest vision of what humanity is capable of achieving is realised in this state. The best forms of art testify to this reality. What was animating the artist in the process of bringing those masterpieces to life? Were they motivated to make them happen, for fame, acclaim or wealth? No. Were they to even force the issue would guarantee a sub-standard outcome. Inspiration is allowing something much greater than you to work through you. This is what makes the fruits of inspiration beautiful, awe-inspiring and engenders them with the ultimate value. It also explains the attractive force (or charisma) which those who allow themselves to be animated by it have. The idols of the world are inspired agents and yet in our unconsciousness we are clueless as to why we place them on a pedestal. Could their embodiment of this ideal be why they are worthy of our attention and worship? When we become conscious of the true source of their standing, it becomes clear that we should answer that question in the affirmative.