Category: Josh Feingold Blog

I have had the unfortunate (mis)opportunity to attend a number of leadership training seminars in the past, and as you can tell from my snarky comment, I have been consistently underwhelmed.

Why, you ask?

Because, these training courses consistently miss the main point that they purport to do.  Train leaders.

Instead they focus on other non-relevant functions of leadership, or seem to skip the topic all together.

The reason for this is that a true definition of a leader seems to be hard to agree on.

However, I will assert that leadership consists of four very attributes, all of which are uncommon, especially to find someone with strengths in more than one area.

1) Self-initiative
2) Brains
3) Guts (calculated risks)
4) Personality.

The last three are in no particular order or importance, by the way.

That’s it.

And I have yet to be at any training seminar that focused on any of these four topics.  Have you?

So if you are looking to train leaders, put together a weekend that explains to people those aspects of the above four topics that they need to focus on, and let them choose which areas they are weak in.  Since Brains and Personality people either have or don’t have (from a leadership perspective only), the focus really needs to be in the other two areas, since it is an uphill battle to train the other two things.  Better to make them solid followers.

Of course, as an organization looking for leaders, it is better just to find people pre-programmed with these four attributes, and stay out of their way, since in truth these four things are all exceptionally hard to teach.

After all, that is probably why no leadership seminars try.

A while back, I wrote about being/feeling alone and I wanted to solidify the main point, since it has become more coherent to me over time.

When we choose to make someone part of our life, it relieves us from the feeling of being alone. But the point is that this decision takes active choice on OUR behalf – or the fact that someone chooses to be with us does not amount to anything regarding feeling alone.

The above is true for FEELING ALONE.  However, BEING ALONE, is just the opposite.  We can think we are alone, when in truth, we have lots of friends who have chosen us, and we are in fact NOT alone. On the other hand, we can think we are not alone, when in reality no one chooses to be with us, and if fact we ARE alone.

If you think about this, it is ironic, since it turns out that while feeling alone is up to us, being alone is up to our friends and family.  Usually, we see it the other way.

Of course, when it comes to choosing how we feel, that is actually an arbitrary decision (well, unless we have no close friends or family), so we might as well assume we are not alone!

Having thought about causation this past year, I have come to the appreciation of the fact that there are some base emotions that we all have, that are part of our core psyche, and we can’t really change.

We can work on them, temper them, and otherwise deal with them, but we can’t remove them as impacts on ourselves.

The emotions, similar to instincts in animals, through natural selection have supported our survival, and are now so deeply engrained, that there really is not much we can do about them, except recognize that they exist, accept their influence, and take it into consideration.

With that introduction in mind, here is what I have learned.  There are actually two base feelings (or instincts).

1) Not to be alone
2) Productive action

From these two primary instincts, three higher level instincts are borne:

1) To be liked by our community (subset of 1)
2) To control (subset of 2)
3) To understand (subset of 1 and 2)

Of course, it could be that I haven’t worked enough on exorcising these traits from my personality, but my current feeling is that these five human instincts are intertwined with the totality of the human experience and inseparable.

Lately, I have come to notice that I have a big ego, and to be honest, I’m not really sure what to do about it.

Now, in my mind, there are two types of people I attribute with big egos – those who are pretending to have a big ego due to really feeling insecure about who they are and those who actually recognize their strengths and actually like who what they see in the mirror.

While certainly over a large part of my life, I fell into the first crowd of people, at this point I couldn’t help to think that I fall into the latter.

So it came as a surprise to me when I realized my ego was getting in the way of my personal growth.

I asked myself what I should do.

Value myself less?  No that doesn’t seem healthy.

Value others more?  That doesn’t really work since when I do that, it tends to inflates my ego (often falsely).

So what was I to do?

Which is when I realized that the issue is that I attribute any value to myself in the first place.  You see, value is relative to another set point, so by assessing my own personal value, by definition, I was insecure and still in the former category.

The only way out is to stop the compulsion to compare myself to others and create figures of value altogether.  There are natural effects that I think get in the way of this goal. But with focus, I do think that we can minimize the ego’s menace.

The upshot is that the goal is not to have a “healthy ego” rather to have no ego altogether.  Which probably isn’t conventional wisdom, I don’t think.  But that is just my ego talking. 😉

A friend of mine forwarded a nice quote this morning made by James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans:

“the truth of nature … is a primitive law of the human mind.”

I wanted to take some time to talk about the nature of truth, which I think he nailed, and is not really what we typically think of when we consider truth.

For most of us, truth is an ideal, a moral, or some other positive way of living life.  However, while this is correct, it isn’t true.  Since, in truth, truth is a reflection of life itself.

Restated, Truth is a reflection of the real nature of the world.

So in fact, truth is a noun, and reflects a tangible reality.  It can be discerned in nature, and within ourselves, if we are open to receiving it.

On an aside, anything which isn’t truth, is fiction.

Truth is important, not because of the emotional and societal values, which while important, aren’t the true reason of their importance.
We can know this because truth, like life, is in its nature is simple, and both of these values are complex.

Rather, truth is important because it aligns us with the world – with nature if you will – and in doing so connects us to our essential form, our true form, which further serves to settle our mind and bring us closer to what we call the divine.

It calls to mind my friend, who tells the truth, but it stems from fear of getting caught.  While this perhaps is a good outcome, the fact that it stems from fear, means that this action isn’t truly true.  It is in fact false.

The true action would be to do the right thing, because it is the right thing to do.  The fear aspect impacts his action, and moves it from truth to falsehood.

Having finished this post, I will admit that it could all be false, but in my gut, I think it is true.