Everyone has a story.
I was visiting a cemetery recently and was struck by the endless rows of names on the grave markers that had the dates of birth and death. The thing that came to mind is that for every name there was undoubtedly a story that could be told. I wondered about what each person had done in their brief time on earth and who they may have impacted for good. Did these people make the world a better place? Did they have family and friends that have missed them deeply when since they passed away? What were their stories? There is an old example used to describe what a person lives for by assigning the story not to when they were born or when they died, but to the dash in between. It says that in the dash is where we find out who the person really was and what was important to them.
As a leader, we also have stories. We have a start date and end date to the service we give to people and organizations, even countries. Our presidents are often most remembered for the brief time they were in office. The dash between election periods.
In your time as a leader, what will be remembered from your dash? What is your story? What will people say about you when they look back at the tenure of your leadership. Did you make a difference? Did you move the organization forward. Did you develop deep relationships with the people in your care? I realize this is deep stuff to think about. Most of us just try to get through another busy and hectic work week and make the projects we’re involved in successful. However, there is a deep need to look deeper than this day’s, week’s or month’s to do list. The things we check off our list, as important as they may seem today, aren’t necessarly always the things which we should be marking off. Perhaps it would be a good exercise to go back and look over the things we checked off and evaluate which of those things really didn’t matter in the long run.
I encourage all of us who seek to be authentic, servant, and transformational leaders to make sure that our to do lists are filled with the most important things…things that will make our dash really mean something. We want our story to be one that speaks of the most important things of life, mainly people and tasks that make the world a better place. The good thing is that we can create our story. Even if it’s been less than what we wish it had been up to this point, we can start anew today, reinventing ourselves and our work to tell a story that will leave the type of legacy we really want to leave.
We all have a story. Let’s make sure it’s a story really worth telling.
Lead well.