In this speech, I will try to answer remaining questions about old speeches, like how to avoid biases, find inner peace, why did you yell at us.
I will also try to tie all of this in to leadership style results. Because this speech is supposed to be about my leadership style.
I’ll start with mindfulness meditation, then I’ll talk about a teacher who taught what he didn’t know & I will end by revealing the results of the test. (conclusion, I still get attached to my character sometimes and it stops me from being the ignorant master that I could be)
Mindfulness meditation is very easy to explain, this technique is about cultivating a detached kind of observation.
I did a 10 day silent retreat in Kanpur Uttar Pradesh, india.
Silent means, no talking, speaking, or even communicating with others. No reading, no smartphone, no activities at all. Just you with yourself.
The activity is eating and the videos at the end of the day. The videos focus and on a few key things to know from buddhism. They are the following.
Siddarth Gautam realized that attachment is the source of most suffering. To get free from suffering, you just need to detach yourself from the causes of suffering.
The technique proposed is about meditating and realizing that everything in yourself is a sensation. Your thoughts, emotions, discomforts,etc. once focused, you can feel them as sensations in your body. I know this because I’ve lived it for 10 days.
The key thing to learn is realize through observation of your sensations that what you experience as pain or suffering is mostly created by your inner processes.
And yes, by observing and applying the techniques, my discomfort of sitting, my fears, my frustration, at one point I realized, wow, When I fear or try to remove myself from this sensation, I feel the pain harder than if I just observe it without judgment.
It’s a switch “Oh, I don’t like this” to “Oh, I can observe this sensation” without judging it as bad.
The next level is to recognize the pleasant sensations how they create craving. You want more of them and thus the craving for them creates suffering in that moment.
I know because I’ve lived in those 10 days, you start to feel those very calm, warm and pleasant sensations and you want to stay attached to them. But you’re supposed to observe them the same way as you observe the negative sensations. This is the level where most people stop, they meditate just to experience those sensations.
When you learn to detach from the pleasant sensations comes the last level: Detaching from the neutral sensations.
Think of a though like “This table is stands on the floor”, not negative, not positive, yet a through and sensation in your body anyway.
In those 10 days I’ve had several opportunities to detach those from the neutral thoughts and connect with a deeper level of perceiving.
I even detached from myself and my personality and saw the process of the aspects that I though was me as just sensations. Who am I? Am I real? Do I exist?
Maybe I don’t exist, I might do deeper on this subject in another speech. All you need to know is that is disconnected from my self and beliefs. This freed me from my bias and made me realize that what I think as truth is just perceptions and attachments.
It made me realize that other humans have the same experience but might not have this realization.
We all have a limited perception of reality, but together, we might form a complete picture.
Thanks buddha.
The ignorant master
Joseph Jacotot was his name, his particularity was simple, he taught subjects at universities which he knew nothing about.
Let me rephrase this, he taught university students on matters which he had no knowledge of.
His method was very simple, abandoned the position of knowledge master to take the one of a fuel of desire. His method could be summarized by Socrates phrase: Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the kindling of flame.
He had a few simple beliefs that I feel we should all adopt:
- All men/women have equal intelligence
- Every man has received from god the faculty of being able to instruct himself
- Everything is in everything
The first Is so simple everyone has a brain that thinks and can develop. It’s just that different humans use their intelligence differently, and it’s okay. Not one field of intelligence or learning is more important that another
The second is the most important, everyone learns alone. Teacher can only show the way, but the student learns always alone. It goes further than this, he believed that “experts” or “teachers” believe that people are stupid and can’t be trusted to learn by themselves.
Everything is in everything, this is more abstract but he basically means that the deep study of one subject will develop transferable skills into others. Because the universe is not a disconnected thing but one, learning about the sea, you learn about physics, boating, economy, hardship the seaman, etc.. Every field of study will be studied when studying one subject deeply or letting a student follow his path.
He believes that his role, was to stimulate his students to follow their path through simple questioning techniques and ensuring that they’re working on their subjects. He believed that if he can make people curious and work on their learning, they would become masters by themselves with the need of his expertise.
This might feel revolutionary to some even for todays’s education. but remember that even sokrates basically share the same idea. I guess human beings haven’t changed that much.
My leadership?
Let’s start with my results from the toastmasters leadership style quiz. Here’s the top 3 with very close scores: 22, innovative, 20 Democratic, 19 altruistic
Innovative is like the startupper who has a team of highly effective people that problem solve together to create something great. Great for solving complex problems, but bad with risk averse team.
Democratic is about reaching consensus decision making, it’s about having everybody participating and creating a team. Great in situation where collaboration of different type of experts is needed, but bad with limited time or ressources
Altruistic is the servant leader, a kind of facilitator who serves the individuals and the team to interact better and work together better. Great for creating alignment and a community, bad with limited time or ressources.
To recap, I’m the guy the leader you call when a complex issue needs to be solved between people of different domains who don’t know how to work together.
I totally agree with this result. I’m a creative person with a talent to see situations as opportunities rather problems, great for solving complex problems. I’m also great at seeing things for different points of view and synthesizing what everyone has said into a direction and I try as much as possible to make everyone feel good when I work with people.
And yes, the negatives are what I hate in work. I hate working with people who are risk averse and don’t take chances or only see problems everywhere and use it as an excuse to stand still. I hate it when leaders take decisions without consulting their team. I especially hate it when leaders don’t take the time to show care and interest into their team members. And I especially hate to be rushed. Yes you sometimes have to move forward, but it doesn’t have to be rushed. If it is rushed, it means bad organizational skills to me.
For this style to work, an important thing is to put your ego on the side. It’s about trusting the team of smarter people than your to find the solutions. I’ve a few the opportunity to lead a few important art projects. Some with or less success. I noticed something, Whenever I stay in this humble, buddha, ignorant master, listening mode, those are the moment where I have the most impact as a leader, communicator and person. Whenever I try to impose my will, I seem to fail most of the time.
- Being an ignorant master
- listening understanding their needs
- seeing what their challenges are and
- pushing them forward both individually and as a team.
Those are the keys of that system, I’m not the best out there, I’m the one helping the best creating something great as a team. How, by being humble, not existing and communicating in such a way to not exist but facilitating communications between people who have trouble aligning with themselves.
To end this speech, here’s a story. I was in one job at the start of my career. I was in a multinational corporate environment. My hard skills were great, my soft skills not so much. They had me do a personality test, I remember what the expert said about my profile:” You’re they to call when faced with an impossibly complex situation. This still rings true today.
This is the lesson that I take with me and my challenge for 2024. I need to forget myself and me, be more in contact with people and help them connect with each other on subjects they don’t understand of each other. And maybe I’ll revive the vision of Joseph Jacotot.
And maybe one day, I’ll become a master of ignorance, and I will inspire you to become one as well.