By background I was an Executive Coach and so sometimes, when I feel stuck in my current role as founder and CEO of Emerging Leaders, I coach myself. Usually with a blank sheet of paper in front of me, I begin by writing down the core question that I am struggling with. As a founder of a charity that was born in the slums of Lusaka 11 years ago, the mistakes I have made in the past years and the challenges we face in the future, can often crowd out the clarity and focus needed for the present.
Today I wrote down the question “What is the BIG idea for Emerging Leaders?’ and as I reflected I came up with five – all born out of the work we are doing or trying to do at the moment.
Big idea 1 – The right kind of leadership training liberates the potential of people trapped in the cycles of intergenerational poverty. It is transformative in people’s lives in a host of ways.
Big idea 2 – You can and need to start as young as you can in order to break the intergenerational cycles of hopelessness. You can teach leadership to a five year old if you base it on timeless principles.
Big idea 3 – Transformational Leadership training is ‘the thing before the thing’. It’s the new operating system in a person’s life that unlocks all of the software needed to live a flourishing life.
Big idea 4 – You transform the life of the child by transforming the life of the teacher, the parent and the child.
Big idea 5 – Transformation, or change, requires praxis – the dynamic combination of a theory of change in action. Waking people up, mindset change, developing first level skills, all sit within this praxis.
Then, like a good coach, I looked at my list of five and asked myself
“If you could chose just one of these to focus on, which would it be?”
And strangely the answer seemed very simple; as simple as the day I stood in a Lusaka slum and saw the extremity of poverty destroying the layers of generations that I was looking at and realised that what people needed wasn't just handouts, or drip down Aid – they needed the find the leader within themselves, the author of their own story, the discovery of their own pen to write it and the change in mindsets to work it through. If they could learn to lead themselves then they would lead themselves out of poverty.
So what is THE big idea?; the one out of the five?
That transformational leadership development, based on timeless principles, (which means it would apply to anyone, anywhere, any age, any culture, any economic strata) enables the poor to get themselves out of poverty.
And it works. This simple simple idea works. Having now trained over 40,000 people through Emerging Leaders (www.emerging-leaders.net) trainers and seen impact on over half a million lives – in every dimension of those lives from income, to health, to education, to reconciliation, to community security – people can lead themselves out of poverty. And they do.
With the worlds youth population exploding, if we could just put this BIG IDEA into the hands of young people, with all of their amazing potential then we would witness a generation of young people leading themselves and their peers out of poverty.