Fighting with Myself - Leadership

 

One of the points that came up was fighting with myself within being in a leadership role. How i was in the beginning a person with no leadership skills and quite lazy to diving right into the role of being a leader and my idea of what i leader is or should be.

Before I came to the farm I was a lazy person. In school I did the least possible and generally stayed away from doing allot of work.

When I first came to the farm I did not know what to expect. We saw that there was quite a bit of work needed to be done and got started on it right away. Now there is me, my whole life trying to avoid any kind of work, now facing it head on. Understand that I looked forward to it, but faced allot of resistance when I started.

The first thing we did on the farm was unpacking everything. There was some heavy lifting involved. I don’t know if any of you ever moved to a new place, but the new farm was quite exciting so unpacking everything and settling in was fun. I did not feel like doing the work, but did it anyway.

At that time there were only 2 able bodied guys. LJ and I. I was the oldest so I took it upon myself, or more I believed I should take it upon myself to take the responsibility of being a ‘’leader’’. I did not have any idea what that means, I just dived right in.

I noticed that people would come to me when needing some advice on a particular task and I felt important within it. I believed it important to be in a leader position.  I defined myself as a leader, and to be a leader Is to have discipline and not be lazy. So I believed that I should fight myself, my laziness to keep it from creeping up on me and hinder my definition of being a leader.

Every time when I am faced with a feeling of resistance - I would fight it. The thoughts that would come up is: can’t give up, can’t give in, must push. I experienced it as a feeling creeping up bringing me down and that I would fight it to stop it

And I fought, hard. Eventually on some of the points it became natural, I changed. Where I no longer needed to fight myself. I was disciplined within myself in tasks. There were still some points I fought myself with.

 

What is interesting is that within all this my experience of myself was like me being hyper all the time, placing myself in hyperdrive in order to do everything believing it was the only way to get things done, but its not. Pushing through resistance does not mean fighting it - because the resistance is me and thus pointless to fight myself. I have been slowing myself down the past few weeks and breathing and stopped the endless fight with myself.