Our values & servant leadership - Courage
When it comes to leadership, values matter. In our current political climate, it is vital that elected leaders clarify their values, and live and lead on a daily basis with the courage to stay committed to those values.
At New Politics Leadership Academy, we understand the importance of modeling this truth. We make the work of getting clear about values central to our approach to training and supporting servant leaders. Our team emerged from a long process of deliberation with a list of five core values that we believe are key to servant leadership and to the work that we do. You can learn about our five core values here.
Throughout this year, various members of our team will be writing about our organizational values and how you can apply them to your service. We hope you take the time to read our posts and do some reflection on how you are living out your own core values in 2020.
In American culture, we often imagine courage means being a superhero and accomplishing a superhuman feat. In reality, courage is much less showy than this — it’s a sum of many smaller, daily acts. Courage is enacted when we choose, every day, to do what is right instead of making decisions from a place of fear.
I think about courage when I am working with our candidates running for office and staffers altering their lives to support their campaigns. It takes courage to uproot your life and move across the country to work for someone you don’t know. It also takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there into the arena and run for office. And once our candidates are in office, leaders with service backgrounds continue to put others first, acting courageously as elected officials even if doing the right thing is not politically convenient.
One thing I have learned over the years is that courage is often talked about in an abstract way, but all it takes is practice. I’ve compiled some ideas below that have helped me to build my courage as a social entrepreneur, and I hope you’ll consider applying them to your own life:
Create a circle of authenticity
Think of a few people in your life who support you and are not afraid to tell you the truth. Tell these people about your goals and ask them to hold you accountable. Courage takes a community of supporters to challenge you, pick you back up when you fail, and cheer you on when you reach your goals.
Proximity is essential
Not being close to suffering that occurs in our communities can lead to complacency and apathy. It would be easy to quit politics when things get hard. There are lots of other options to fill one’s time. But I am reminded daily how broken politics impacts the people in our communities and country. It is difficult, especially right now, to get involved in new things, but consider ways you can get engaged in your neighborhood and virtually — like buying groceries for elderly or immunocompromised neighbors, or volunteering to make caring calls to check on individuals in your community.
Reflect on your values and live them in your daily life
Staying centered and true to your core values requires courage. It’s important to create space to reflect on your values and how the actions you’ve taken fit or don’t fit within your value system. Living a life aligned with your values requires the courage to know when you are not following that path and to make the changes necessary. Not sure what your core values are? Our program Answering the Call can help! Taking a periodic look at your values will give you the courage to act in ways that reflect what is important to you, and equally as importantly, will make it more evident when you’re acting from a place of fear instead of courage.