One of
the biggest inhibitors to the development of leadership potential in First Nations
peoples is that of a lack of self-confidence.
To be
fair, this isn’t just an issue for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. All around the world, leadership development
programmes have to work hard to try and empower people who, for one reason or
another, suffer from low self-esteem and low self-confidence.
Of
course, in the context of Australian history, this is a particular problem for
the First Nations – as we see regularly at the Stars Institute.
Yet
being self-confident as a leader needs to be balanced against the need to also
be capable of realistically assessing how well you are performing.
This
isn’t easy to balance for any indigenous leadership
program because there will be a tendency on the part of many people to fall
into one of the following traps:
·
That
they are somehow lacking the pre-requisites for effective self-development and
leadership meaning, by a faulty logic extension, that they must always be wrong
when a difference of opinion or problem arises;
·
That
their performance in a given activity or task by definition cannot have been
good enough because for most of their life they have been told that they aren’t
capable;
By
complete contrast, that leadership means never being wrong or at least if you
are, that you can’t admit to it.
In a
brief blog of this nature, there is no way that we have the space to outline
how effective leadership programmes deal with these sometimes conflicting
tendencies.
What is
important is to teach techniques to assess the realities of a situation and to
be able to differentiate between an allocation of responsibility and
blame.
If
something goes wrong, you can’t learn from it unless you understand how the
problem arose and who was responsible including, if necessary identifying
objectively that the fault was yours. Of course, that doesn’t mean beating
yourself up either.
Blame,
whether personal or directed at others, is simply recrimination and that’s
usually pointless and counter-productive.
Developing
the strength of your personal character is all about being able to objectively
decide when you are right and when you are wrong. It’s not an easy skill to learn but we’ll
help you!
