Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Leadership

The French Emperor Napoleon I had a very novel question he always asked when presented with a recommendation that someone was promoted to the rank of General in his armies.

After dutifully listening to the inevitable lengthy list of all the attributes and qualifications of the person concerned, he would ask pointedly – "Yes, yes, that’s all very well - but is he lucky?"

At the Stars Institute of Learning and Leadership, we have no ambitions to try and produce military dictators who then try to take over the known world!  Even so, Napoleon’s mention of luck does have some relevance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership programs.

That is - what is luck in the context of leadership?

That’s actually a complex question and we do not pretend to have all the answers to it but what we do know is that many events, both positive and negative, attributed to ‘luck’ are in fact no such thing.

Programs looking to develop Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership need to take into account the fact that more than 200 years of cultural subjugation has led to members of these societies having a predisposition, perhaps understandably so, to believe that they are ‘unlucky’.

Breaking down the anticipation of failure and encouraging people to think that to some extent they can create their own success isn’t easy.  When it is achieved, it can also be difficult to encourage the realisation that success has come about as a result of their personal development rather than simply that their luck has changed for the better, as that can lead to thinking that it could reverse itself in future.

Of course, misfortune can strike anyone at any time and for reasons they could not possibly have foreseen or had any degree of control over.  Once again though, it’s important not to see that as yet more evidence of inevitable bad luck but instead as those inevitable life obstaclesthat need to be overcome.

We know that this change in mindset can be achieved and we regularly achieve it as part of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership programs.  Why not come along and allow us to convince you that luck plays a much smaller part in your life than you might believe? 

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Do you cut-and-run?

There is an age-old expression along the lines of it being useless to "flog a dead horse".

Few expressions are quite so evocative. The idea that a dead horse is going to run faster if you hit it harder with a crop is self-evidently ludicrous.

The expression is meant to convey the wisdom that all of us need to sometimes accept that something we have been trying to achieve just isn’t going to happen.  It’s meant to stop us investing further time, effort, emotion and possibly money, in something that is by definition doomed to failure.

Of course, like so many other old sayings, while there is some wisdom here, there are also some dangers.

Clearly all of us need to recognize when something is, to all intents and purposes, effectively dead in the water. Trying to constantly make a success of something that is doomed is a waste of your time and effort.

Yet, there is a flip side to this. Sometimes going that extra mile and making that extra bit of effort can make all the difference between success and failure.  This leads us into the domain of equally famous sayings such as “perseverance wins” or “try, try and try again”.

So, how do you know when something simply doesn’t justify any more effort being put into it and can be legitimately described as being a failure and that activity where a little more persistence may yield fruit?

As you might have guessed by now, there is no easy answer to this.  This is largely to do with experience of life coupled with the application of certain analytical techniques which we at the Stars Institute will teach you to think about.

However, what is important is not to pull the plug on any of your endeavors or enterprises due to a lack of self-confidence.  On balance, when speaking of leadership development and training within Aboriginal communities, there is probably a much greater pre-disposition towards a lack of confidence leading to a too-quick jump to assuming failure rather than a stubborn and irrational refusal to accept defeat.

Like so many things in life, differentiating between failure and a further challenge is difficult and something that can stretch our judgmental capabilities.  We are here to help you think about these things and show you how to do it. 

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