The leadership imperative

All my life I wanted to become a leader  the person who led people to achieve a specific goal, whether in school, in an organization or the community. By all means the goal was clear and good but the purpose was not. The motive was not right, the heart not in sync. Yet I still strived to be one. Since then I believed I was born to become a student leader.

But when I was placed in a group of 80 other student leaders from all over the Philippines, my ego shrank to the smallest it could possibly be. Most of my batchmates in the congress organized by the Ayalas were presidents of an organization composed of presidents and so forth. I felt like being in the wrong place.

But every little detail in life has its purpose. Attending the said congress proved what Jaime Augustus Zobel De Ayala said that, “There is no certain leader. They come in all shapes and sizes, literally.”

Then the concept of leadership changed within a week full of stories, outdoor challenges, sharing and my own reflections. It was about them, not me. It was about what they can do to help, not my glory. My role was to lead, not command. To set an example, to be excellent.

Then a flame inside of me sparked. I was burning for the heritage of our own cultural identity. I wanted more to know who we are as Filipinos and what we can do. It dawned on me that the road to knowing thyself is more than difficult to undertake, painful in a sense. Our country’s history rooted on the grounds of foreign colonization wiped out our identity as a people that reality has made it clear - our ethnic tribes are now facing extinction.

I became agitated at the fact that soldiers die day after day after four years of struggling inside the military academy. Great leaders and servants spare their lives for the country fighting for peace when there must have been some other way.

But what are we doing as a people? Nothing I presume. We move forward as a nation leaving behind our colorful yesterday. Our lives go on as if there is no problem but young people like me are reasonably disturbed. We are moved at the fact that there is so much to do to bring back the prime of the Philippines. To be head on with today’s technology and erasing our past does not pay forward to who we are today.

And maybe that is the biggest take home I can share – to pay forward, to give back. It is a single step to take to take our progress into a higher level. It means so much to give back to a country that has always been yours all your life. It is a nation that has never betrayed you since birth. The Philippines is rich in all ways, it only takes a matter of making the first ripple, the first throw of a starfish back into the sea.

But the ripple is not done alone. No man can carry the world on his shoulders.

In a pool of young leaders catching the same fire as mine, there is so much work to do. But this is the leadership imperative. When we hold hands amidst distance and seas, work together for the better while carefully adapting to the ever changing reality, we can be confident of a better country.

The Philippines needs more great leaders; those with the imperative, those who understand what it means to serve its people and not the other way around.

**Published in the Freeman Newspaper on February 12, 2013