Last October, the International Union of Superiors General (UISG) organised a new online course on leadership: “Leadership, vulnerability and self-knowledge”. This is how they present it on their website:
Authentic religious leadership can only be exercised by learning to know oneself and to embrace one’s own vulnerability in order to embrace that of others.
Leading, moreover, requires discernment that is rooted in true personal knowledge, leads along paths of freedom and thus scrutinises God’s ways at the crossroads of human relationships and decisions.
This training offers paths, tools for self-knowledge, for accepting human vulnerability from God’s affectionate gaze and for exercising leadership with maturity.
The speaker, Paula Jordão, from Verbum Dei, begins by saying: “We realise that religious leadership can only be done from a personal knowledge, from one’s own vulnerability. It requires a lot of discernment and discernment requires us to know ourselves inside in order to scrutinise God’s ways”.
It is a simple, profound and practical course that we encourage you to listen and work. We all lead in some aspect of life and, if not, at least we have the arduous task of leading ourselves on a daily basis. Perhaps we often feel like the egg that Paula gives us as a symbol: with a lot of life inside but vulnerable, in need of time, protection, with a lot of hidden life and a potential that does not come out. We can see it in ourselves or in the people we live with, work with or those we lead… or who lead us.
We encourage you to spend a few hours listening to Paula Jordão. It is worth it.
