Calling Forth The Genius in Self and Others
I’m going to tell a story from my school days about one of my teachers. In fact, my favourite teacher, a man called Bill Roberts. This is to illustrate a quality of leadership that I feel is needed in our world.
And Bill Roberts, he taught me English and history, but actually he taught me a lot more than that. And at the time, I was 14 years old, he was in his 60s, very experienced teacher and quite eccentric. And also a great storyteller.
So he was a cricket fanatic, so he’d often tell stories about cricket, but he’d also teach us history and English, two different classes, one of history and one was English. And he’d sometimes turn up at a an English lesson and start teaching history, and then say how many of you are in my English set? And we’d all put our hands up, and it didn’t really matter the subject, because it was more teaching in the more general sense.
He was an educator. Education means to ‘lead out’ – ‘educare’ as in Duke to lead out, a Duke is a leader. Educate literally means to ‘lead out’. And so he had a way of drawing out from the students their uniqueness and their potential.
How did he do this?
I think, first, by being aware of the potential in himself and creating a space within himself, and in the field. Because when you create it inside yourself, you’re also creating a space in the field.
So he would ask a question, without there being a right answer necessarily. He’d ask us a question, and then when people responded, he’d then ask another question to take us deeper, to make us reflect deeper.
And this way of seeing the potential in each of us, it made a big difference to me. Because at the time, I really wasn’t enjoying school. I felt quite lonely. I felt a very competitive environment. It was an all male school, and quite difficult to bring your sensitivity out, to value sensitivity.
It’s a lot of competition between the male, young males and the teachers, most of them. So he had a way of seeing that, and he saw something in me, and honoured it and respected it, and managed to call that forward. It made a huge difference in my life.
And I think this way of leading out, leading forth. This way of education, it’s needed in our world by our leaders. To lead out, actually to ‘call out’ means to ‘evoke’, evoke a out voc, as in vocal, to call forth from people.
So we need the ability to evoke in our team, in our family, in our class, in our community, in our world. To call forth, to lead out from each other, the unique essential qualities that we all carry. Because all of us carry a certain genius, a uniqueness that is needed in our world now.
And we need to call it out of ourselves, and call it out of each other, to meet the challenges of our time, the challenges of the environment, the social challenges, all these different things that we have in our world. We can meet these challenges, but by really calling them out of ourselves, calling ourselves to stand tall, and meet what is needed by the time that we live in.
So this is evocative leadership. And of course, I’ve been involved in evocative leadership mastery for some time. We study this in depth, but all of us can begin to bring this by creating space within us, by seeing the potential in ourselves and in others and in calling that out. Maybe through questions, open questions, brilliant way of evoking each other.
So these are some thoughts about evocative leadership and educative leadership. Thank you for watching.
