Common Purpose Blog » hero’s journey http://commonpurpose.net We run courses which give people the inspiration, skills and connections to become better leaders both at work and in society. Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:15:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Fire in the Belly http://commonpurpose.net/2008/09/fire-in-the-belly/ http://commonpurpose.net/2008/09/fire-in-the-belly/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:07:16 +0000 Ethan Ohs http://commonpurpose.wordpress.com/?p=35 I was 22, broke, just finished my degree, and had no idea what my next move in life would be when my aunt pulled me aside and predicted that my 20s would be extremely hard and that I was going to learn lessons I was not prepared for, and I was going to make compromises I had once foolishly vowed I would never make.  Like all young people I laughed at the prospect of ever changing my philosophy of life.

This would not be the last time that my ideology would be challenged, as it turns out it was going to happen more and more the longer my career continued.  Even scarier for me now is to think of the words of my mentor: ‘Ethan, it won’t ever get easier, you won’t ever find some great clarity, you have to learn to hold the unknown and exist in the transition.  That is what leadership is about.’

His words come back to haunt me regularly, exist in transition, allow change to occur and be comfortable with the unknown.  A far cry from the idealism I held in my early 20s when I thought I had a clear understanding of who I was and where I wanted to be and how the world worked and how it should work in the future.  I had principles!

As an emerging leader the Hero’s Journey is an ever-present reminder of the struggles I will face.  As a leader I will be tempted.  As a leader I will be mislead, I will lose battles in order to win wars, I will retreat into myself to emerge a new man like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

This is all well and good – my hero’s journey is a complicated path, in this path I am fighting to hold dear to my idealism as I develop a sense of pragmatism.  I must wage a war against reality while questioning my Utopia.  It is holding two objects that seem to be completely disparate and making something whole from them.

I don’t think it is too different from other people’s ideology.  I am hoping that by remaining aware of what is happening to me, by questioning it, by pushing and questioning it that much more, I am making myself a superior leader rather than just a leader.

What my youth failed to prepare me for is that life is a journey and not a destination.  Rather than trying to control or extinguish the fire in my belly I hope to feed it and in feeding it I will know the best way to lead, and the skills I have developed along the way will keep the smoke that fire creates from blinding me as I make new decisions.

Ethan Ohs

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