Courageous Leadership: Principle-Centered Leadership

Courageous Leadership: Principle-Centered Leadership Presented By Stephen Pocklington, CRE, ITE

Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like the roads across the earth. For actually there were no roads to begin with, but when many people pass one way a road is made.Lu Xun, 1921

The people we have met on this journey are living this story.They are pushing forward the edge of hope with what they prove is possible. They are creating new space in which each of us can find hope.Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe, 2002 Copeland Center

Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see--in the mind’s eye--a path to a better future. Hope acknowledges the significant obstacles and deep pitfalls along the path. True hope has no room for delusion. Clear-eyed, hope gives us the courage to confront our circumstances, and the capacity to surmount them. For all my patients, hope, true hope, has proved as important as any medication I might prescribe.Jerome Groopman, MD, 2004 Copeland Center

Beware how you take hope away from another human beingOliver Wendell Homes Copeland Center

Hope isn’tthe same as Optimism: • Hope isn’t blind to suffering and struggle; it has survived them • Hope is rooted in the experienced or witnessed reality of resilience and recovery • Hope is the undaunted belief that tomorrow can be better than today despite what the pessimists and so-called “realists” may say Copeland Center

This kind of hope isn’t clean or tidy. Honest hope has an edge. It’s messy. It requires that we let go of pat answers, all preconceived formulas, all confidence that our sailing will be smooth. It’s not a resting point. Honest hope is movementFrances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe, 2002 Copeland Center

Hope can arrive only when you recognize that there are real options and that you have genuine choices.Hope can only flourish when you believe that what you do can make a difference, that your actions can bring a future different from the present.Jerome Groopman, MD, 2004 Copeland Center

To have hope, then, is to acquire a belief in your ability to have some control over your circumstances.You are no longer entirely at the mercy of forces outside yourself.Jerome Groopman, MD, 2004 Copeland Center

Before we can realize who we are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an imposter and a stranger.Thomas Merton, 1961 Copeland Center

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self understanding.George Bernard Shaw, 1903 Copeland Center

Only those who have helped themselves know how to help others, and to respect their right to help themselvesGeorge Bernard Shaw, 1891 Copeland Center

We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. Mark Vonnegut,1997 Copeland Center

Care is a special relationship characterized by consent rather than control. Therefore, its auspices are individual and associational. For those who need care, we must recognize the community as the appropriate social tool.John McKnight, 1995 Copeland Center

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound to mine, let us work together.Aboriginal Woman Copeland Center

Nobody’s free until everybody’s free. Fannie Lou Hamer Illustration by Harvey Chan, Courtesy Southern Poverty Law Center Copeland Center

Courageous Leadership: Principle-Centered Leadership