Would you consider yourself a leader? In other words, are your team members motivated when working with you? Many people mistakenly equate leaders to authorities. Authorities use the “fear factor” to push their team members whereas a leader inspires his team members. As a leader, you are in charge of the team but not in total control of the team. The delicate difference between being in charge and controlling in leadership is not taught directly to us via any formal education, even when we pick up responsibilities in clubs and societies affairs. In martial art training, especially in the traditional ones such as Aikido, leadership is cultivated in regular training. The senior members are usually paired up with junior members during the training. The approach for which the senior members adopt in guiding the juniors is far from giving instructions directly. The corrections and guidance on how to do a technique are being done indirectly, with the least amount of words if possible. The interesting question is how do the seniors communicate with the juniors during the pairing-up training? For starters, the seniors would help the juniors with the techniques by offering minimal resistance and even moving the relevant body parts for the juniors. At this point, some may claim that this sort of training method is impractical but this could be an in-depth discussion topic for future articles. Allow me to summarise the rationale of the training method with a simple fact: juniors, being the beginners, are not expected to be able to perform the techniques perfectly. Eventually, the difficulty level of the training shall be escalated as the training journey continues. The seniors’ role, in this context, is to create the “right feelings” to the juniors as the juniors perform the technique on them. The seniors, in this situation, who have access to the bigger picture (knowing the entire technique) are akin to leaders. The juniors who require guidance, resemble regular team members under leadership. As the training continues, without saying a word, the juniors will be guided by the “right feelings” that are being implanted deeply in their brains. In the absence of the seniors, the juniors, though may not be able to execute the technique perfectly, would be able to assess the quality of their executions, solely based on the “right feelings”. “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way.” The same goes with leadership. It is the team synergy or the “right feelings” that fuel the team motivation. Without exerting total control onto the team, an alternative which you could explore is to guide the team like how traditional martial arts training is like -- implanting the right feelings to the team. This is important because the team will then be able to develop their confidence along the journey, even better, establishing their own unique styles and strengths to contribute to the visions of the leaders! Slowly, you would notice that a great part of leadership is resulted from good teamwork where we help one another to be more successful by growing together!
You are a leader not because you hold the chief title or any presidential position, but when you start behaving like one -- caring for the people around you and aspire to grow them into greater figures than you. So, how does your training help you to grow as a leader? More importantly, are you ready to lead a team and possibly grow them as next leaders who could achieve more and greater than you?
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