What if our leaders were humble

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

a thank you to the nanowell elders

who are always here with us on this

country to their leaders

past and present and to those who are

emerging

we thank them for having us on their

country

and for me to have been able to live in

this beautiful place for so long

i come from the edge of the desert in

queensland

so it’s very different today i’m going

to talk to you about sacred leadership

something that i spent a very long time

learning about so what is sacred

leadership

i spent seven years at anu thinking

about the sacred leaders in my life

in my culture and thinking about the

leaders

in white culture imagine

imagine if the main quality

of our government our politicians

our business leaders our community and

social leaders

was humility

imagine that imagine somebody being

humble

about being a leader the two usually do

not go together

but to be a sacred leader in our culture

requires the practice of humility

for quite a long time before you’re

invited

to be an elder by those elders who have

already done that in their life

so what are sacred leaders

the people on this screen professor

robert he

keegan of harvard university spent 40

years in educational psychology

looking at leaders in the business world

in the education world

and he studied more than three thousand

companies with the myriad of leaders in

those companies

and he came up with traits and

characteristics

of higher levels of thinking and higher

levels of consciousness

in people that inspired other people to

follow ten years ago i found this

incredibly interesting

he said people like the dalai lama

nelson mandela martin luther king

mother teresa ordinary people

who because of something that came into

their life

did extraordinary things and all of us

have the potential for this

mother teresa was a nun in albania

who went to the slums of calcutta and

saw

people on the streets and in their faces

she saw jesus christ and she felt like

her christian duty

was to take care of the poor and she did

that all her life

and inspired others to do the same the

dalai lama was kicked out of his country

and he inspired other people around the

world to think about the human rights

of tibet and the human rights of people

whose countries are taken over by

violence and force

nelson mandela was a young man who went

through his cultural

spiritual journey of his clan

he then became what we might consider a

terrorist

he took up arms against the apartheid

regime

he was then put in jail for a very long

time and during that period of time of

hard labor

he started to think about who and what

he was and he came out of there

and he led a country into transformation

but his children say that he was an

ordinary human being

an ordinary father who disciplined them

so in some ways these people have

something

that makes them do something

extraordinary that old fellow you see in

the picture there

cuminara randall adopted me when i was

21 years of

age culturally because my grandparents

had died

and i wanted to follow the cultural law

and i you need your

grandparents to take you through

ceremony he and his niece barbara jigatu

are very

old anangu senior law people from the

central desert

they live next to uluru the rock

so for 40 odd years they have been doing

that for me that old lady you see in the

picture

was uneducated woman from the sin from

hyderabad in sin

she lived behind a veil as a child

she began to meditate and learn

meditation

she established a university that has

now

helped establish a university that is

now a un peace messenger

around the world with thousands of

centers and all they do

is teach meditation because they believe

that our

humanness our spirituality is to be at

peace with ourselves

and with each other

so what is it about sacred leadership

it’s about becoming

knowing being and doing

sacredness emotional intelligence

spirituality

in our lives with ourselves first with

other people in our culture our family

with our animal family with our planet

in our workplaces

and in all our relationships professor

keegan who i already mentioned

did the research to come up with what

was the levels of thinking

these highest consciousness levels of

thinking

and he found out that there were these

five levels

egocentric is where we begin most of the

people in the world well not most but a

big percentage 15

of leaders in companies are egocentric

think donald trump it’s my way or the

highway

they cannot perceive anybody else’s

needs

outside their own their needs have to be

done first

that’s what a child does that’s what a

child wants and they emotionally have

not developed beyond childhood

socialized the majority of people

stay at this level 50 to 60 percent

of business leaders he discovered was

socialized

their social status was their identity

i’m the vice president of exxonmobil i’m

the prime minister of australia

i’m the head of google i own snapchat

yeah i live in vorkloose

i drive a lexus i earn 500

000 a year i have 10 million in

investments

these are people who live in the

hierarchy of social class

50 to 60 percent of leaders

of companies in our world

independent is where we make

breakthrough where somebody has

something that happens in their life

that makes them look at their value

systems that makes them look at their

emotional

intelligence makes them transform their

behavior their thinking

and they do the inner work that requires

that

they usually also have a spiritual

foundation

or they start to develop one they could

come from a religious core

but they don’t call it religion it’s

usually

a caring for people are caring for the

planet a desire to do good to nurture

the world in a positive way

those people take us then into

interdependent and sacred

at independent we have 25 of people in

the world

who become those types of leaders and

you’ve seen them you’ve been

with them you know them they are people

who’ve been in your lives

they inspire you to follow they have

vision and they want to make a

difference

so how does it come about emotional

intelligence

is learned in our families of origin if

you grew up in a family

where there were adults in that family

who were abusive

violent addicted codependent

psychological

illnesses mental illnesses religious

fundamentalism

or who were colonised or acculturated to

a dominant culture

a hundred percent of the world as john

bradshaw says

to some degree or another in the western

world that is

your emotional development as a child

will be arrested

if it happens before the age of seven

you’ll stay at egocentric

and it’ll take a bit of recovery to move

beyond it

so we can think about that when we look

at some people in the world

so what are we interested in doing we’re

interested

in developing beyond those traumas

we’re interested in looking at healthy

functionality where society helps you

grow and develop

to transit all of those changes

in the developmental life now this is a

little chat i know you can’t read all

those words i’m not going to read them

all

but i’m going to show to you that when i

did my research and i showed these to

the elders that i talked to

who’d been through some of them great

traumas and

some of them who didn’t meet white

people until they were 16 and 17

who’d never left their country and who

were not traumatized

by colonisation they said look at all

those little bits where you’ve got the

colors and those words

that’s where we do ceremony to help the

kids go through those emotional

spiritual transitions of life that’s

when we take them

out to the desert and we help them move

from one thing to another

because they’re ready to do it we rub

the little children with ochre

when they’re little we smoke them when

they’re born we bring them into the

world

they’re a spiritual sacred being we

treat them as sacred beings and we bring

them up as sacred beings

so keegan put these two things together

eric erickson’s work on human psychic

social development

and his theory and that’s what he came

up with so if you are not traumatized in

any of your

development you’re more likely to be

able to become a sacred leader but in my

research

i discovered people who were traumatized

in aboriginal culture could go back to

culture and spirituality

and they could heal to such a degree

that they could become

sacred leaders and have the

characteristics of sacred leaders

in my life i had sacred leaders i

watched at least 20 elders before me and

i observed them throughout my life

i watch them be humble i watch them be

able to resolve conflict

i watch them be able to mediate and

facilitate

i watch them be able to carry out

punishment

for murder and rape and be able to do

that with a compassionate empathic

and discerning heart so first nations

knowledge

is very ancient we don’t know how how

long we’ve been here

why should anybody like white scientists

put a number

on how long we’ve been here we say that

this knowledge is time immemorial

it’s cultural social emotional spiritual

and mental and emotional intelligence

it’s built into a system of development

that was psychologically healthy

we had a lot of time to figure it out

we worked it out children are not

ever traumatized or disciplined before

the age of five

because they cannot work out what’s

going on and they embed

feelings in their memory with trauma

it’s very important not to do it to them

they’re taught by following come follow

me

i’ve had this experience from people

like this

the other characteristics of our culture

that teaches

us that our elders are our leaders and

they are invited to be our leaders

because they show humility because

they mentor other people and they bring

everyone up with compassion and love

it’s a lifelong learning process we do

it throughout our lives and we have

mentors throughout our lives even

in colonised communities even in

communities where they were

stolen or there were missions there are

elders still

who follow these laws this is how

chukapur our sacred way of being

we learn the laws of respect respect and

honor the self respect and honor

everyone else

i come in contact with respect and honor

country land

and i take care of it the main law

is to maintain and become the embodiment

of harmony

have harmony with myself my thoughts

my feelings my actions and my behaviour

i think very carefully

about the energy i put out into the

world

and i treat everybody the same way this

takes most of your life to learn

i’m 62 and i’m just getting there i’m

just getting there

my my um my grandfather kaminaro who’s

now passed away

at the age of 88 was the embodiment of

kanini

after being stolen at seven taken on the

back of a horse for two weeks

from king’s canyon to alice springs sent

to a camp on an

island he didn’t meet his mother before

she died 40 years later he gets back to

his country

and he goes through cultural law and

business he becomes a senior lawman

and he begins to hold the law of kanye

in harmony

when i started to go and visit them on

country

i learnt and saw the way in which

they were so humble regardless of what

went on

didn’t mean that they didn’t stand up

for themselves didn’t mean that they

weren’t strong didn’t mean that they

didn’t set boundaries

they did but what they always showed

was unconditional love and humility and

i hope in my life

i imagine in my life that at some point

an old person out there in the desert is

going to nod their heads at me

after a ceremony and say yes we invite

you

to be an elder because i’ve shown

the one thing i’ve tried to grow into

all my life

it’s very difficult to let go of the ego

and become humble

but imagine if we were in government

if we were the leaders of our country

and that’s how we were behaving

what a country we would be i’m going to

finish with the sacred song

i’m going to ask you all to close your

eyes we don’t know how old this song is

it’s a song that tells us about how we

have to look after law country

and everything in it in order for our

energy to be

maintained in harmony

now

oh

i’m pleased

thank you