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