{"id":9836,"date":"2016-10-25T04:51:17","date_gmt":"2016-10-25T11:51:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=9836"},"modified":"2016-10-25T04:51:17","modified_gmt":"2016-10-25T11:51:17","slug":"theres-a-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/theres-a-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"There&#8217;s a hero"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Heroic leadership by Chris Lowney<\/p>\n<p><\/strong>As the great philosopher Mariah Carey once said:<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cThere&#8217;s a hero\/If you look inside your heart\/You don&#8217;t have to be afraid\/Of what you are\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Chris Lowney agrees with Mariah, it seems. Using the Jesuits as the inspiration for his <em>heroic leadership<\/em>, he riffs on four key leadership traits that marked out this particular company (of Jesus). The first of these is <strong>self-awareness<\/strong> \u2013 the ability to look inside your heart and to be who you are as a person and a leader:<\/p>\n<p>\u201ca leader\u2019s most compelling leadership tool is who he or she is\u2026\u201d (Lowney:19)<\/p>\n<p>The Jesuits go through a 30-day period of self-reflection using the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, carrying out a self-inventory and dealing with misplaced affections of the heart. They continue on this journey of reflection using the daily prayer of examen.<\/p>\n<p>The other three areas that Lowney highlights are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Ingenuity \u2013 confident optimistic innovation<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Love \u2013 engaging others positively and supportively<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Heroism \u2013 the spirit of magis (<em>more<\/em>)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>These four pillars are not explicitly stated in Jesuit writings, but are drawn out by the author. While all the points are interesting and well made, and there are some very interesting leadership insights, they seem a little arbitrary to me. Because this is not an explicitly Christian book, Lowney seems at times to downplay the <em>God factor<\/em> in the spread of this movement and in its outstanding achievements and adventures.<\/p>\n<p>For example:<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cLoyola\u2019s personal commitment was to Christian service, and the Exercises\u2019 thrust and subject matter are emphatically Christian. But they work as a leadership tool not because they are grounded in a religious worldview but because they build the personal resources required for freely chosen, powerful, and successful human commitments\u2026\u201d (Lowney:116)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Self-awareness, courage, ingenuity, heroism are all expressed in a fairly humanistic way and seem to move away from the centrality of God, of the cross, of the ultimate motivation for Christian service and sacrifice.<\/p>\n<p>The self-awareness piece of the Jesuits is surely much more than the emotional intelligence or personal reflection that you can pick up in a Goleman book or in the latest thinking on EQ. Ingenuity and adaptability was sourced from a radical obedience to the gospel and a willingness to abandon all for the sake of the call. The love of which Lowney writes was divine in its origin and sounds like the compelling love of the Apostle Paul. The examen is not some mindfulness mumbo-jumbo, but is a prayerful walk and consciousness of God and his presence throughout the day.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not that I didn\u2019t like and agree with many of the leadership insights in the book. Plenty of underlining took place. The highlighter pen was out in abundance.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s just that I think the central thread that holds it all together is vastly underplayed to a secular audience, and once that thread is pulled, the whole thing unravels.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heroic leadership by Chris Lowney As the great philosopher Mariah Carey once said: \u201cThere&#8217;s a hero\/If you look inside your heart\/You don&#8217;t have to be afraid\/Of what you are\u2026\u201d Chris Lowney agrees with Mariah, it seems. Using the Jesuits as the inspiration for his heroic leadership, he riffs on four key leadership traits that marked [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[934,933],"class_list":["post-9836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-heroic-leadership","tag-lowney","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/89"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9836\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}