Many people view the responsibilities of leadership with a jaundiced eye. After all, using our God given gifts is a daunting task filled with risk and fraught with dangers. What if we fail? What will people think? How could we ever overcome the embarrassment? How would we handle the success? When we fully embrace the leadership path, we set ourselves up for challenges beyond the fairy tale ending of living “happily ever after”. When you study the lives of leaders you realize that they all failed multiple times, with intense emotional distress, and in multiple fields of endeavor. Winston Churchill lost more elections than he won, and was ostracized during the 1930′s when he was almost universally branded a “war monger”. Yet he refused to conform to what others thought, took his lumps, and stayed the course his internal compass dictated. Should you accept a leadership role, rest assured that it will be hard. The easier path is to “hide out”, play it safe, and live a “reasonable” life. No one seems to mind; most people seem happy being “normal”. Every decision we make in life has consequences, and the tragic result is we become victims of our own limited vision of who we are and what we can become, and the world is denied your full contribution. Once we select the “easy” path, it becomes our default decision, and our “universe” becomes very limited. We are held captive by fear in disguise of “security”.

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