I moved away from my home country and my family 17 years ago, a lifetime away. Having not one but two home countries is a privilege, especially when both places truly feel like home. Despite the passage of time, every time I visit my country of birth I feel instantly at home. It’s the family, the people, the language, the food and the smells. And on my last visit back home, I was lucky to experience a nostalgic visit back to a time and place that formed an important part of my life. I decided to attend a high school reunion and take a trip down memory lane. I went to a relatively small all-girl high school (100 in the class.) Since I moved out of the country, I haven’t really kept in touch with any of my high school friends. But as soon as I walked in, it was as if I never left. We had a great turnout and had a lot of fun reminiscing about the good times. As the stories came out, I was amazed how easy it was to reconnect and chat like old friends. I realized how lucky I was to have the opportunity to see my friends again and catch up. With some, it actually felt like we’d just spoken a week ago, and all those years we hadn’t seen each other seemed to just fade away. Many said that high school was the best time of their lives. I can’t say that for myself, but certainly these were good years of learning, growth, and great friendships. For me, it was never a conscious decision to not keep in touch. It’s just that with the best of intentions, I moved on and got busy with school, jobs, raising a family, and building a new life. While there are so many ways to keep in touch with faraway friends, staying in touch across the miles proved harder than building new friendships. But I still have a warm place in my heart for those friends who shared my formative years. We have an innate need to belong to a family, a village and a tribe. Our identity often comes from belonging, first to our family of origin and then to our families of choice that provide social and emotional support, our tightly knit safety net against a world that can be a cold and lonely place. Self-chosen tribes are formed around shared experiences, interests and values. Tribe members are there for each other in celebrating milestones and successes as well as in offering support in tough times. We thrive as individuals and as a small tribe when we are surrounded by a close-knit group of people we love and trust, whether our DNA family or our like-minded family. A high school reunion is one of those milestones that make you to take stock of where you are in your life, the people in your life, and what you’ve accomplished in the last couple of decades. Taking stock of my life, I started thinking about Seth Godin’s “Tribes.” How true it is that we operate in tribes, and that there are opportunities to have a positive impact at every turn. I believe the book has been referred to as a “must read” book to any leader. And we are all potential leaders. Godin doesn’t provide a leadership formula. But often it’s not about the information we get but rather about being inspired to think about an idea and then form our own approach. The book would push you to ponder the question of what makes one a leader. “Tribes” isn’t meant to provide any answers but rather to ask the question for us to explore and find our own answers. It inspires people to lead, rather than teach how to lead. It encourages everyone take a fresh look at the concept of leadership and create an individual leadership roadmap. To me, the book was a gentle reminder that leadership is about offering something unique to the world, bringing value to others; to the tribes we belong to and beyond. Thinking about tribes I’ve remembered the following definition of a leader by John Quincy Adams: “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader” Leadership is an attitude, not a position. It’s about having clarity about making a difference and affecting that change. Leadership is having an impact on others by being a caring positive influence. The job of a leader is to help others develop their full potential and see them succeed. We all have opportunities to exert positive influence over situations and to change things for the better in ways large and small, one good deed at a time. Leadership is all about behavior, being the “go-to-person” the glue that holds a tribe or an organization together. We are the sum of our experiences, and as leaders we use all that we have and everything that we have learned in our choice of words and actions as we pay it forward. And I’ll end with the question we were asked at our high school graduation party: “what impact do you want to leave on the world?” Most of us have not yet made the big impact our idealistic 18-year-old self dreamed of making. But we’ve all made a difference in the communities where we live and work. And now that we are older and wiser, with the perspective of time, the lessons learned and the wisdom gained as we traveled our life paths, we are better equipped to make the changes in our life to continue to affect the change we want to see in the world.
