03 Jan Day 10: a future of leadership
The projects of the future start from this journey. There were not alternatives: something special connects Italy to Israel and something likewise important will born from us, young leaders.
The time has come, as we are used to say, to draw conclusions. We are sat in circle and there are already few tears that drop as this is one of the last moments together.
Eliav asked us to look inside us to find an “insight”, a personal reflection about this trip and a question that we will take home with us.
An instance of silence and then some popcorns are ready: at LEAD we use this method, one can express his own idea when he feels ready and hence the effect is similar to the one of the pot in which popcorns pop casually, one after the other.
It’s not so difficult to write in this page what we told each other, since the emotions, the memories and the dreams for the future were the same for all of us; maybe what is difficult is to find the right words to transfer to you, the reader, that magic that we felt in the room and the nostalgia that squeezes my stomach as I reread the notes that Maayan wrote while we were speaking.
Some of us knew that what was going to be said would have been reductive compared to the magnificence of the experience that we had lived: our mind had not yet elaborated the enormous quantity of things that we had done during those ten days and the magnificence of the people that we had met. Everything seemed – and still seems – so magic and so unreal. Beginning from the hugs in our first meeting: so spontaneous, full of affection and more powerful than any other presentation; to then moving to the community that we have created and to that common language that we spoke. I don’t mean English, but Leadership. The majority of us was fascinated by the fact that we didn’t need explanations: Italian and Israeli leaders feel the same fears, find the same obstacles, want to solve the issues of the educational system, of integration, of relationship among people… There was no difference between Italy and Israel and we, leaders, have created a community because each of us wants to do something good, because each of us cares about the others, because we want to make the world a better place.
Some have said that the moment we met was the moment in which they found people who believe in the same things in which they believe in, that type of people that they’d been looking for since a while. Others discovered a special type of relationships, that in Italy, in the real life, they had never experienced and now think that we are their best friends. Others understood that we never stop discovering new things about people, even when we have been knowing them since our childhood.
There is someone who throughout the journey has always dreamed about us, leaders, together, and who promises us that the future will really be beautiful. There’s no need to ask her how to get there quickly as we all know it: TOGETHER. Each of us is a leader his/her own way and there are no equal definitions for leadership; this way only together with other leaders we can gain an extra value, a super power that really can allow us to overcome all the obstacles and make hopes, dreams and things to change the world outside us real. Hence there is someone who adds that the ingredient to be added to leadership is: LOVE.
Two ingredients are still missing to the magical potion: be OURSELVES and do not stop DREAMING. Obviously there is the need for an “Israeli style” story to add the second last ingredient: the story of Reb Zusha, one of the top rabbis in history, who is sure that once got to Paradise he won’t be asked why he wasn’t a certain person during his life, but instead, why he has not been Reb Zusha, why not himself.
Finally, we are asked to keep dreaming and believing in our dreams: it’s not something childish, instead, it’s actually out of two dreams that LEAD and LEADIT were born.
Once the potion is done we know that we have two options: keeping this journey as a precious memory or exiting LEAD office and do big things, being committed to change things, “to get involved” – to be fully participative in what we do. No one of us needs time to choose between the two options, as for all of us it’s clear that our option is the second one. It’s not a case that the questions that we put on the table were: how can we keep in contact? How can we foster what was born during the journey? How can we recreate the same magic that made us so connected with also people outside LEAD? How can we bring what we learned in our everyday life? How can we keep the serenity that these days brought us in our hectic life? How can we speak about leadership with people who have never met it? How can we be real leaders in a world that wants bosses, power and abundance? How can we make LEADIT better?
All these questions make this journey a “starting point”, a new beginning towards something that really seems bigger than us and that has the ambition to demolish borders, all of them, of all types.
The first step has been already made: we, Italian alumni, have thought about some projects to start and develop in collaboration with our Israeli friends. To be honest, there was no alternative: something special connects us and something likewise special will born from us.
Tosca Naletto
