BoldUlysses.com

They say that leadership is influence. Far removed from the popular paradigm of being visibly in charge or giving orders, true leadership can be distilled to the ability to influence others. Our ability to lead, then, depends on our effectiveness in influencing others. And since most of us frown at the thought of passivity, instead wanting to take initiative, push forward, fulfill our ambitions, lead ourselves first and then others, the whole concept of influence takes on a new level of significance.

Have you ever sat back and thought about the ways others have influenced you? Think about your personal habits, drives, thoughts patterns. A lot of that is derived from more spread-out presences in our lives: parents, old friends, siblings and such who impress upon our lives over the course of many years. But I’d hazard a theory, depending on our individual temperament, that there are key moments in our lives where others have made a difference that changed us permanently. Maybe it was something they said, or a pattern of actions we witnessed, or a consistent response to a particular situation. Whatever the case, in that moment or small series of moments, our life was truly changed. We deal so much in the lofty, ethereal realm of concepts, motivation, platitudes and pep talks; this is where the rubber meets the road, this is influence.

• Colleen: It’s hard to overestimate her influence during the six months or so that we knew each other and the one month that we dated. Freshman year of college, Fall ’97 to Spring ’98. She was a Park Scholar (NCSU’s highest scholarship) and had a depth and emotional intelligence that took me by surprise. I couldn’t point to a specific thing she said or did, but during late nights at studio and in her dorm room, we talked and the questions she asked me, the attitudes she displayed was unlike anything I had experienced. I was fairly self-aware and introspective before then, but conversations we had could have been prefaced with the phrase how deep do you want to go? She was the one under whose auspices I arrived at the whole concept of understanding expounded upon a few entries ago. For the first time I thought about the semantics of the vocabulary I had been throwing around; I thought about relationships on more than a surface level, and more toward the core of true desires and needs. She effected a pattern of thinking in me that extended itself into so many more areas. Talk about emotional intimacy: it started here. Part of me wishes it hadn’t, that I had waited to experience it later in life, but I wasn’t even aware of the concept before it was upon me, so there it is.
• Salaam: Way back in the seventh grade, he simultaneously influenced my notions of “cool” and inspired me to seek out new music for myself instead of just taking what was handed to me on the radio. He was a good friend from our first stint in France and an MK living in Monaco. His dad worked with Trans World Radio and we went to the same church. We were close to the same age and got along well. My family had been back in the States for a couple of years and they were back on furlough, so my parents invited their family over for the evening. I knew what time they were coming over so I had time to “prepare.” How’s that, you ask? In seventh grade my idea of “cool” during a social outing with other homeschoolers was to sit alone playing my Gameboy and hope other kids would wander over and watch. I felt aloof and had the deluded idea that owning a cool electronic gadget would guarantee me some kind of magnetic attractiveness. The whole concept of stepping outside myself and observing the ridiculousness of my attitude with an objective eye was completely beyond me. In any case, the evening Salaam and his family were to visit the ante had been upped; I had recently shelled out a hefty chunk of my savings to purchase an Atari Lynx, the cool new handheld console. Not only that, but I had an Amy Grant tape upstairs I could play on my boombox. The first song I thought was pretty cool, and it had a nice “heavy” guitar solo. I had it all planned out…and everything went perfectly. I cleaned my room, and instead of greeting the family at the door, I staked out a spot in the middle of my futon in my room and waited for them to come upstairs. I listened for their arrival, and when I heard Salaam and his brothers make their way to the stairs I started the tape and plugged in the Lynx. And to a tee, just as they rounded the bend at the top of the stairs, the guitar solo hit and there I was, sitting there, engrossed in my bitchin’ game system, sitting cross-legged on the futon. They were polite; they came over, and I came down off my cloud a little bit, enough to acknowledge their presence and make conversation. They expressed interest in the Lynx and my Lego set. Then I remember asking them what they thought of the music, and Salaam made a single comment that precipitated a major reality check: “It just sounds kind of…I dunno, stupid.” I think I short-circuited. I carried on without missing a beat; we had fun, but that one comment and the ensuing experiences with Salaam and his music started a fundamental shift. Not only was it the beginning of the end in terms of wasting money on video game systems, I started to look at music differently and form my own opinions about what I liked and make my own channels toward new and interesting music. Funny how a little bit of honesty can have that much of an impact.
• Precious: I’ve always maintained that the more attracted I am to someone the worse job I feel I do of appealing to them, and by that principle, in her case I did a very poor job indeed of presenting myself. I wrote her a few letters, we exchanged e-mails and had conversations online. We even attempted a few hesitant phone calls, and the chemistry was strained, to put it kindly. She was serene and a good conversationalist, but I was inadvertently doing my best to completely sabotage things, with constant nervous interjections and random tangents before I burst back onto the subject with a string of apologies for drifting off topic. I was even driving myself crazy, to say nothing of how I’m sure she was feeling on the receiving end of my nonsense. It came to a head one day, and I remember her quietly but insistently saying, “Just…stop being self-conscious.” It floored me. I tapered off and didn’t say anything for at least 30 seconds until I replied with, “Okay… Okay.” It really was that simple. And from then on, while I’ll occasionally have spurts of self-consciousness, it’s much better than it used to be. If you saw any of my writing from the period you’d know. Ellipses galore and endless loopback references calling out something I had said as witty or dumb or anywhere in between. It’s painful to read. And somehow that one little comment changed everything.
• More to come.

After all that, though, here’s the question: Do the people who influence you “implant” something new within you in that moment? Or do they just activate something latent that had always been present? I think in particular about the situation with Colleen–I had written papers before that time demonstrating a kind of exhaustive analysis of a subject, so I think the faculties were there to a degree, just not focused on the things on which she shone a spotlight during our conversations. Food for thought.