Your Sweatshirt

It’s pos­si­ble that the main job of a leader is to become free of your­self. Because if you can­not do that then you are des­tined to play out over and over only the ways of being that you already know. These ways may cer­tain­ly be a gift in one sense, a strength that comes from you, but in anoth­er they will also always be shad­ow. They will always make you, your orga­ni­za­tion, your soci­ety small­er. They will not enable you to embrace some­thing larg­er than what you already are; they will not enable oth­ers to embrace some­thing larg­er than what you or they know. And yet, isn’t that the pur­pose of lead­er­ship — to embrace some­thing much larg­er than we feel we are capa­ble of know­ing or being?

And yet if you ask “How?” you may still be prob­lems. Because the self ask­ing how may still be the self want­i­ng to extend and enlarge in ways that sim­ply con­firm the need of its exis­tence. And if it gets that con­fir­ma­tion, all the neg­a­tive pat­terns and shad­ows, all the pain and frus­tra­tion will just con­tin­ue — although per­haps with a sign post­ed to the brand, “new and improved.” How many new and improved ver­sions of you can there be before you decide the whole thing needs to go?

The oth­er day I came across the mar­velous con­cept of “sweat­shirts” in Claude Stein­er’s mar­velous book: Scripts Peo­ple Live: Trans­ac­tion­al Analy­sis of Life Scripts. He writes:

The sweat­shirt is a metaphor­ic ref­er­ence to the fact that most per­sons with [life]scripts can be visu­al­ized as wear­ing sweat­shirts over or under their clothes, on which is writ­ten a short, two- or three-word descrip­tion char­ac­ter­iz­ing their exis­ten­tial posi­tions. In addi­tion, just as games con­tain a sud­den switch or rever­sal, so sweat­shirts often have a front and back. For instance, Miss Felix’s sweat­shirt promi­nent­ly read “Look­ing for a man” in front. On the inside of the back, to be read as it was tak­en off, was writ­ten “But not you.” Cap­tain Mar­vel’s sweat­shirt said “Cap­tain Mar­vel” on the front and “Unless I’m sober” on the back; anoth­er man, a “born los­er,” had “You can’t win them all” in front, and “I can’t win any” on the back. The sweat­shirt is anoth­er way of say­ing that peo­ple have their scripts writ­ten all over them.…

I believe that are lots of pos­si­ble scripts for lead­ers. For exam­ple, the front of the sweat­shirt might read:

“I’m a real­ly pow­er­ful per­son,” and the back says, “that’s why I nev­er ask for help.”

or

“Why do you keep ask­ing me for answers,” and the back says, “I don’t even have the right questions.”

or

“I could prob­a­bly help you alot,” and the back says, “If I told you what I real­ly think.”

I’m sure you can think of many such lines on your own when you think of oth­ers. What would be on your shirt? 

And what would it take to find free­dom from these lines?

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