Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this week on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the first in a two-part series on leadership. And not a superficial treatment either, but a deep investigation into what it means to be a true leader. Gone are the old values we once held so high, like charisma and conviction and coercion. It's a new time, and it requires true leadership.
Here's an excerpt from our latest Thinking with Somebody Else's Head program, Freedom and Leadership. So
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: if you inflict a pain, if you cut your finger, it will not recover. It will not grow again in its place. So this is the same and even worse in our psychological level, in our spiritual level. Because energetically speaking, if we play too much with our virtues, our talents, our essence, our soul, it will get harmed.
And it's difficult to get back.
Richard: Yeah. Could this be then a real explanation for the cause of all the anguish that we see around the planet? The pharmaceutical use of antidepressants.
Cláudia: Growing and growing and growing.
Richard: That people are desperate somehow.
Cláudia: And even kids are desperate. Now they need to be drugged. They call it this attention deficit disorder, but it's this environment which is totally upside down, totally, totally inverted.
So going back to companies and to nations, a leader, he must be a leader. And in terms that he cannot forbid his employees or his citizens to do what is good. And he must stop his citizens or employees to destroy the nation or the company. So being a leader requires an enormous amount of self-knowledge, of understanding and virtue, virtue of knowing oneself in terms of, am I against my own nature?
Am I using freedom in the correct way?
This is a deep, deep philosophical and psychological question.
Richard: And most time when people get to positions of power, they stop that kind of questioning, don't they? They stop to, because they've arrived at the top now, I don't need to think anymore, I'm the best. And so why should I do any self-analysis?
Cláudia: So money substituted their brains and their ideas and their feelings.
In Portuguese, we can say they change mentality, mentalidade, por materialidade. Mentality or mentality. So we exchanged a good mentality or a broad mentality, a universal mentality, a fair, a good one, a loving one, and a human mentality, for mentality. So it became like metallic people. We live in a metallic society, and we became metallic people. And we sound metallic, and even the music is metallic, and everything is metallic.
So we destroyed our essence by using incorrectly, invertedly, our freedom.
We are only free to do good, beauty and truthful actions. If you have to work just to make another person richer, it's immoral. It's wrong, it's not the right use of your freedom. You can only ask for your employees to be hard working people if you are helping them to be useful somehow in life, to themselves and
Richard: to the world. Right. And then the other part of it is that the leader also has to be able to stop the people from destroying the company.
Because there's this also this, people think that if I'm working for somebody, I'm being exploited, I'm being taken advantage of, this company is sucking the blood out of me and life out of
Cláudia: me. So this really happens many times, but the workers have to change this mentality gradually. And this cannot be like overnight. It's not like the Occupy Wall Street thing, this movement, because what they want seems to be to have a share in what the first percent have and what they're doing.
So it's not to change the mentality of the world, to go back to the value of good work. They are wanting a share of what they think belongs to them, and it would be fair to... But if they stop working, who is going to be millionaire in the first place? So it's everything wrong, it's everything upside down, you know, everything upside down.
Imagine if everybody in the world, or everybody in a country, or everybody in a company, they start disinverting their mentality. They of course will not attack the company because the company is the source of their survival at least in the moment. So what are they going to do to fight and destroy the source of their income? So this is not the way to treat things.
We must change consciousness. Consciousness is very powerful and consciousness is very constructive. So people must change the people in power by conscientizing them, not attacking them.
This is our opinion, because we are even Christian in our principles, because they understand. Even Christians killed people and they agree that a war is desirable sometimes. It's something legal sometimes. But we understand that we should never do war because we are not allowed to kill our fellow men.
Richard: Indeed, we are not free for this.
Our program is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, coming every week on the Stop Radio Network. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
