Dain Dunston is a master coach who focuses on radical self-awareness for leaders. An award-winning author and speaker, he is the founding partner of Reservoir LLC, a consulting company with deep resources for leaders.
What do you stand for? That may be the most important question you can ask as a leader. Why? Because how you define what you stand for determines the size of the arena you play in. You can stand tall or you can stand small. It’s your choice. It’s not about money or fame. There are plenty of famous billionaires who stand for absolutely nothing, no matter what their media team tweets about them. And there are people, almost invisible in their modest appearance, who are quietly changing the lives of everyone they touch. Which would you like to be?
What does it mean to stand for something?
Many years ago, I was working with a coach who asked me what I stood for. He wanted me to understand why it was important to find something I stood for, something that expressed my purpose in life. Unfortunately, I was somewhat unclear on the concept. I was in my late thirties and was experiencing success with my writing. I was earning a living from it and people were praising my work.
So, when the coach asked what I stood for, I offered up the biggest thing I could think of.
“I’m going to be a great writer,” I announced.
The coach shook his head.
“No, you don’t get it,” he said. “That’s not big enough. Think bigger.”
I thought about it for a while. At that point, I thought it was pretty huge that I had finally “come out” as a writer, declared myself as someone talented and smart enough to do that for a living, and discovered, to my surprise, that most everyone who knew me was wondering what took me so long.
Bigger than that? I gave it a shot.
“I’m going to be one of the greatest writers of my generation!”
A goal is not a stand
The coach looked at me with pity and told me I was still thinking small. I was thinking of goals. Goals aren’t a stand. Goals are just the measurement of the stand. The best writer of your generation? Because why? What’s the purpose of your work? What will it stand for?
I thought about what I might have to offer. I thought about the path I had been on. The years are searching for a spiritual path. The years I spent studying yoga and then building a yoga community in London. Trying to figure out who I was and how to be a leader. I thought about it a lot, and when I returned to meet with the coach a couple of weeks later, I tried a new idea for him.
“I stand for making work a path of enlightenment,” I said.
“That works,” he said. “That’s a big stand.”
Your stand is the expression of your highest self
That stand was consistent both with the work I was doing then and the work I am doing today. It was consistent with my Essential Self. I didn’t realize it yet, but I had expressed what I was already working on.
As leaders, we have to get jobs done. The apples have to be picked. The code has to be written and tested. The eggs have to be fried the way the customers like them. Those are the tasks of life. All those tasks are done by people. And that calls for a more profound leadership duty, a duty for the people who get things done.
Each one of the people you work with is looking for meaning, whether they know it or not. More than that, every person you encounter today is looking for meaning. Why is that your problem? Well, we are living in a world of deep disruptions, deep distrust, and fearful outcomes. And every one of those negative outcomes can be mitigated, if only to a small degree, by your next interaction.
Thank someone. Let them know you see them. Let them see that they made a difference to someone’s day by the way they checked you out of the store, took your order at lunch, and completed the acquisition for the IT company your team is in charge of acquiring. When you aspire to be a leader, you aspire to change people’s lives. That’s what a leader stands for.
What do you want to stand for?
Dain Dunston, Author, Speaker, Teacher, Coach
Dain Dunston is a storyteller, future-finder and CEO-whisperer who has been fascinated with the concept of elevated awareness and consciousness since he was in college.
Dain grew up in a family surrounded by literature, art, and music, from Prokofiev to Bebop to Blues. His mother was a reclusive painter and his father was on the fast track to becoming a CEO by the age of 45. From his earliest memories, he found himself fascinated by two fundamental philosophical questions: “Who are we?” And “Why are we here?”
