True leadership

By Jeff Becraft

We had a luncheon yesterday at Our Place of Hope with Sheriff Lott as our featured speaker. It was a great event. We had several community leaders out, and we wanted to share with them the impact that mental illness is having on our community and also share with them the unique paradigm shift that Our Place of Hope is to fill the gap in providing meaningful relationships and meaningful work for those living with mental illness.

One of the things that hit me, though, was right when the caterer showed up, I look up and I see one of our Board members who is a president of a company and he is carrying a box helping unload the stuff for the caterer. This is typical for this person… and that is really leadership in motion.

We oftentimes look at leadership as going up… but really, leadership, true leadership, is about going down. It is about serving others.

It is about stooping down to make others great.

Then we had another board member show up, and their first question was, “What can I help out with?”… with a big smile on their face,

Again, that is real leadership. We have all kind of Board members that do that.

I was just so inspired by that because that is leadership in action. It’s like a drop of water throwing itself over a waterfall and exuberantly and joylessly celebrating that is going down to a lower level (a picture I got from the book Hinds Feet on High Places).

That really is what leadership is all about.

One time, Brenda and I had gone up to Little Switzerland. We were just visiting and moseying around the shops and whatnot. But we went out at one point and sat down in these two chairs overlooking the valley. We just sat there and took it all in. It was beautiful… and it was restful.

The reason we have mountaintop experiences is so we can be refreshed and get a higher perspective… so that we can go down and help those that are living in day-to-day life in the valley.

Jeff Becraft is the Director of Our Place of Hope and the Director Emeritus for Youth Corps and has dedicated much of his life to helping shift the vision of people’s lives. Our Place of Hope is a paradigm shift for people living with mental illness that encourages them to regain meaning, purpose, and hope for their lives. You can connect with Jeff at  [email protected].