Some People Lead by Walking In and Saying Nothing

There is a kind of authority that has nothing to do with position, and if your only picture of leadership is the one with a microphone in it, you will spend your life assuming you do not have any.

My father-in-law was like this. He would come into a house where a family was coming apart and sit down and accept a cup of coffee and say almost nothing for an hour, and by the time he left the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees. Nobody could tell you afterwards what he had said. He mostly had not said anything. He had simply been unhurried in a room that was panicking, and it turned out that was the whole intervention.

Presence is a leadership style. It is not what you do while waiting to become a real leader.

I make this point because the Kingdom Personality work names several ways of leading, and only some of them look like leading. The one who steadies. The one who blesses. The one who stays. Those are governing acts. They organise the people around them just as truly as instruction does, and often more durably, because nobody resents them afterwards.

If you have been in rooms where things settled and you assumed it was a coincidence that you were there, I would ask you to count how many times that coincidence has happened.

And if you have been waiting to be given something to lead, look down. You may already be carrying it.

You may already be leading in the only way that lasts, and disqualifying yourself because it does not look like the version on the poster.