Manila, 15 September 2021 — Discovering the story of love in your life.

Story

It happened in 1957.  The birth of a baby boy in Curaçao resembled that of most children around the world. To me, however, this story is special because it made me see how an ever-expanding love will drive life forward. The infant’s journey of love started with his mother, and then grew to include his father and elder brothers. As a toddler, he discovered self-love. And when he started school, his love expanded to include his teacher and classmates. A desire for belonging then drove him to conform and love some people more than others. 

As a teen, his love grew to include more people, in sports and a religious group. He discovered the love of winning in sports, and how to learn from losing. At school, meanwhile, his love grew again, this time for science, languages, literature, arts, and music. In his mid-teens, he discovered a love for helping others, and this led him to consider career choices to help more people, even outside his country.

Over time, his love kept expanding, to embrace different cultures, to explore the world’s great wisdom traditions, and to analyze global development challenges like water security, the environment, governance, and sustainability. And, as he witnessed professionals around him struggle to make positive changes happen, it sparked in him a love for coaching and training in 21st-century leadership skills. This story of expanding love still continues. It’s not just the story of me, but of love driving life in me forward.

Challenge

With some modifications to reflect the uniqueness of your journey in life, this might be your story too. It’s a story of how love and life expand us. When researching this, I came across the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatic philosophy. He described how love creatively supports new evolutionary forms throughout the universe. He called it Evolutionary Love, a force that drives life in you and me forward.

As we grow up in life, this love expands us in each of our developmental stages, from sensorimotor (infancy) to egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, and kosmocentric. This development is by no means smooth sailing. We all know of people whose development got arrested at one of the earlier stages, and the havoc that creates. So we have the challenge to keep our love growing without getting stuck during our development. 

What does this story of love mean for leaders? “What’s love gotta do with it?” Leadership, which nowadays is defined as a process of influencing positive change, is about bringing out the best in ourselves and others in service of positive change in the world. Change that you care for, sparks your curiosity, fires up your passion, and lets you bridge divides to bring more and more people on board. Can you see that leadership, seen in this way, is driven by an expanding love in us?

Question

The story of expanding love that I shared was told as a retrospective. We never know in advance how the story will develop next. Falling in love remains to us a mysterious and unpredictable adventure, and the same is true for speculating how Evolutionary Love can drive our life forward from here on. 

What we can do, however, is to reflect on how this great love has already grown inside us and in our lives. And how, with openness and without pretension, we want that love to drive us forward to our potential. Such a reflection will surely tell us something valuable about developing our life and leadership.

So, for this week, here are three questions you can ask yourself. First, how wide and diverse has your love already grown during your life, and who are in and out of your current realm of love? Second, how can you keep your love growing? And third, what do you see when you look at your leadership development through a lens of expanding love? For me, what I discovered during my reflection this week is a new perspective that love and leadership are connected in intricate ways, and that leaders are people who love more. Let me know what you discover?