Reflections of a Younger You
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Reflections of A Younger You
John Paul Derryberry
He's still there every time I look in the mirror—the younger version of me. I have been checking for him more lately. Not because I've reached an age where some gray has sprouted in the embers of my fire-red beard. Nor, do I suddenly feel old and have odd body parts that ache for no reason. I have noticed on my long runs; there are days I don't have my "A" game anymore, but I've accepted that. No, I examine my reflection for glimpses of my youth as my new job is
far removed from the reason I got into social work. I'm no longer In the daily grinder of intervening in people's lives.
I'm three or four steps away from our clients now. There are days when I miss them dearly. It was a simpler interaction before. I'd assist you and I'd see whenever my intervention was working. It was always my goal to enter into the type of leadership in the non-profit social work world I'm in now. It was a goal that sprouted from my youthful days of witnessing failed leadership. I noticed leaders making decisions without frontline employees in mind, launching initiatives that made the job harder for folks below them. They'd drone on in a monologue about how we are here for a mission, which was code for no raise was coming. I knew entering the non-profit world that some years there would be no raise. Don't patronize me with the "we are the world" mission stuff.
Youthful John hated that stuff, and I'm happy to report that more experienced John does as well. And that's what I always worried about as I climbed the ranks. The passionate seed I was as a wide-eyed youthful, I'm-going-to-change-the-world person, would grow into a leader jaded by the harshness of social work. I've seen it so much from so many non-profit leaders. They lost touch with their passion through their journey, swallowed up by the noise and slowly lost touch. We forget where we started, maybe we don’t forget. Perhaps we ignore where we started. We don’t want to acknowledge we are treating folks they way we said we would never treat people.
It's relatively easy for most of us to look back after years of doing a job and say I'm not my younger version. We fail to realize that not all change is equal, and not all change is an improvement. I'm not that same 23-year-old, but am I a better version of him or a worse one? The question is not whether you have changed, but have you changed for the better? The questions aren't I'm a leader now, so now do this, but how do I take what made me want to light the world on fire at 23 and be a good leader? Yes, we should grow, gather more information, become better, evolve.
Our passion should become determination, not jaded. Excitement should become a lifelong quest for knowledge, not burn-out under the weight of the job. And most importantly, we should imagine our younger self sitting in the meetings we now lead and ask ourselves, does young me think I'm full of nonsense? If the answer is yes, then we have some work to do. For now, I feel like young me would approve of how I lead. He's still there in my reflection, and it's the day that I don't see him; I'll worry I've become what I never wanted to be, a bad leader!