A leader’s first duty is to protect what cannot be bought, trust, tenderness, dignity, and the courage to be true.
I heard it from my home, a child asking his mother with complete innocence, Mama, it’s 6 a.m. in the night, right, and in that one line the whole winter morning revealed itself, the sky still dark, the air still asleep, the day not yet confident enough to announce itself, and a little heart trying to make sense of time through what it can see and feel, not through what clocks insist is true.
That question has more beauty in it than most adult sentences, because it carries no performance, no strategy, no need to sound impressive, it carries only pure perception, and that is what quietly exposes the strange theatre we live in, where grown people spend their lives polishing their image, dressing their identity, curating their voice, carrying portfolios and accessories, building a vocabulary of superiority, measuring themselves through what they own, what they can display, what they can make others believe.
And then something small enters the room, a child’s innocence, a moment of unedited love, a simple question spoken without agenda, and suddenly all that expensive architecture of ego begins to look fragile, because kindness and truth do not need drama, they do not need packaging, they arrive with an austere purity that cannot be bought, cannot be performed, cannot be manufactured, and that purity has a way of breaking you open, not loudly, not violently, but inwardly, into a quiet surrender where you see the void behind the noise you’ve been calling a life.
The child was technically wrong, 6 a.m. is morning, yet what he said felt right, because it described the world as it was lived, not as it was labelled, and that is why innocence heals, it is honest without trying, it sees without calculating, it loves without bargaining, and in that presence you remember that the highest form of leadership is not dominance, not control, not the ability to impress, it is the ability to remain human, to carry love without spectacle, to live with truth without decoration, to be so real that even a dark winter morning becomes light just because a child asked his mother a question.
This is why I pioneered Awakened Leadership and founded the Awakened Leadership Movement: to restore leadership to presence, conscience, and human truth before performance becomes our only language. If this reflection resonated, explore Awakened Leadership and the Awakened Leadership Model, and if you lead a system and feel this question inside you, reach me through the Advisor page or the 1:1 Awakeneing Session page.
