Humility is easily misunderstood or misconstrued. To help clarify, humility has two requirements.
Knowing one’s limitations is the first requirement for true humility. Humility cannot occur if one has not tested their capabilities. If they haven’t really tried and “gone for it”, then they cannot know their limitations. Unless you have tried and failed, then you might be mistaking cowardice or apathy for humility. Perhaps, it will take many attempts and failures to truly understand our limitations.
Once we have defined and accepted our limitations we can then engage in the next requirement for true humility, and that is reaching out to others for help. Whether our limitation is in the physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual dimensions of being, when we humble ourselves enough to reach out and seek help from others, then we can truly understand and practice humility. Besides people we reach out to directly, “Others” can be authors dead or still living, or spiritual entities, a higher power i.e., God.
Recently, I spoke with a man who retired from the military at the rank of Colonel. Over a long career he engaged in many missions and deployments leading men and women in wartime assignments. I asked him about his strategy when beginning a new assignment, perhaps with people he did not know. He spoke from experience, and replied that humility is too often and underrated virtue in a leader. He spoke to the first requirement of humility, to know your limitations. When starting out, Look, Listen, and Learn. You don’t know, so don’t pretend that you do. A common mistake is to tear things down without understanding why they are there.
The Colonel also said to rely on and trust your people. This fulfills the second requirement for humility, to reach out to others for help, enlist their support and allow them to share their point of view and ideas. You can’t do it all yourself, not should you. His advice was in alignment with a maxim I learned from a leadership training I learned, “seek maximum appropriate involvement.”
True humility requires great struggle in order to know your limitations, and then connection and trusting involvement with others who can help.
Ben Wagner (254)
Member The365Commitment
