Create! Redefine Your Win
The following journal entry is part three of Issue 019: The Trailhead—Leadership for American Unity. Here’s where you can find the introduction to the series, part one on how to be inclusive, and part two on how to stay grounded in wisdom.
If leadership for American unity is the purpose of political activity, what does it mean to win? If followers of Jesus are politically involved for the sake of unity and motivated by the call to love others as Christ loved us, how do they define winning? If we aren’t called by God to control policy—a logical impossibility—then what are we called to create once we are inclusive and grounded in wisdom, and how do we define success?
These questions are difficult to answer, and there may never be a universally agreed upon approach even within the Church. But based on firsthand experience, the Liberatus vision of healing, wholeness, or American unity in politics, and the conversation, research, and writing we have done over the last seven years exploring it, here are seven ways we can redefine winning, create beautiful work that unifies the country, and artistically reflect the goodness of our Creator.
Included with each point is a note sharing how we apply these ideas at Liberatus. As we work to create a culture of American unity by inspiring it today, we aren’t advocating for someone else, somewhere else, with more power than us to take steps towards unity; rather, Liberatus offers those we serve a way to take steps where they are to bring unity to life, using the power they already have as American citizens. The framework of winning articulated here has been, to the best of our ability, part of the creation process of Liberatus Volume One. We can always improve, though, and if you’d like to become part of the creative team behind Liberatus, you are welcome to apply to join the Leadership Council.
I. Have a vision for unity and use tactics to reinforce it.
Every leader knows that vision is critical, that if there is no vision or shared mission, nothing happens, people drift apart, and new culture is not created. Vision is so critical that it’s not possible to fill a leadership role well without it.
Whatever we do in American politics, the tactics we use—and therefore the culture we create as we use them—should not set us on a path that leads to the destruction of our union or the downfall of the Constitution. Rather, they should reinforce the vision of unity.
Leadership Institute founder Morton Blackwell notes that the tools we use to organize campaigns are often philosophically neutral. And yet the end vision still matters. Referring to Ideas Have Consequences author Richard Weaver, he notes that “Weaver warned powerfully against rootless, mechanistic manipulation, against knowledge ‘of techniques rather than of ends.’ His deserving target was the destructive tendency of modern man to lose his sense of purpose as he rapidly accumulates knowledge of how to do things.”
Posting on social media, doing interviews, and debating one’s opponent are neutral tactics, but the content of the messages delivered will either lead us towards unity or away from it.
It’s important to note, though, that the reason why strategists, staffers, and candidates for elected office motivate out of fear, demonize their opponents, interrupt each other when speaking, spin the truth after debates, and harass us with campaign ads is simple. It works. It produces wins in terms of votes, money, and power. And as noted in the previous journal entry, we do this in order to move people from indifference to active participation, because as political professionals their participation is necessary for our livelihoods to flourish.
But the perfect example of tactics that further a bigger vision is Jesus. Everything he did pointed to the kingdom of God—and no one disputes that. No one finds the kingdom of God less attractive because of the way Jesus lived his life.
How we apply it: The vision of Liberatus is American unity, and while we don’t view relationships as a tactic, we move forward by connecting with people in person—not by high-tech digital marketing. Volume One offers contemplative spirituality as a core part of the basis for unity, and contemplative spirituality rooted in the in the kingdom of God is not something that advances through well-done marketing campaigns. For the time being, we deliberately post fewer times on social media in order to emphasize real-life, in-person connections and relationships. But again, relationships are neither a tactic nor a strategy—they are the point, the thing itself. Posting on social media is a tactic, though, and we use social media as a tactic less often in order to reinforce the vision of unity, which requires actual human connection. However, a congressional campaign might choose a different tactical approach such as posting daily to reinforce the overarching purpose of reaching 700,000 constituents to foster political unity among them as the best way to serve them.
II. Follow Olympians to perform at your best
Michael Phelps never set a goal of winning Olympic gold. Instead he focused on training to swim at world record speeds. Meb Keflezighi says that running to win a marathon isn’t about finishing in first place. Instead, winning means getting everything you can out of yourself. Abby Wambach recounts Pia Sundhage telling the US Women’s National Team that it wasn’t enough to win by sheer strength when you’re already the best team in the world. Instead she wanted to see the team respect the sport, respect each other, and win beautifully. And finally, Lolo Jones says that winning in life is about being kind people with character and ultimately trusting God.
Working in politics with the pursuit of excellence that we see in Olympians means knowing what your specific goals and objectives are—within a big vision—and putting in consistent effort to reach them. None of us can determine who might be the best in the world—but we can determine how well we organize our time, and whether we use that time to chase something that gets the best possible performance out of ourselves. We can all be Olympians in our respective fields, if we choose to be.
Sources for further reading:
The Golden Rules: Finding World-Class Excellence in Your Life and Work by Bob Bowman, coach for Michael Phelps
26 Marathons: What I Learned About Faith, Identity, Running, and Life from My Marathon Career by Meb Keflezighi
Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game by Abby Wambach
Over It: How to Face Life’s Hurdles with Grit, Hustle, and Grace by Lolo Jones
How we apply it: Liberatus Volume One has been five years in the making because as an organization, and much like the Olympic four-year cycle, we wanted to offer everyone we serve a beautiful work of art. Our bigger vision is American unity, and our organizational goal includes biannual publication. We can’t control how many people will want to take part in the mission to inspire American unity—but we can create an internal culture of continual improvement so that we can reach an irresistible level of artistic excellence. And we can control the number of people we attempt to connect with. During the Indiegogo campaign for Volume One, of the connections we tracked, just over 30% of the people we made a personal point of contact with backed the campaign. Unity is relational and can’t exist without personal connections, so thank you to all the backers who shared the mission!
III. Define your values
How you define your personal and organizational values will influence the tactics you use and what it means to perform at your best. It will influence how you live them and the culture you create in the process. Defining them and evaluating them often will help you examine your motives, stay focused on maturing in the ways that truly matter, and give your team a shared framework of success. Defining values will help you know how to fuel and rest, enjoy and care for nature, and make it clear what kind of leadership culture you hope to create. Values can and should be connected to metrics, key performance indicators, or objectives and key results that you have in place.
Understanding your values will also help you articulate your sense of vocation and help you identify what you are so passionate about that you’d be willing to commit to and sacrifice for over the long haul. Knowing your values means you can move beyond the need to feel momentum and relevance to having endurance and celebrating moments when you and your team bring your values to life through action. Endurance inherently includes movement, going somewhere, and creating something new. But if we constantly wait for other ventures to appear exciting and have momentum for us to decide what to do with our lives, or if we wait for charismatic leaders and market data to tell us what matters, it means we don’t have exciting values of our own worth living.
From the standpoint of faith, endurance matters because the kingdom of God grows in our hearts over time. To read a set of faith-rooted values that anyone working in politics and government could adopt, view the Liberatus Values of Freedom and Philosophy of Freedom in Political Engagement.
How we apply it: For Liberatus, we define success three ways: to create a culture of constant improvement, to stay true to the vision of American unity, and to achieve the mission and goals. These three aspects of success reflect our primary core values of community, contemplation, and creativity, which are a reiteration of the three aspects of the Trailhead. And the seven Key Performance Indicators in our seven-year report each reflect one of the Values of Freedom.
IV. Think about the next 40 years
In politics, when leadership for American unity is our purpose, winning will always mean leaving the next generation better off than we are today. To do that, we should think about the next 40 years, and not only what we want today.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. offers a beautiful example of how to vision-cast over several decades with his philosophy of nonviolence which can create the Beloved Community.
How we apply it: We’ve incorporated vision over the next 40 years into the core messaging we use, and intend to continue the mission over the long-haul to create a culture of American unity for the next generation by producing content, experiences, and leaders that inspire it today. Leading for American unity today means the next generation can grow up knowing that participation in American politics is for the purpose of American unity, and it means they will have guidance on how to go about it, which does not widely exist in our culture today.
V. Questions > quick policy answers
In American politics today, the first question we generally ask is what position someone has on a given issue, or what position we should take. But that starting point skips the necessary work of wisdom.
Taking and stating a position is easy. Congressional staff write yes or no vote recs every week. What’s difficult is asking thorough questions in order to research them, which is one of the best ways we can create a culture of unity and create new solutions. Questions bring together all three actions that define unity, because questions require us to search for multiple viewpoints in order to answer them: by nature they send us on a deeper search for wisdom, and they open the door to greater creativity.
For example, taking a position about the border wall is easy, and it doesn’t take much resolve to fiercely hold one’s position. What’s difficult—what does take tenacity—is having the patience to ask and search for answers to questions such as:
What kind of infrastructure do we need to have a secure border?
How should the US respond to those fleeing violence and oppression?
What kind of infrastructure and training do we need to have in place to meet basic humanitarian needs at ports of entry?
Who owns the land where we might build a border wall, and should we take that land from them by force?
How might a 2,000-mile fence cutting all the way across the North American continent affect our environment and therefore our well-being?
What conditions in Latin American countries are causing so many people to flee?
Do we pay a fair price for the goods we import from Latin American countries?
How would we respond to decades of war and natural disasters if they affected us?
Does the US government offer Latin American countries a helpful model of good governance—or do we need to improve at home first?
If we don’t strengthen economic, political, and relational ties with Latin America, does that open the door to Chinese and Russian influence that could ultimately threaten US national security in the Western Hemisphere?
Would cartels in Latin America have power and a destabilizing influence in the region if they weren’t making money from trafficking drugs into the United States to be sold to American citizens?
How we apply it: As a 501(c)(3), we don’t advocate for or against legislation. But in Volume One we do tell stories that elevate the human experience and include questions such as these and cite congressional-level research sources. And you’re invited to join us. Of course, we can all do this where we are, and that’s why we created Volume One: to give you a stake in asking better questions as part of the creation of a culture of unity. So that we can ask better questions, submit yours on the main page for The Trailhead here.
VI. Leadership is service
For whatever reason, we often think of political leaders as having an elevated position above the rest of us and of being in a place of authority. Neither of these perspectives is fully accurate.
Because we have a democratic-republic form of government, the job function of elected officials is to serve and represent. While they can and should lead public thought, running for office or running a nonprofit in the political space are not about building one’s personal brand or platform. And as has been covered previously, it is not about agitating the grassroots out of fear for the leader’s goals.
It's critical that we enter these professional fields with our needs for validation and basic human acceptance already met. We must enter from a place of passion, of knowing what our vocation is. It means that while we have creative ambitions, we can still detach from the role, carry the weight of leadership, and serve however we know deep down we are called to serve. When we discern this, roles in public service will no longer be about getting attention for ourselves, but rather advocating for others and creating something new with them.
When we are deeply grounded and realize that conflict is a desire for connection, we can attempt to connect authentically, genuinely, at a deeper level, whenever we sense conflict, except in cases of abuse. We can intentionally bring potential points of conflict to the surface and out into the open so that they can be fuel to accelerate our growth, rather than let points of conflict become fire that destroys human relationships. When leadership is service, it means offering our teams clarity about where we are going and why it matters—regardless of what aspects of our endeavor may be uncertain, which can often be a point of conflict.
In the context of leadership for American unity, the third action that defines unity—create!—is the role of the executive branch and most notably the presidency. It’s the American president that can best articulate what it means to win as a nation, and the role of the executive is to implement the laws created by Congress. To create, or to lead, means to act on a vision to better humanity.
How we apply it: Liberatus was born out of firsthand experience in American politics, specifically grassroots organizing, campaigns for office, and Congress. People who work professionally in politics have more talent than their jobs often allow to be expressed because of self-imposed limitations in order to keep them from becoming political liabilities. And yet it’s those same professionals that see and experience dysfunction firsthand. Liberatus first serves professionals with experience in American politics by giving them a creative outlet to write about healing or unity. Then we serve Americans across the US by compiling what our writers create into beautifully photographed and designed illustrated journals so that they can tangibly be part of inspiring American unity in their communities. Finally, we serve partner organizations* by giving 20% of the proceeds of each illustrated journal to those partner organizations who are creating a culture of American unity across the United States.
VII. Write your narrative
Finally, redefining winning includes writing a campaign or brand communications narrative of American unity. Political engagement for that purpose, particularly when rooted in faith, will dictate how we define the enemy, how we articulate the conflict of life, whom we frame as the hero, and whom we look to as our guide. It will frame how we define problems and solutions and how we relate to each other, and why we relate to each other that way, in order to solve them. Like our core values, it will determine the culture of our team and their ability to succeed.
As leaders, writing an overarching brand narrative—the story we tell in our elevator pitch, speeches, marketing, social media posts, fundraising calls to action, etc—that moves humanity closer to American unity will force us to explore what motivates us personally—and to be honest about our motives with others.
How we apply it: From a Christian perspective, the enemy is sin and death, and within the context of American unity the enemy is disunity—as referenced by the declaration in one of America’s first political cartoons, “Join, or Die.” Because we are all stakeholders in American unity, there’s no person or group we attack. We all know the effects of disunity, but unity is a gift in which we all get to participate.
As the founder of Liberatus, my motives include wanting to create a better culture than what I have so far experienced so that the next generation will live a better life, connecting my faith to the way we do politics because of the love that God has for us, and a life-long drive to work creatively, inspired by people like my grandparents, servicemembers, and Olympic athletes.
CONCLUSION
If leadership for American unity is our motive when we are professionally involved in American politics, it will frame everything we do. As Americans, holding the country together for the next generation is our overarching purpose within any policy debate. As followers of Christ, acting for the sake of unity points to the hope we have in the kingdom of God and is a way we can love others as Christ loved us. That might not always look like winning in terms of votes, money, and influence, but when we follow Christ, we can move from a culture of disunity to a culture of unity, from an unlivable inner life to one that’s livable and at peace, and we can invite others to experience the love of God too, in all of our endeavors.
Life experiences may move us to do something about the economy, employment law, inflation, taxes, guns, abortion, marriage, healthcare, the environment, transportation, energy production, racial reconciliation, national defense, immigration, foreign affairs, education, and more. And we may choose to amend the Constitution again. But when we start at The Trailhead of leadership for American unity, we can strengthen our country for the next generation by including all Americans, by seeking deeper wisdom in every endeavor, and therefore by creating lasting solutions to the policy fights of our time.
The Trailhead is the starting point, foundational particularly for followers of Christ, where we act for American unity, where we set out on a new trail to be inclusive, stay grounded in wisdom, and create!
Issue 019: The Trailhead—Leadership for American Unity is a companion series to Liberatus Volume One, and both were made possible by the many contributors to and creators of Liberatus over the last seven years. To inspire American unity in your community, get a copy of Volume One, share it with your friends, family, and colleagues, give directly to the mission by donating or setting up a recurring contribution as a Liberatus Advocate, or help lead our country to unity by applying to join the Liberatus Leadership Council.
The Mission: To create a culture of American unity for the next generation by producing content, experiences, and leaders that inspire it today. Our goal is to publish a high-quality, biannual illustrated journal and to give 20% of the funds received for copies ordered on the Liberatus website to partner organizations* creating a culture of American unity across the United States.
HOW DO YOU CREATE A CULTURE OF UNITY?
If you have professional experience in American politics or government, you can add your ideas to the series. To get started writing to inspire unity and work with us to reach the goal of biannual publication of illustrated journals, apply to join the Liberatus Leadership Council.
Mission: Inspire American Unity
Create a culture of American unity for the next generation by producing content, experiences, and leaders that inspire it today.
Journal Entry #126
ISSUE 019: THE TRAILHEAD—LEADERSHIP FOR AMERICAN UNITY, PART 3
Continue reading part four
