We’re young ambitious people who want to become some of the best leaders the world has known. What holds us back is thinking that going into leadership will lead us to be corrupt and miserable. That power corrupts and it corrupts absolutely. That it is better to stay out of the spotlight than to jump into it and get obliterated. And yet we feel a sense of duty and excitement to lead people.
We are self-learners, autodidacts. We like to learn new things and we pick them up fast, excelling in almost any field in which we’ve been. We trust what we have learned more than what an expert tells us to learn. We value first-hand experience over second-hand research. Along the way, we’ve mostly ignored emotions and have struggled to have deep relationships with people. We connect with almost anyone, but rarely on a deep level. When conflict arises, we don’t know how to deal with it, either avoiding it or escalating it.
We are athletic and like learning things physically, in the body. We admire the Martin Luther King’s and Gandhi’s of the world. We feel frustrated with the current leadership behaviors we see. We wish it would be different and we realize that the only way to get there is through leading in the way we wish to be led—with strength and love.
We also recognize that this takes practice and consistency to ingrain the movements into memory. We have had neither a venue in which to practice, the exercises to practice, nor the community with whom to practice. Now we have all three.
Welcome to emōkō.