A Journey Toward Surrender: Reflections on a Life of Leading

By John Horan-Kates

A Journey Toward Surrender is a memoir describing how my view of leadership has evolved over fifty years. Its a story in understanding a different and more freeing meaning of surrender.

From leading teams in government, business, and the non-profit world, I have developed an outlook that works. The biggest challenge in leading comes down to one key necessitymanaging the ego. If we could relinquish our ego investment, the world would be a better and much more effective place.

I argue that there is a dynamic continuum or tension between responsibility and surrender that evolves throughout life and that to live well within this continuum, one must realize that God is in control of the outcome.

In the end, I contend that without a change of heart, policy reforms are futile. Without a deep assessment of ones moral character, our actions will be based on what Scripture refers to as shifting sands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524576363

John Horan-Kates

John Horan-Kates has more than fifty years of experience in leadership roles in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. He was the founding president of the Vail Valley Foundation in the early ’80s working directly with former president Gerald R. Ford to establish several international events and programs. Later, he founded the Vail Leadership Institute, offering programs for emerging community leaders. In 1994, John was named Vail Valley Citizen of the Year. He earned an undergraduate business degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, was an honors graduate from the U.S. Naval Officer Candidate School, and received the Navy Commendation Medal for service in Vietnam aboard the USS Jennings County. He holds a certificate as a professional leadership coach from the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara and is a graduate of the Living School at the Center for Action & Contemplation. His most recent book is a memoir titled A Journey toward Surrender.

Book preview

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

PART I.   LEAVING THE NEST

CHAPTER 1:   MONEY IN MY POCKET

CHAPTER 2:   MORE RESPONSIBILITY

CHAPTER 3:   SERVING

PART II.   PUTTING DOWN ROOTS

CHAPTER 4:   UNDERSTANDING MYSELF

CHAPTER 5:   BUILDING COMMUNITY

CHAPTER 6:   LOST & FOUND

PART III.   GOING DEEPER

CHAPTER 7:   INSIDE FIRST

CHAPTER 8:   DECLARING MY FAITH

POSTSCRIPT

APPENDIX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NOTES

PHOTO CREDITS

DEDICATION

To Pamela Horan-Kates, my wife of forty years and spiritual partner for life.

This story is mostly our journey that we have travelled together.

Without her I may have been perpetually lost.

Together we have found meaning and purpose in our lives and in our community.

And purpose is essential to any sort of leadership.

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INTRODUCTION

It was 2:30 in the morning when I got a wake-up call, but it wasn’t from an errant alarm clock. It felt like bolt of lightning. Declare your faith – stay the course. I shot straight up in bed, not even a yawn. It didn’t feel like a dream because my heart was racing like a revved-up engine. I jumped out of bed and spent the next several hours trying to understand what had just happened. I wrote it down and noodled a few notes alongside. I thought to myself, That was a directive from above. It wasn’t a suggestion.

When I told my wife she asked, What did it sound like? I said, There was no sound – the words were just there. It was intense and bright the way the sun bursts over the horizon or maybe like Paul’s road to Damascus encounter. It was an awesome moment of humility to realize that God had spoken directly to me.

The bolt of lightning was the defining moment for me; but there have been others along the way. Some people call them triggering events; others say they are vital spiritual experiences. A defining moment is transformational in that your life actually changes; usually for the better, but not necessarily right away. Processing that bolt of lightning not only changed me, it also put things into perspective so I could see more clearly. Lightning gets your attention, and for me, it helped in grasping the arc of my life in a new way. It was a major step in realizing what an integrated life might be like.

At the time, I had been working my way through Henry Blackaby’s book, Experiencing God, which is actually a day-by-day journal. I liked his format because it was straight-forward, not too dense, and more importantly, it provided a place for me to journal my thoughts. In fairly short order, I concluded that the declare your faith part was about writing. So, I adopted Blackaby’s approach and began writing my own journal. The words just seemed to flow like a river. It wasn’t a struggle – I never experienced writers block. Within a year, I had published The Leaders Journal – Integrating Head and Heart. I had found a new joy – more than an avocation but not quite a new career. To this day, I’ve remained committed to declaring.

In terms of stay the course, that was more difficult. I wrestled and questioned the options and prayed for clarity. I just wasn’t sure what that phrase meant. Then, about a year later, I got another little message – this time it was like a slight electric shock, nowhere near a bolt of lightning. The message was, I will show you the way. Go through the open door. Again, there was no voice or sound – it was just there. I wasn’t as surprised this time – I knew who was talking.

And so I’ve been looking for the open doors ever since. When an opportunity presents itself, I check it out. If it seems right, I keep going. On the other hand, when someone doesn’t return my phone calls after a few tries, I conclude that’s not an open door – I move on. Over time, I’ve concluded that stay in a more narrow interpretation meant to continue with my local community focus rather than being drawn to some worthy cause in a third world country. In a broader sense, it meant continuing in my spiritual walk.

These two defining moments are what inspired me to get serious about further understanding my leadership perspective. I knew I was getting direction but I needed to put it into an overall context.

I have to admit I’m a leadership junkie. I’ve read and studied with a whole raft of leadership experts. I led a leadership institute for more than twenty years, and I’ve worked for and with some really good leaders. James MacGregor Burns, one of those experts says, Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth. ¹ My fifty years of experience has been a wonderful, blessed ride and yet confirms Burns’ sentiment; I had only a vague understanding of what I was doing until much later in my journey. The approach I describe here is a synthesis of all of this leadership knowledge and experience offered through my own lens.

I used to joke that leadership is quite straight forward until you involve people; then it gets a little messy. All leadership activity involves skills, and no doubt skills are important – actually essential. You need be an effective communicator, a visionary strategist, and you’ve got to understand the numbers – plus all the other skills the best business schools teach. But my experience has shown that these things are not enough. They are certainly not sufficient if what a leader is striving for is something extraordinary, something that really makes a difference. I like the call that says we should be building excellent, ethical and enduring organizations. ² To answer this challenge I believe we need an integrated approach, one that embraces both heart with head. Heart, because while most leaders think they want skills, I believe what they really need is a solid character. And because leadership is a people business, there’s lots of complexity. But I also believe that simplicity lies just beyond complexity. ³

From leading teams in government, business and the non-profit world, I have developed an outlook about what works and what doesn’t. I believe the biggest challenge in leading, among many significant difficulties, comes down to one necessity – managing the ego. If we could learn how to deal effectively with the ego, the world would be a better, friendlier, and much more effective place. If we could relinquish our ego investment in winning as a way of inflating ourselves and replace it with the joy of being alive, of gratitude and appreciation, of really learning and loving and realizing a sense of awe, life might be less stressful. I learned the hard way that I couldn’t lead a team of people very effectively until I could lead my own life. Developing a mature outlook took a lot longer than I thought it should.

I have always worked to simplify things – it’s the best way for me to deal with that complexity. So I’ve been a fan of models – usually graphic depictions of the various moving parts of a situation. I’ve included several of these models in the text for reference, plus this one below in more detail in the Appendix. As my journey unfolded, I landed on the notion – a theory really – that I call the responsibility integrating surrender continuum.

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I think most of us live in the tension of this dynamic our whole lives even though we don’t realize it most of the time. At least I didn’t.

My hope here is to describe how my journey evolved from mostly below this line, in an unhealthy mode, to above the line – much of the time. Of course, it wasn’t totally above or below that line, but rather a lifelong process of up’s and down’s learning from my mistakes. Because we all are imperfect by nature, the unhealthy aspects of our make-up are just always present. Even though we’d like to, we can’t deny it. We can slip into a selfish mode almost without noticing it. But I still long for clean hands all the time even though I’ll never get there. And that does remind me of the quip; If we strive for perfection, we might find excellence. ⁴

This story describes my journey through the various stages and seasons. I will provide support for my responsibility integrating surrender theory, realizing there is no scientific way of proving it. I use toward in the title, but integrating may better describe the need to embrace both ends of that leadership spectrum. Toward simply speaks to the notion that we won’t be completely surrendered until we pass into that next world. Along the way, I will also touch on the very real resistance to this notion and how critics and sceptics shun the softer edge of leadership.

It was later in my journey that the word surrender entered my functioning vocabulary. It’s a challenging word in today’s culture. Soul and consciousness and spirituality – even worldview – can be baffling words too. I came to see that these concepts were interrelated and each can be slippery and mean different things depending on your background – basically what side of the tracks you came from. This is the story of how my journey in understanding these notions gave a different and more freeing meaning to surrender.

My inquisitive little brain has spent a ton of energy wrestling with the meanings and implications of these words – like an amateur etymologist. It’s been fascinating – similar to working a Rubik’s cube – trying to weave some of this into how I have led teams, organizations – my life really – over the years. I love the admonition that what you do speaks so loudly I can hardly hear what you say, ⁵ But I also believe that words do matter.

Then there are troubling words like only, often expressed as this is the only way. I’ve never liked only but it became particularly troublesome when I started wrestling with the notion of surrender. When guys in my band of brothers would say, Jesus is the only way I would have a visceral, dubious reaction and would remember the comment by one thought-leader who said, Fundamentalists want to make certain what is essentially a mystery. ⁶ And that thought was amplified by, There are two kinds of people; those who seek certainty and those who seek understanding. ⁷ I am of the second school.

While I’m a follower of that man from Galilee, one way of understanding just seemed too limiting. A pastor I know says, in effect, the Bible is the only thing you need; everything else is garbage. I have an instinctual, skeptical reaction to this one way of thinking. It strikes me as arrogant and narrow-minded for anyone to advocate that their approach is absolutely right and the only way. I have come to loathe a dualistic attitude, basically the only approach, versus an and way of thinking. In leadership, it’s called win-win.

I look at scripture as a main resource, not the only source. While I agree that the Bible is a collection of inspired stories, there are lots of other inspirational works to be experienced. I don’t want to shut everything else out; I want to be inclusive not exclusive. I see Jesus’ way as foundational to how I lead, but not the only viewpoint out there.

In our mainstream vernacular, surrender typically equates to losing – to giving up. Our culture resists surrender with all its might the same way we resisted that spoonful of cod liver oil back in the day. We’ve been taught that life is about winning – about getting ahead. When winning is the only goal, we simply can’t admit to anything that looks like failure. Who wants to lose?

Interestingly, loss is the way to surrender. It just took me a lifetime to realize that this seemingly undesirable attitude – surrender – was what created the space and the willingness to loosen my vise grip on the heroic journey and the constant striving.

My friend, Dr. John Tamerin reminded me that surrender is about accepting the things you cannot change – about accepting reality with grace versus bitterness. Loss is inevitable, so how we deal with it is our challenge. ⁸ Surrender is letting go of unrealistic expectations of ourselves and others. Dr. Tamerin closed his letter by asking, Isn’t surrender really a commitment to a set of core values which reflect something beyond yourself? ⁹

Early in life as an immature twenty-year old all I was thinking about – besides the opposite sex – was being successful. To some of my friends this meant the accumulation of wealth, fame, power, or running something – anything really – being in control which was, and still is, a central aspiration of most business school graduates. But none of this stuff dominated my thinking; I wanted a good job, to wear a coat and tie and to get ahead. I wanted that familiar American dream.

You’re a naval officer now, my first captain in Vietnam counseled, take responsibility for your department. The truth was I didn’t know jack-shit (a technical Navy expression) and yet there I was being asked to lead fifty guys in a war zone simply because I had been anointed and they hadn’t. I remember thinking, What do I really know? In time, I learned the ropes and provided direction to my guys, but it would only take me another forty years to see things more clearly. I did have responsibilities, but I wasn’t really in control.

When I got married, I embraced an early version of surrender when I said to myself, Just yield to her. Say yes to her requests. Do the hard stuff. To that, many guys said, "You would do