Are you a leader or a follower?

 Consider the relationship between living “outside-in” vs “inside-out.” We live outside in in order to fit in, not be rejected by the “group/culture” and that’s good otherwise we could have no functional society. We need to obey the rules, laws, cultural expectations in order to cooperate with other humans. Most people live mostly outside-in. A few live mostly inside-out asserting their viewpoint on the world around them. That can be good or bad. Conquerors live inside-out and force others to live outside-in.

Personally, I lived outside-in for the first half of my life, striving hard to live within the rules and guidelines of society and my strict, comprehensive religion that prescribed what I wear, how I talk, how I use my time, how I raise my children, what I eat, what I did with my by-now-very-little leisure time. Eventually, about age 48, I collapsed under that layer of outside-in Expectations and began anew—and to assert myself on the world around me. I have used this OI-IO model very successfully in my consulting practice worldwide as a small part of my week-long seminars. See Level Three Leadership for more.

Although I was a leader in my religion, I was living outside-in to someone else’s VABEs. In the end, IMO everything boils down to genetics and VABEs. Given that mid-life crisis/rebirth, I am living more inside-out now. I have become a very skeptical “follower”—too many times I’ve emulated and/or followed others only to find that was confining, constraining and just plain inaccurate philosophy of life. I now follow Science and repeatable, multiple sourced evidence. And wrote a book in my retirement A Song of Humanity: A Science-based Alternative to the World’s Scriptures to combat the millennial mountains of mythological rubbish that continues to be perpetrated on the world’s defenseless children.

I hope my experience and writings will be of help to people worldwide who want to “find themselves” amidst all of the other people telling them what to do, what to think, and what to believe. At home, even my dog does her own thing though. As a consultant before retiring, I was honored to teach people all over the world. Am I a thought leader?