Description

In Chapter 3 of 15, leadership philosopher and bootstrap business expert Bijoy Goswami learns stewardship from Austin, Texas-based philosopher Charles Herman.

Transcript

Erik Michielsen: What does it mean to steward things and why this is the central focus on what you do? Bijoy Goswami: Stewardship is the term that I've known but it’s something that I came across recently with a local philosopher named Charles Herman who lives in town and have done some wonderful work on stewardship. I think that if you want to look around the world you start with yourself. You have this body, you have this life energy, you have this perspective. There is a stewardship role that you actually have of yourself and many people struggle with that their whole life. They may never get pass it. They fall into drugs, they fall into other things and they don’t steward themselves in a way that allows the greatest unfolding. Then there are other people that you encounter in your life how do you steward them on their journey, how do you be helpful to them in their process? From there you go to the organizations that you might be part of. From there you go to the communities that you might join or create and then you go to the city and the country and to the world. So what I realized and this kind of goes back to my question is you keep going back to the question what is the question? What I realized is my question is how do you steward things. And the models have developed over time were about particular things that I was focusing my attention on. So how do I steward myself and other people? Well realizing that people have a particular energy that they are kind of connected to more than others means that I can help them to deepen that energy and say well is it really worthwhile to go and work on this other thing that I don’t have a natural inclination for and actual passion for; probably not. So that says something about how you steward another person or yourself. And there are interesting points of view some people would say we’d work on your weaknesses. The model that I've seen and what I've learned is work on your strengths. Bring other people for the weaknesses and then that’s how you get that. So stewardship to me is the core question that interests me and I think is animating all these other work.