Be A Man: What Leadership Really Means
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On a blazing hot day over a hundred years ago, about two hundred men charged uphill across open ground to assault an entrenched enemy as artillery and machine gun fire poured down upon them. Against all odds, they reached the summit, destroyed the defenders, and then proceeded to do the same thing to the next hill, winning the battle and, ultimately, the war.
What made them do it? A bombastic, bespectacled man who was the only member of the regiment on horseback. This made him the most prominent target on the whole battlefield, and he went first.
Theodore Roosevelt had a quality that made his Rough Riders willing to follow him even into an apparently impossible battle.
John J. Pershing, who led a company of BuffaloSoldiers up the same hill along with the Rough Riders, had it as well: the quality that made men want to follow him, even into what seemed certain death.
That quality is leadership, or being ‘the Alpha Male.’ It’s a mysterious quality, which some men seem to possess and others don’t.
Bad men have this quality as well as good men: Hitler had it just as much as Churchill. It is the quality of being able to convince others to follow you.
Most of us probably won’t have to lead a charge up San Juan Hill, or whatever the modern equivalent might be. But, as men, we are called upon to be the head of our families, and so we had better have some idea of what leadership entails before we attempt to exercise it.
“What is our aim? It is victory!”
Leadership involves three factors:
- Communication with the group, especially concerning the goal of that group
- The personal resources necessary to meet or pursue that goal
- The ability to communicate the fact that you possess those resources so as to inspire trust
Take Winston Churchill for example.
1. One of the first things he did upon being elected Prime Minister was to state his goal: Victory. He let the people know at once what he intended and that everything he did would be with that end in mind. He also maintained communication with the people through his speeches and with the military leaders throughout the war, ensuring that he knew what was going on both at home and on the battlefield, and that the people constantly knew his intentions.
2. He also possessed the resources necessary for a war leader: he had served in the military in his youth, had been the Lord High Admiral during the Great War and later served in the trenches in France. He had been warning the British people and government about the dangers of Hitler since before the Nazis even took power. He understood warfare and he understood his enemy.
3. Finally, he made the people aware of this. The public, indeed, already knew his credentials: he had been a fixture of British political life since the Victorian era, and everyone remembered his unheeded warnings throughout the thirties.
Through his speeches, and even more so through his actions, he was able to inspire the trust of his people. In short, he promised them he would lead them to victory, he had the personal resources to do so if anyone did, and the people saw that he meant it.
Real Alphas don’t lead by bluster or displays of power: they lead by letting the pack know that they intend to care for it and that they have the ability to do so. This trust is the basis of their authority.
Being a Leader in the Home
So, what does all this have to do with family life?
The husband is the head of the family, as St. Paul says. Thus a husband ought to have the quality of leadership, at least as far as his own family is concerned, and this ought to begin in courtship.
We men who dare to ask the fair and lovely maidens of CatholicMatch to consider becoming our wives ought to make a point of acting like a leader.
Whether you are naturally an “Alpha” or a “Beta” (or an Omega, for that matter), your wife has a right to expect you to act like an Alpha with regard to the family.
That is to say, she has a right to feel that she can trust you, that you have the family’s best interest at heart, and that you have the resources necessary to care for the family.
To effectively lead your family, you have to
- Communicate your goal for your family: what do you expect it to do? What's the purpose of it?
- Develop the resources necessary for achieving this goal (habits, modes of thought, knowledge, etc.)
- Let it be known that you have such resources.
For example, one of the necessary resources for family leadership is the virtue of chastity. Before anything else, the family itself must be secure and known to be secure, especially in these days when such security is not taken for granted. Thus your wife needs to feel confident that you will not betray her, abandon her, or damage the emotional bond between you.
If she is not confident in this, the family structure will be uncertain and your children will sense this. Any crisis will, therefore, have the potential to break the corroded family bond and destroy the ‘pack.’
To have the ability to control your sexual urges, and to have communicated this ability to your wife through action, on the other hand, permits her to trust your ability to remain faithful to her and hence that, whatever else happens, the family bond will remain intact even in difficult times.
Again, leadership is primarily a matter of rational trust: of your making the other person aware, of their own knowledge, that you have both the proper intentions and the ability to carry them out, and that it is therefore safe to rely upon your judgment. In a stable family, both spouses will have something of this quality, though as men, we are especially called upon to adopt it.
You and I ought to be beginning our marriage prep now, before we’ve even met our spouses, by developing these necessary resources that will allow our wives to trust us as the alpha of the family pack. Then when you meet her, your wife will see, to her joy, that she can trust you with her life and her heart.
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