Jim Cogley Reflections: Tues 25th Feb – Mon 3rd Mar 2025

Note: A seminar entitled Personal and Ancestral Healing will be held in Lady’s Island Community Centre on Saturday8^th March from 10am to 4pm. Cost €40 with refreshments included. Facilitators – Jim Cogley & Luba Rodzhuk. Bookings by phone or text to 087-7640407. There are just a few places left for this day.

Because of strong demand and limited spaces, two similar Wood You Believe seminars involving Personal and Ancestral Healing are scheduled to be held in the Edmund Rice Healing Centre in Callan, Co Kilkenny on Saturdays March 15^th and 22^nd also from 10am to 4pm. The cost will be €50 with refreshments and lunch included. Bookings by phone or text to Jim Maher on 086-1276649. This is a beautiful venue that is quickly becoming established as a centre of Healing. Early booking is advised.

Tue Feb 25^th – Leadership as Enabling

Leadership and authority are generally regarded as going hand in hand. There are many who long to be in leadership but not for the right reasons. They like to be in charge and to control others or have an innate need to be bossy. Real leadership has nothing to do with telling others what to do or exercising control. Its essence is to be found in the root meaning of the word authority, and it comes from the Latin word ‘augere’ which means to make things grow. We can extrapolate this to also mean to empower, to bring out the best and to develop potential. From that root word we get the sense of leadership not being seen as gift in itself but more in how it enables the gifts of others to come to the fore.

Wed Feb 26^th – Leadership as Visionary

Many natural leaders are often placed in the role of also being administrators even though the roles are really quite separate. A leader could be classed as somebody who sees what needs to be done while an administrator is someone who sees that it is done. The role of a leader is to work towards becoming redundant by delegating as much work as possible. If a leader tries to also operate in an administrative role, he or she is likely to fail in his own eyes and in the eyes of those he has responsibility for. Many potentially good organizations fail early because of this, where the energy needed for visioning something into being, becomes dissipated in administrative tasks. Issues like financing, duty rosters and the day-to-day running. These take from the leader’s role of been able to guide the organization to where it needs to be.

Thurs Feb 27^th – Leadership as Recognizing Potential

Inside every apple are a number of pips. Anyone can count the number of pips in an apple but only God can count the number of apples in a pip. Such is our divine potential. A good leader is someone who recognizes the potential in others even when it is in a very embryonic form. His or her task is to carefully nurture that potential so that it slowly comes to fruition. This often involves encouraging someone to do what they least want to do, or feel they are capable of doing, in order to achieve what they have always wanted to achieve. Unless that person is believed in and encouraged, they will find it very difficult to break out of their comfort zone and it is only when this happens that they will begin to see what’s possible and begin to believe in themselves. Someone who believes in us, before we believe in ourselves, is capable of awakening good in us that we never knew existed and empowering us to do things that we never believed we could.

Fri Feb 28^th – Leadership as Hands Off

We often say that a good leader is very hands on. However, it might also be true to say that truly good leadership is more hands off. By this I mean that such a person recognizes that everybody needs to grow through mistakes, and that most people get things right only after getting the wrong. Giving someone the freedom to make mistakes is essential to good leadership and this means to not try and micromanage everything or give the impression of always looking over the shoulder of somebody who is new. Being given the freedom to make mistakes is usually the best formula for success. For someone who is good at something, it’s very tempting to put an old head on young shoulders, and burden someone with expectations that had they been subjected to at a young age themselves could have stymied their potential.

Sat March 1^st – Leadership as Sowing Seeds

While most people give out about what is not, a leader is someone who says, ‘why not’ and proceeds to find ways to bring that about. This does not mean telling people what to do but more helping people to see what he sees and thereby helping them to invest their energies in bringing that about. A truly good leader, while he knows where he is going, may even say very little about his vision but instead ask questions and sow seeds in others minds so that when his vision is coming to its fulfilment the ideas will appear to come from others and it will be they who will be much more inclined to invest in and own the project from the beginning. Another useful strategy of leadership is to bring the detractors on board from the beginning. Their voices may still remain negative but can serve a useful role of representing those on the outside who also need to be heard and whose criticisms may be quite valuable to in order to refine the project.

Sunday March 2^nd – How We see Things

A central part of the Gospel teaching today is where Christ tells us to take the plank out of our own eye first before ever attempting to remove a splinter from someone else’s eye. In other words, don’t ever try and change someone else unless you are prepared to change yourself first. The piece shown was just a piece of firewood that a lady gave to me thinking that I might find a use for it. What I saw was a knot and the way the wood formed around it made it look like an eye. The knot that formed the eye had a number of cracks that to my mind made it a lot more interesting. So, I doctored it up and what you see is  the final result.

Then I began to reflect on how we see things and how our perception is so hugely distorted  by the particular eyes by which we view reality. The Jewish Talmud teaches that we see things not as they are but as we are. We all suffer from distorted vision. None of us can see reality clearly. We have all noticed how some are so quick to take offence while others you could insult them to their face and they would just laugh it off. Some are always seeing hurt and taking offence even where there is none and would be very slow to admit that someone else might see the same situation very differently.

Our sight may be formed in our mother’s womb but our perception is formed by our early experiences in life. If our earliest experience is one of rejection or abandonment, then that becomes the lens through which we view reality and so our adult experience will either be fear of rejection or experiencing it over and over. So here is the challenging truth, ‘unless we are aware of where we have come from in our early years, that is the place we are going’. That means there is something in us that creates our future along the lines of our past and particularly what we have turned a blind eye to back there will end up being right in front of us in the present. Here let me offer an example:

A man shared recently that nothing he had ever done in his life had ever worked out in spite of all his best efforts. Life seemed very unfair, that no matter how hard he tried without ever being unkind to anyone, no amount of effort or goodwill ever paid dividends. With a dawning awareness he began to see how and why nothing could work out and it had nothing to do with effort. Into everything he had done he had carried a big suitcase of unresolved hurt and rejection. For some time, he would manage to keep the lid on this and pretend there was nothing wrong, but inevitably it would open with the contents becoming more familiar with each opening. In terms of relationships not working he had been rejected by his mother and now this undermined every attempt to be in a long-term relationship. It was his granny who had reared him, and his neediness made him smother every woman he had met in adult life. Then in work his issues with not being loved by his father had carried through into his work where he always had issues with authority figures. It was his past that was ever present and never where he thought he had left it.

How someone’s past creates their future seems quite mysterious and even unfair, but we know that it does. Past events, particularly when we choose to look in the opposite direction become what we see in the future and then life is like driving a car, what we look at in front of us determines the direction our lives will go. Is it any wonder then that without awareness the place we are coming from is also the place we are going!

Mon March 3^rd – Leaders who Renege

Every ship needs a captain. Every community needs a leader who will take responsibility. There are people who are anointed leaders and are meant to lead. They have the charism of authority. The danger is that when leaders who are meant to lead do not step forward and take their role, others who have a need for power will generally step into the breach. This is a danger in all groups, organizations and communities. The need for control runs very deep and we should never underestimate how difficult it is to let go of control after having been given it for too long. It exercises its grip in subtle ways. Someone may go out of his or her way to be kind and helpful, they are prepared to be at everyone’s beck and call, nothing is ever too much, they appear and want to do everything and be in everything. However, it is all still operating out of a need for to be in control. So, when that control is questioned or threatened or that person no longer gets their own way, there is the threat of complete withdrawal of all support. This is when the true motive, that was hidden in plain sight for everyone, suddenly becomes apparent.

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