Dermot Butterly: leadership is creating and serving your deeper 'why'

My guest in this episode of the podcast “Leadership is the Competitive Advantage” is a professional life coach, teacher, author and speaker Dermot Butterly. In addition to being almost 20 years a coach himself, Dermot is also a trainer of life coaches with Erickson Coaching International where I met him as my trainer. He is also the producer and host of a radio show in Northern California called, “The Celtic Coach Radio Show – An Irish Talk Show, Just for Men and All Things Manly” on KOWS Radio. It was a pleasure to sit down with him and enjoy the wealth of personal experience, wisdom and pure sincerity that Dermot laid out on the table. He is a true leader in a sense that he is here to serve and create more meaning and value into our lives every day. I really enjoyed the experience.

“I believe that at the core every human being on the planet is a leader. And I say this because to me the greatest attribute or the ‘why’ of someone who is a great leader is that they have a desire to serve. That to me is really the essence of leadership. There is a quote, and I don’t remember if this is from Gandhi or Mandela, but he basically said that great leaders have a desire to serve, not to control. And that says everything that I ever need to know about what makes a great leader. If listeners took just that from our conversation today and they would hit the stop button right now, it would be of a huge value. Just ask yourself – where in my life do I have a desire to serve? Whether it is with my children, whether it is with my husband or my wife, or whether I would like to serve the public in a meaningful way, or whether it would be my colleagues at work, or I would like to show up for myself a little bit more every day, or I would just like to be a kinder and loving person to others. See, people think that leaders are these superhumans who do these amazing big things - Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King etc. - you know, people like that who do really big things in the world. But if you sat down with Mahatma Gandhi or you sat down with Nelson Mandela they would say to you: do the little things well. Mother Teresa said that you do not have to do great things, and she was a true leader herself, but do the little things with love and care. That would be enough And, you see, that to me is the essence of a great leader. Leadership is creating and serving your deeper 'why'.” – Dermot Butterly

Listen and enjoy!