Time to let go.

There comes a time to let go, and I think I made the right decision. For 5 years, I’ve had the privilege of leading several Filipino Student Associations here in Queensland, with the most recent being the Queensland Filipino Youth Association.

At the end of last year, which was the last year of my term as Chief Officer, I started to look for someone who could lead this organisation. Why? Because I firmly believe that you should be able to let go of being a leader and become a mentor.

Many of those that know my past will know that I don’t take to the status quo lightly. By failing to let go, stagnation occurs, leading to failure, which is what, in my opinion, happened to a previous organisation I used to be a part of. A lack of succession led to the me making the decision to burn the bridge — nothing good was coming out of it, and attempting to have a conversation about it wasn’t happening anyway, so why subject myself to it?

With my current student organisation, instituting a succession plan makes it easier to enact on the vision already set out and to allow for new initiatives to develop. This is where true success lies — to allow someone else to flourish. And yes, I still have to shepherd the new leaders a bit, and there have been some interesting things to see in terms of dynamics, but again, this is all part of the process.

The ultimate goal is to ensure that by the start of 2020, the pathway to succession as well as mentoring skills have been refined to a stage where I myself and my fellow group of mentors are happy for me to properly pass the torch on. By then, I will have been in the student leadership sphere for about 7 years, and that should be plenty of time and experience for both myself and for the leaders that follow on from me.

This was originally published at npaatan.wixsite.com on May 29, 2018.