The Development Scheme
To me, the three metamorphoses of the spirit as formulated in "Thus spoke Zarathustra" from Friedrich Nietzsche are the normal progression towards natural authority. When your mind reaches the state of the child, you have this pure and natural leadership where, for example, anger is no longer a quality that others would attribute to you. You stand rock solid in your field because of your extensive knowledge and experience. You have your own work philosophy and know how to lead people. You usually get good feedback and achieve great results. The people who work for you trust you.
The three metamorphoses of the spirit
Your life is a lifetime of learning. You start as a camel and load up all the knowledge and experience you gain in the first and most important learning stages of your life. This includes school, university, apprenticeship, and the first years of work. But also, everything that comes along the way like the first love, the first crisis and life's ups and downs.
After you have built up enough knowledge, you become a lion and realize that on top of all this knowledge you can now build something functional like a family, a career, and a business. You are proud and you take credit for your accomplishments, which are now visible to everyone. This is a stage marked by behavior. At a certain stage, you act strong and confident. You collect recognition not for its own sake, but rather, because you are kicking ass, and doing great things. A lion is already a leader. And often even a good leader. They can attack but also protect. They can roar loudly and state their opinion, and they are heard. They separate from the mass and are counted into the pool of the creators. They don't accept that something needs to be done as it has always been done and can think outside the box. They lead to new lands and conquer new worlds. But this stage is where most people get stuck and fail to progress - unfortunately.
Because the last stage is the most important. Here you become a child again and learn that all the pride is trivial.
You rather pass on your knowledge so that many more people can benefit from it. You share and give away credit, and the knowledge you have built up before. You drop the old ballast and burdens and unnecessary things you have surrounded yourself with over the years. Your ego subsides and you are no longer driven by strategic ingratiation or bound by social conformity. No more leading through fear or rank. Leadership now feels natural. A child is a curious person that creates for the sake of creation, a person who researches only to learn, who lives for the sake of life and experience. The child is defined according to their own system of beliefs, values and ideas - their own philosophy.
The Camel
The camel stands for the first steps to becoming a great leader. It stands for the first steps in life.
It stands symbolically for the accumulation of knowledge that one acquires, for example, in kindergarten, school, university or during training. The knowledge that one acquires by reading books, watching movies and so on. With every piece of information you carry something more with you. It also stands for the sum of the experiences one makes along the way. The good but also the many bad. All the crap you go through and the associated lessons that you draw or should draw from it.
In summary, the camel walks the hard path. It carries the heavy load that many people try to avoid. And if you have never done that, you will not be able to transform your mind into a lion. And again, heavy burden does not mean physical burden. It also means the heavy psychological burdens. The heavy burden of responsibility and the hardest of all, admitting your own failures and mistakes. You can only carry this special burden alone, as this is your experience and can't be shared responsibility. To overcome the camel stage will happen alone.
The Lion
The lion is the epitome of courage, pride and will to fight (even if the male version is quite lazy when it comes to catching the meal).
The next stage of development is one that a carrying, "renouncing and reverent" animal could not go through. It is the fight against the golden dragon. The literary pangolin is synonymous with all the values already created and claims that there are no more values to be created. And since it has all the values, it has the right to tell everyone what the right values are. It tells us what to do and how far we are allowed to go.
Now you are the fighter, the lion - loud and proud. There is nothing to be afraid of anymore. Nothing more to justify yourself from and the right always from your side. This is the phase in which the majority of managers get stuck. Since they are of the opinion that it does not go better any more, there is also no more after what one could strive for. However, this is also the phase you have to be careful of the most.
The lion phase is the phase which is characterized by your own successes. The phase in which you realize that you can finally apply all that you have learned and that it really makes a difference. It pays off that you have spent years at university, for example, and you finally have a job that pays a good salary. The status has to be defended. That's when many people start to worry about what will happen if they lose their status. Fear mixes with pride and this becomes explosive. This fighting mode is not the last stage. It is just halfway to becoming a great leader.
Now that you know how to fight, you are ready to evolve to the next level.
The Child
“But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?
Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.”
Here you become a child again and learn that all the pride is trivial. You rather pass on your knowledge so that many more people can benefit from it. You share and give away credit, and the knowledge you have built up before. You drop the old ballast and burdens and unnecessary things you have surrounded yourself with over the years. Your ego subsides and you are no longer driven by strategic ingratiation or bound by social conformity. No more leading through fear or rank. Leadership now feels natural. A child is a curious person that creates for the sake of creation, a person who researches only to learn, who lives for the sake of life and experience. The child is defined according to their own system of beliefs, values and ideas - their own philosophy.
It is important to note that these changes are not active and on a schedule. It's more like you're doing your normal work and suddenly realize you've been doing a familiar task differently. And you think back and then realize that even on the last few occasions you've done it, your way of working and your behavior has already changed. It's a long and silent process. Changes in attitude take a lot of time and need to be remembered over and over again.
So what is the final phase? What does it mean to transform your mind into a child? There may be a lot of different explanations from great philosophers and people who have a much greater experience of interpreting such masterpieces than I do. I can only say that for me it is an analogy for the transformation of authority.
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