Honestly, this was quite a quiet week. I had submitted the draft that I had written to the Senior Fellow that I was working with, and was waiting throughout the week for a reply. It’s a busy time at the organisation with lots of research proposals being submitted, and so it’s completely understandable that this particular project was put on the back burner for a week.

This being the case, my schedule pretty much entirely cleared up for the week as I waited for feedback. And so, this was a moment of quiet and stillness in the middle of my LiA, and actually the first week in a very, very long time where I haven’t been sprinting in motion. For sure, I still had responsibilities to fill at Bruegel – I was ticking along with some of the other projects I’ve been helping out on here, and that was definitely very interesting. But this was an important moment to reflect, in my opinion, and to exercise temperance.

I think it’s easy, as a leader, to construe temperance as being a virtue in a purely instrumental sense – by that I mean that it’s easy to only value temperance as a way of not burning out and ensuring that you get more things done. It’s easy to value stopping and knowing when to be intentional as a way of making sure that you don’t overextend, and it’s easy therefore to choose not to be temperate as a leader when you don’t in fact need to be on this particular instrumental view. Why exercise caution and conscious awareness when you have space to lurch forward with the next big thing?

Leadership definitely is about getting things done. For me, it’s about doing everything you can to help others. But I think it’s also very important to have the humility to recognise that especially in the case of myself and other scholars, we aren’t the finished products yet and nor are we meant to be or expected to be. And so, I don’t think the emphasis of leadership for us is about delivering all the time, every time. I think it’s more about delivering, about getting amazing things done, and then taking time to reflect and learn from what you’ve been up to.

This is something I learnt the hard way this academic year – I was so involved with everything happening around me and all these incredibly exciting new opportunities that I honestly forgot to stop and think, to stop and reflect in the way that I consider so important to my character and my style of leadership. And when about halfway during the academic year I realised that this had happened, I understood that the answer for me as a leader isn’t to stop doing but to keep doing and start thinking again.

Temperance is definitely something that you exercise in moments when you are making decisions, in terms of not being impulsive and instead remaining measured. But temperance extends beyond just moments, and I think it’s a character trait that you display over time. It’s about being in motion, surging forward towards what you want to achieve, and still having the courage to stop and think. To understand that it’s okay not to be running towards your goal all the time, because if you don’t stop and look around you’ll get there and you’ll largely be the same person who started running. That’s what the value of temperance is – it’s not instrumental, it doesn’t help you get more done. It’s about having the courage to stop, recognise where you are, think about how you feel and how you’ve gotten here, and measure where you want to go. It’s about having the courage to carve that stillness out.

And so, this week, I thought of surging onwards. I thought of going ahead and researching even more and adding even more content to the document before the Senior Fellow reviewed it. But was that really the best use, for me as a leader in this moment in time, of that time that I had been given by the fortuity of a few concurrent deadlines on someone else’s plate? I didn’t think so. My earlier internship and this LiA have been such hearty experiences, and I’ve been trying to do my best to digest them as they’re happening. I tried to make time every day to stop and think when I was in London, and these blog posts are a part of that here in Brussels. But I feel like so much has happened and frankly I have changed a lot, and I felt this week that I needed to take some time to bring those thoughts out explicitly and get my house in order.

So I did! Whilst I did keep up some reading on the Mediterranean project and I did continue with the other things I’m helping out with, I didn’t cannibalise my time by lurching forward into keeping myself occupied. Instead, I took time out to really reflect on who I was at the start of this summer and the way I was thinking and feeling, who I am now and how my thinking has changed, and most importantly who I want to be in the immediate future. For example, this term coming up I have to make some exciting but daunting choices about what comes next. I don’t want this exciting journey of leadership and impact that I’ve been on as a Laidlaw Scholar and more broadly at university to come to a quiet close when I leave university and move on to what’s next. I think it would be quite sad to enter the world of work and smother everything that I’ve learnt. And so I’ve been trying to find a way, consistent with my skills and what I find intellectually interesting, to continue on this journey.

Regarding the project, I have now received feedback! The Senior Fellow said that my draft was ‘terrific’, which was relieving to hear. I’m going to add more to it this week, and then send it through. I am excited to get back to it, but I’m really happy that I took that space to breathe and think this week.