At the Heart of All Directions

Over the past two weeks I’ve shared one of my favourite stories — one a good friend, mentor, and executive coach once told me.

The story of finding the pony.

It’s a simple story, but a rich one. There are many lessons hidden inside it. One of the most powerful is this: you cannot change the nature of people.

Which raises an important question.

If we cannot change the nature of people, how do we lead?

For me, the answer begins with looking to nature itself.

The wisdom of the ancients — of the first peoples — is rightly called wisdom. Long before modern scientific methods, the ancients developed their own way of understanding the world: through careful observation of patterns over long periods of time.

Nature was their teacher.

Recently I’ve had the time to reflect on one such teaching that many Indigenous traditions still rely upon today: the teachings of the four directions.

What I have come to realise is that at the heart of these teachings lies a simple but profound idea:

presence.

And presence, I believe, is the key to working with the nature of people rather than trying to change it.

The four directions offer a way of understanding life through the movement of the natural world.

The east, where the sun rises, represents spring — rebirth, renewal, and the dawn of something new.

The south, where the warm summer sun sits high in the sky, represents comfort, vitality, and the warmth of growth.

The west, where the sun sets, represents autumn — the end of the day, when the earth prepares for rest.

And the north represents winter — a time of reflection, when the land sleeps and we learn from the lessons the year has given us.

These teachings come from the northern hemisphere and are particularly rooted in the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples in what settlers now call Canada. But the underlying insight is universal.

They form a simple — yet elegant — way of understanding cycles.

What struck me most as I reflected on the four directions is that they are arranged in a circle.

At first I thought about how each direction connects to the others.

To begin something new in the east, we must leave something behind in the west.
The lessons of the past live in the north.
And when things go well, we eventually experience the warmth and comfort of the south.

But something else caught my attention.

The west and the north are rooted in the past.
The east and the south point toward the future.

None of the directions speak directly to the present.

And that is where the circle becomes important.

The circle represents continuity. Life moving endlessly forward.

An individual life may end, but life itself continues.

But the circle also has another property — one that I’ll explain imperfectly, and with apologies to the mathematicians and physicists who may find my explanation overly simple.

If you imagine the infinite points that make up the edge of a circle and then combine them, they converge toward the centre.

The heart of the circle.

And that centre point is zero.

It is the place where all directions meet.

That centre is the present.

The past lives behind us in the west and north.
The future emerges before us in the east and south.

But leadership — real leadership — happens in the centre.

In the present.

We leave the past behind, even as we carry its lessons.
We move toward the dawn of something new.
We work toward the warmth and comfort that success may eventually bring.

But we do all of that here and now.

In the present moment.

And this brings us back to the nature of people.

If we accept that we cannot change people’s nature — that optimism, scepticism, independence, caution, and curiosity are all part of the wiring people bring with them — then leadership is not about trying to reshape that nature.

Leadership is about being present enough to work with it.

To see people as they are.

To create conditions where their nature becomes contribution rather than friction.

Which brings me back to the story of finding the pony.

Sometimes we find ourselves staring at a very large pile of manure.

But the work of leadership is not to change who people are.

It is to remain present.

To see clearly.

And to continue the search — here and now — knowing that somewhere in the pile there may indeed be a pony.