Why Leadership?
Hey, I’m Bo Cornelius, the founder of Second Mountain Leadership My story begins in 2017 when I arrived at Algoa Correctional Center (ACC) full of fear, anger, failure, shame, isolation, and insecurity. I was beginning a 7-year sentence and I knew that I would be serving 85%. I was desperate to find a way to return to my family as a person that they could be proud of.
The first two years were extraordinarily difficult. The circumstances were deplorable, the treatment was horrible, and I felt that I was less than human. I was dealing with difficult emotions and trying to find my purpose and maintain a strong relationship with my wife and daughter.
I participated in Restorative Justice by attending Impact of Victims classes and built projects that were donated to various charities in the woodshop. I learned to train dogs in the Puppies for Parole program, and I read a ton of books. In 2019, I attended a leadership conference called the Global Leadership Summit, that was live streamed across the world in the Chapel at ACC. It was at this point that I finally experienced an entirely different atmosphere. It was a very positive experience, and for two days I remember feeling like something other than a resident at a correctional institution. After hearing Chris Voss speak, my wife sent me his book to read. After reading Never Split the Difference, I was keenly aware that applying his concept of tactical empathy could benefit me in my interactions with other residents and staff members. This concept worked when I applied it and it showed me that other leadership concepts could be applied within the prison to the benefit of everyone. This planted the seed for a bigger idea.
Through the study of leadership, I understood that leadership at its core, was influence. Influence has a wide scope including personal development, life-skills, parenting, and recovery. These are types of prison programs, often very narrow in scope. Through the study of leadership, I started to understand that principles like communication, conflict resolution, humility, empathy, and gratitude as well as many, many more apply to all of the program types offered in prisons. I felt that leadership could be a more holistic approach to so-called “rehabilitation”. Leadership encompasses all of the programs offered and through the lens of intentional influence, it allows for empowerment, autonomy, and it inspires change as opposed to demanding it through threat and deprivation. Leadership gives you your power back even in prison. When personal development happens through influence instead of risk management, inspiration occurs because we realize that we have influence, even in prison.
In my experience, the vast majority of people want to be a positive influence, not a negative influence. They really just don’t know how. But narrow programs that are based on a risk management model, do not inspire because what is implied through the transaction of the information in these programs, is that the best outcome is just for us to not return to prison. Understanding that we can be a positive influence on ourselves, our families, and our communities is both inspiring and motivating.
In the end, the only way that genuine growth and change occur is through inspiration and hope, not through control and by exploiting shame and guilt. We can do more than just stay out of prison. We can thrive and we can be assets to the communities that we return to. That’s why we started Second Mountain Leadership; check out our homepage to learn more, and please consider supporting our work.