The Poisonous Potion
Protect your vulnerability in front of the constant of being great, without allowing anyone to impose themselves permanently in the sphere of your emotions.
Thebes, the city of the living. Pharaoh Seti returns to his sumptuous castle of the Nile river. However, when he enters his huge chamber, he found himself face to face with the servants of the high priest Imhotep, his greatest witch doctor. It's no fair thing, he says to himself. He furiously makes towards the balcony. There, next to a beautiful statue, Anck-su-namun, his wife, awaits him all alone with a loving smile on her face. He realizes that someone touched her. And no one but him was allowed to touch her.
He suddenly turns. Then, unexpected, the priest Imhotep, bravely and tenaciously, draws the sword from his sheath. Then Anck-su-namun, getting all her strength, all the courage lying inside her heart, gladly stabs the dagger in the Pharaoh's back. A deep groan takes his breath away, and his strangled voice seems unable to break through his stiff throat. Then, with an indescribable thirst, with a consummate hate, Imhotep strikes him the fatal blow. The king is gone. All that's left of him is a simple: "Once upon a time".
Do you remain loyal to the values that give meaning and scope to facts that reveal your majesty, without giving up the impulse given by feelings?
Force against force. It's a terrible thing to be a Pharaoh and to feel deep inside, with a visible shudder, that your moment of agony has been decided, and it will happen straightaway, and you can't fight it at all. Uniting in a single thought, a single will, devoted to a single desire, the high priest Imhotep and his lover, Anck-su-namun, formed one power which brought Pharaoh to perdition. "God" proved to be lower than perfection, sharing the same fate of ordinary people, but in a violent manner.
I wonder how Anck-su-namun could pretend that she is faithful to the Pharaoh and loving him, and during this entire time to betray him with the high priest Imhotep. No doubt that her agility and subtlety, with which she managed to manipulate him, were the two weapons with which she deceived his vigilance. For Pharaoh, who was certainly conquered by her irresistible charm, would never have accepted being betrayed. As a proof, when he realized that he was betrayed, he was mercilessly killed.
Although he was very strong and brave, the Pharaoh was deceived by the strongest human passion: love, the attraction towards for Anck-su-namun. He should have better investigated how things are and to be vigilant, not to put all his confidence in her. This big mistake became an undeniable reality when he realized what lies behind appearances, and he paid the ultimate price for it.
Can you cure a wound of love without turning it into a deadly wound?
"You never know if a woman's love holds true" once remarked the Spanish playwright Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla. And he was not wrong.
If the Pharaoh had been able to read Anck-su-namun’s heart like an open book, if he had deciphered what lied behind her appearance, if he would have realized earlier her changeable and treacherous nature, then things would have been quite different. Nevertheless, the Pharaoh, overconfident in his own powers, built his entire life philosophy on the idea that everything happens according to his wishes.
Well, things didn't work out like that. In the end, he was defeated by the force of this woman. For she brought him to death, although she was not alone in this. Even so, she was the main culprit.
In leadership, before you are subjected to the amplification of a longer-lasting experience, you should encounter that safety distance that helps you better see what is the "peak of trust" in people, getting closer to the perspective from which God looks at what He intends to accomplish. A distance that will allow you to stop safely even if the heart continues to suffer.
Can you control the role that others play in your life when you feel confident in a game played under the sign of a naive realism?
Every leader has a weakness. The Pharaoh's weakness was Anck-su-namun. Just like Judith, the rich Israelite widow who charmed general Holofernes – the besieger – and cut off his head while he slept, so that Nebuchadnezzar's army could not besiege the city of Bethulia, just like Jael killed Sisera from Canaan, who was leading an army against the Israelites, hammering a spike to his temples - so Anck-su-namun stabbed Pharaoh Seti so that she could spend the rest of her life with the high priest Imhotep.
As a consequence, we can conclude: the leader who abandons himself to feelings and lacks perspicacity proves naivete, having all the chances to be lied to, cheated and betrayed.
Not every good-tasting potion keeps your power
Love is blind. It is a nutritious potion, tasteful, which can give you energy and vitality, so that can be useful and can get you rid of all sorts of evil. Even so, at the same time, love can be a poisonous potion, which can make you sensitive, vulnerable to all sorts of influences, to everything happening around you. Love can be a fine and tasty drink fogging your mind, blurring your thinking and confusing your spirit, and finally leading you to failure. Powers become weaknesses if you sip of the poisonous potion.
Lower-level leadership is a consequence of the weakness of seeing you strong when power feeds your hidden emotions.
Conclusion: Any leader needs moral support, and he can enjoy the best support from his life partner, the one next to him for better and for worse. She is the one he can count on during hard times and who will never use the "poisonous potion".
However, we must not forget that any leader has at least one vulnerable point. And any rival can annihilate a leader, attacking him in this point.
