Leadership

In September 2013, I told a close friend about a dream. I was Managing Director of a software company in Buea, but something was stirring — a vision for a leadership training organisation. I didn’t have a clear plan. I just knew that the way most people were being taught to lead wasn’t working. My friend listened. Then he did something I didn’t expect — he recommended me for a leadership development program for African leaders. He thought it would sharpen me. Application forms were due the following year. I didn’t go. Not that year. Not the next. Not for six years. By October 2013, the vision had a name — “Leading From The Heart.” I’d written down three foundational laws: Love, Faith, Hope. A colleague presented the material at a leaders’ meeting and the response was electric. I created a Facebook page. I started drafting registration documents. The dream felt alive. Then life happened. I transitioned from corporate management into pastoral ministry. What I thought would be a season of growth became a season of grinding — not just the exhaustion kind, but the soul-crushing kind where you’re grinding in the wrong calling. The ministry culture demanded I become someone I wasn’t. The LFTH vision was still in my heart, but I couldn’t embrace it. I was too busy surviving. Six years passed. Six years of carrying a dream I couldn’t pursue. Six years of knowing what I was called to do but not having the space, the permission, or the courage to do it. In 2019, the door finally opened. I attended the program my friend had recommended six years earlier. And the experience included something I’d never done before: a silent retreat. If you’ve never sat in deliberate silence for an extended period, it’s hard to explain what happens. At first, the noise inside you is louder than anything outside. Your mind races through to-do lists, unresolved conversations, plans you haven’t executed. But if you stay — if you resist the urge to fill the emptiness with productivity — something shifts. The noise settles. And in the settling, you begin to hear differently. I walked into that retreat carrying a dream I couldn’t articulate. I walked out with permission. Not a business plan. Not a strategy. Just permission to pursue what had been placed in my heart six years earlier. That retreat changed the course of my life. Within a year, Lead from the Heart was formally relaunched as a consultancy. I reconnected with a ministry community I’d first encountered a decade earlier. The Leadership Heartbeat methodology — the framework I now teach executives and emerging leaders across Africa — began to crystallise. Not from theory, but from lived experience. From the grinding. From the silence. From the six-year gap. Here’s what I’ve learned from those six years: The gap wasn’t wasted. It felt wasted — painfully so. But the leader who showed up in 2019 was not the same man who had the dream in 2013. The corporate season taught me systems. The toxic ministry season taught me what leadership should never look like. The grinding taught me why rhythm matters more than hustle. The silence gave me permission to finally begin. If you’re reading this and you’re in your own six-year gap — carrying a vision that feels stuck, delayed, or impossible — I want you to know something: the gap is not the enemy of your calling. It might be the preparation for it. Not every delay is a denial. Sometimes God is building something in you that the dream requires before it can survive. I couldn’t have built Lead from the Heart in 2013. I didn’t have the depth, the pain, the methodology, or the maturity. I needed those six years — even the terrible ones — to become the leader the vision required. Your gap might be doing the same thing for you. Next week: The Making of a Leader — Part 2: The Grinding Season Silas Achu is the Founder of Lead from the Heart, a leadership development consultancy empowering African executives and emerging leaders through the Leadership Heartbeat methodology. Learn more at www.leadfromtheheart.co.uk