Read The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership for Free Online

tell me that people can feel you before they can hear you. Especially people who have been oppressed. They have been exploited so much that their antennas are always up, checking for authenticity, kicking the tires, making sure you are real.They know who’s authentic and who’s not. They can’t even tell you how they know, can’t even describe what is missing. They just know.
    So that’s why it’s so important for leaders to be themselves. Even if sometimes that means not being the perfect candidate, or the perfect pastor, or the perfect principal. People will accept you and your mistakes much more readily if they feel you’re being real. What they won’t accept is a phony. I’ve made a ton of mistakes in my career, but the people I was trying to lead didn’t hold them against me, because they could see the content of my heart. They could feel it. It’s like the saying I hear all the time in politics: It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. You make the mistake, people understand. But when you try to disguise it and play them for the fool, that’s when you’re going to pay dearly.
    The Bible is filled with examples of the importance of authenticity and the many rewards that will flow to you when you don’t try to be something that you’re not. When Moses found out that he was actually an Israelite and not an Egyptian, he went and found his people and became a great leader to them, rather than trying to live more comfortably as one of the ruling Egyptians.
    When God called Gideon to lead the Israelites from oppression, Gideon didn’t try to hide his fear and pretend he was some heroic figure. No, he asked God to prove Himself before Gideon would commit to taking on a massive army. So that’s when God drenched the fleece in dew, to demonstrate His power.
    I think it’s only natural to wrestle with yourself when you are faced with the opportunity to be something you’re not. Who among us doesn’t want to be perceived as smarter or braver or grander than we really are? But it is when you win that wrestling match with yourself that you begin to approach greatness.
    Those who listen to me on the pulpit or in front of the mic might notice that I mix a lot of humor into my orations. It was always a part of my personality to be funny, but at an early age, I decided to develop and use humor in my sermonizing. I think it’s extremely important when converting people to make them comfortable; it adds a great deal to your authenticity. You have to let people know that you are not dropped out of heaven onto earth like some flawless gift of God. That’s not going to get you as far as letting them see that you came through the same insecurities, the same anxieties, the same fears, the same temptations that they did. I came from the ground up; I didn’t come from the sky down. When people realize that about you, they can relate to you better and therefore are more open to your message.
    For instance, when I talk about women, I’m honest about the changes I went through after my marriage ended, when I was trying to date a lot of younger women, stumbling through the stereotypical middle-age crisis, trying to prove I was still young and vital. But one day, I woke up and thought, You can go out with a twenty-year-old girl, but you’re certainly not twenty anymore. You’re not fooling anybody but yourself. That is an entirely different message from me preaching about it from alofty perch, as if I’m up on Mount Sinai. Similarly, I can talk in a personal way about vanity because I went through it myself, when my vanity outran my sanity, that period of wanting to be in the newspaper, rather than being more concerned about what I’m saying and whether I’m using it for good. That’s real. And the more real you are about your own shortcomings, the easier it is for you to help somebody get past his or hers. If you can’t be real about your own shortcomings, then you haven’t gotten over them. I can’t concede and