The fundamental truths I learned about leadership from my time in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina are:

1) Accessing, Trusting & Acting on Your Gut Instincts: The process of becoming a leader starts by engaging your own gut level leadership instincts. It’s about developing your ability to access, trust and act on your intuition. It’s making what I call the leadership switch, which means switching your focus for direction to inside of yourself instead of outside to an "authority" figure. It means using your leadership instinct as a compass by which to navigate when the external landmarks aren’t clear or have been washed away, literally, as they were in Katrina.

2) Learning to be a Leader is an Experiential Process: In order to become the best leader that one can be, one must have direct experience of engaging one’s gut instincts. You can’t only read about how to do this. I believe that directly experiencing a personal challenge, even a crisis, enables one to fully maximize this leadership potential. Going through an outdoor challenge like Outward Bound is one way to tap one’s leadership instincts.

3) The Ability to Deal With Reality is Key: Developing the ability to keep up with a fast-changing reality is key to successful leadership. This involves being able to switch off what you thought would happen to facing what is actually happening. Further, it means being able to shift your "internal frame of reference" to quickly match a new, changed reality. Being stuck on "this isn't what's supposed to be happening" impairs one's ability to respond successfully.

4) Without Resolving One's Own Weaknesses, One Will Not Be Able to Develop One's Full Leadership Potential: Identifying and learning to overcome one's weaknesses is essential to developing your leadership potential. Unless one does this, these weaknesses remain as hidden obstacles, much like logs floating just under the surface of a river. Weaknesses may include fear, a lack of confidence, or even arrogance, for example. The central weakness I faced in Katrina was overcoming my fear of asking for help or even admitting that I needed help. Fear of dependency and "being a burden" followed closely behind.

5) Never Hand Over Complete Responsibility for Your Situation to "Authority Figures." Don't naively trust authority figures as if you'd be trusting God. They will do their best, but they have their own self-interest as well. Always hold onto some quotient of responsibility for yourself and your situation. Never ignore your “leadership instinct.”