A strangely reflective, even melancholy day. Is that because, unlike our cousins in the northern hemisphere, Easter is not associated with the energy and vitality of spring but with the more subdued spirit of autumn?

The truth is that we will learn nothing from our sadness, our suffering, our disappointments or our failures unless we give ourselves time to experience them to the full, reflect on them, learn from them or, in modern parlance, process them.

To listen to someone means devoting time to the process, putting your own concerns on hold, remaining silent even when you’re dying to say something. Patient listening also involves a willingness to postpone judgement about what is being said. Mostly, we want to rush in to agree, to disagree, to object, to correct; but listening demands the patience to let all that wait until the other person has finished saying to us what they want to say to us.

Yet in our enthusiasm for the idea that everyone should be able to read and write fluently, we may be missing a crucial point: in today’s culture, finely honed literacy skills are simply not as important as they once were.

You have five hundred Facebook ‘friends’? That simply means you’ve redefined ‘friend’ to make it something like ‘a contact I exchange data with’.

Polls are no substitute for leadership because, at its very essence, leadership is about giving people what they don’t already have – a sense of vision, inspiration, or even an adequate grasp of a particular subject.

There’s no such thing as a boring subject, only a bored listener who hasn’t bothered to search for the relevance of the message to them.

Although we love the idea of choice – our culture almost worships it – we seek refuge in the familiar and the comfortable.

Actually, I can’t imagine anything more tedious than a perfect person, especially if it was someone who also demanded perfection from me.

It is the misfortune of contemporary leaders, across the whole spectrum of Australian life, that the community’s demand for strong leadership is growing in direct proportion to our lack of confidence in ourselves. The end of this century is an unusually difficult time to be a leader in Australia.