Conscious life leadership is about being attuned to the context around you and tuning into the inner core of your Being to gather this way a large set of data based on which you can make informed decisions.
As such, you must make yourself aware of, and – in this sense, sensitive to both external and internal knowledge so as to gather an enormous amount of data that you can use to respond in thoughtful ways.
When unaware of these inner and external types of information offered to us, there is a much greater risk of activating unthoughtful immediate reaction responses. Haphazardly, a reaction could be helpful, but most likely it is not. More often it causes more harm than good.
Once we attune ourselves to becoming more aware and expanding our consciousness to both the inner and outer world – then we can be like the bluefin tuna, which scientists cannot explain how navigates with such ease and swiftness. We too can learn to navigate with swiftness and navigate in social relations to inspire and create engagement among colleagues, employees, end-users, partners, etc.
When as leaders we can create that kind of inspiration, engagement, and creativity around us – it becomes a whole different story coming to work each day to engage in conversations with other people, who are equally engaged to take the conversation further.
Conversations with people who have left their egoic self behind are not concerned about who got the idea or where did it come from. No, they just want to get the idea going. They want to develop it, explore it, and see how can they act on it and move it into real life for it to have an impact. This is when we feel the energy of what is going on in our organizations.
Conscious Life Leaders can Create the Energy they Themselves Feel
We need to train leaders to create this type of energy. Make room for this energy
If you don’t feel it within yourself, you cannot create it in the external world. Because, as a leader, you can never go any deeper in relations with other people than you dare to go in your investigation of yourself. So, it takes the courage to go deeper with oneself and it necessitates of course the knowledge of how to do this.
As a leader, you need to understand your own values to understand the values of other people and so also understand in general, how values affect relations, interaction, and life trajectories.
You need to be an authentic person to hope to be able to create authentic relationships – between yourself and some other employer or leader and also among all the different people out there in the organization.
That is why I would like to invite you to talk more about conscious life leadership and I want you to consider going that we stop talking about horizontal leadership development where we just give leaders another tool and another tool and another tool. We are not helping the leader who is in search of a solution and they stand with a hammer – when facing a problem that looks nothing like a nail.
Globally, we are estimated to spend 355 billion dollars on leadership development and with little effect.
If we instead train our leaders to understand social relations, to understand their inner life and how can we make this inner life match the external life – being fully present and aware to gather as much information, so we can make a qualified decision as to – ‘how can we best help this situation’, ‘how can we best help these people overcome these challenges they are facing?’ -then there is no situation we cannot handle and there is no situation we cannot face and perhaps even make a better situation out of.
Moreover, we can then even start to appreciate these challenges as they push us to become even better.
On a side note, remember, the inner life is unfolding, whether we dare to talk about it or not – we’ve all seen a boss or an employee turn frustrated, start to yell, or become really sad. Since we know it is within all of us – is it not time to dare to address it?
We need to tune in to our awareness and we need to talk about conscious life leadership. Moreover, we must dare to talk about emotional intelligence and dare to talk about spiritual intelligence (the purpose and meaning of work and life and so forth).
Furthermore, we must move away from the horizontal leadership development approach where we give leaders yet another tool and another tool. Instead, it is time to talk about vertical leadership development, which is about lifting mindsets.
We have to make shifts into higher mindsets, where we are attuned to what is going on within ourselves and we are totally attuned to the context and environments around us in which we are agents and where we have to find solutions to challenges every day and so best help the people to create on their own.
That’s when the magic starts.
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Please leave a comment and let’s start a conversation about what it takes to create great leadership for tomorrow’s healthy organizations.
I wish you all the very best
Sincerely
Vibeke Vad Baunsgaard
Editor-in-Chief ManageMagazine
Manage with Passion, Wisdom & Creativity
You can see more about conscious life leadership – and learn about talks, courses, and workshops – at vibekebaunsgaard.com
