What is the biggest leadership challenge today?
Consciousness evolution
Being clear on your intentions are absolutely critical
if you want to progress in life. Intentions provide a gravitational pull
towards our desired outcomes. They provide the energy currency that keeps us
focused and moving forward when times are challenging. Your higher intentions
also affect our perception and awareness. They help identify opportunities on
our mental radar. Having clarity on your highest intentions serves as a
navigation aid towards your goals. If they are clearly established, your senses
will recognize, prioritize and attend to what is salient and most important for
achieving your objectives. This will happen unconsciously, without you having
to exert any effort or energy. This is how you use your neuro-endocrine system
in favour of getting what you want. Let me explain with an example:
You need a new car, and you start shopping around. You’ve noticed the new Land Rover Discovery and have taken a liking to it. Especially the gunmetal colour, with tan leather seats. You price it on the web and go for a test drive at your nearest dealer. You checked the budget and it’s within your range. You like it and can see yourself enjoying this vehicle. During this process you have established your intention. You decided you want this. But before actually buying it, as you drive around, to the office, school and gym, you start noticing LR Discovery’s everywhere. They stand out on your radar all the time (especially that gunmetal one you like). Your attention is following your intention, without you having to do anything. That is how intention and attention works in tandem. Maybe this article popped up on your radar because you aspire to grow and develop.
So, what are you intentional about? It could be many noble things, but if you are not intentional about your development, well then you will not grow, evolve, or mature. And you definitely won’t make use of this autonomous process for your own benefit.
I believe one of the reasons we are on earth, or a collective human purpose and endeavor, is the journey of moving through stages of development. To expand our awareness of self, others, and the world. To grow in consciousness.
The diagram illustrates the levels of consciousness that humans can go through, if they are deliberate about it. This development doesn’t just happen by default. In fact, 80% of people will remain at the underdeveloped, Reactive level, while 15% will reach the Creative level and only 5% will move on to Integral. Operating from the Reactive level severely limits leadership effectiveness, while operating from the Creative or Integral level enhances leadership effectiveness.
It should come as no surprise that a higher-level of individual development or consciousness is required for higher individual effectiveness. But additional to that, a more conscious leader catalyzes collective effectiveness, which transforms business performance.
Albert Einstein said, “The solutions to our current problems cannot be solved from the level of consciousness that created them.” Therefore, problems can only be solved from a higher order consciousness, one more complex than the problems and challenges we face.
Intentionality is vital, but awareness of what to be intentional about comes first. How are you identifying the conscious and unconscious patterns, beliefs, and behaviours that are limiting your growth and effectiveness? What if you have reactive tendencies and programmed behaviours that are limiting your health, growth, leadership effectiveness, development, behaviours, and therefore business results? If you are unaware of these blind spots (which all of us have), how can you be intentional about overcoming or working through them? Your lack of awareness and intentionality can be the primary obstacle to the very future you are committed to creating.
The world we perceive, and experience is a reflection of our internal associations, mapping, and meaning making. You are daily responding to new situations in old ways. Then wonder why nothing changes and why progress is short-lived. This conditioned, reactive state of mind removes critical thinking from the moment and replaces or imposes a historic view generated from an immature, disempowered place in history. You will never wake up, look yourself in the mirror and say today I will do the same stupid, reactive, regressive, self-defeating things I have been doing for years. But more often than not you will do them. Reality does not change. We change our subjective reality through how we relate to and engage with the world, our self-world relationship. We relate to the world through our internal mapping; therefore, we change our experience through updating our mental maps and internal operating system.
This requires dialogue, introspection, reflection and action. The deeper the conversation, the more the assumptions and beliefs that shape our reality have a chance of being exposed and re-examined. As these assumptions and beliefs are revised, behaviour can be changed. Change or transformation always starts with yourself. You will never change your system, organization, team, culture, or outcomes if you don’t change yourself. You (and all the competing aspects within you) are holding up the frame that is reinforcing the status quo. How you show up, react to, and engage with the world through the filters and programs (beliefs, perspectives, fears, and meanings) you have established over a lifetime will govern your experience and results.
The solution will not be found in trying to fix the external problem but by uncovering the internal assumptions and beliefs we hold about the problem. Our assumptions often create, maintain, and reinforce the problem(experience). When we change our assumptions and beliefs; solutions may not only become clear, they become obvious. In other words, the things that are driving your deeper programming; that cause you to think, feel, and act the way you do, is what creates your results and outcomes. You need to bring that into conscious awareness so that you can change the conditioning and programming that is driving your outcomes rather than just changing behaviour (or reactively try to fix the problem) to get to different outcomes.
This is what Carl Jung was referring to when he said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
By making your own leadership development a strategic priority, you will give yourself and your organization a competitive advantage. This is not something you can leave up to others or think it will just happen over time. Many leaders stay in the reactive state and lower levels of development because this is hard work that normally confronts us with exactly those things we are avoiding. Those things about ourselves we cannot see, because at some point we did not want to see it or because it wasn’t welcome, useful or socially acceptable. Senior leaders often resist discovering that they still have much to learn. This work requires humility, and our ego identity does not want its stable framework and worldview to be rattled. Very often the thinking is that the problem is external to us, so let’s fix everything else but ourselves. It is not called the Hero’s Journey for nothing, and it’s definitely not for the faint hearted. It’s not easy to confront that which is limiting us from offering our full contribution. And overcoming the obstacles (often within) that block us.
Here are some questions to ponder:
Are you more conscious now than what you were one year ago? How do you know that?
How are your reactive conditioned responses holding recurring problems in place and preventing personal and business growth?
How are self-limiting beliefs and behaviours that keeps your ego identity alive preventing you from showing up?
Are you committed to ongoing growth, development and maturing in how you relate to yourself and others?
Those outside of a paradigm are more likely to see the blind spots and the solutions that we cannot. Are you intentional about your leadership development and do you want to harness that to drive improved business results? Do you need help with identifying limiting conscious and unconscious patterns in your life? If your answer is yes, let’s connect and have a conversation.
Thank you for reading.
Reinhard
