In this article, you’ll find the five core values of evolutionary leadership. We’ll look at what are they and start the conversation about how to activate these superpowers within ourselves and our teams.
5 core values:
1. Self-Awareness & Mindfulness
2. Leadership & Connection
3. Power-With (vs. Power-Over)
4. Vulnerability
5. Befriending the Shadows
6. Embodied Wisdom
Let’s take a look at each one at a time.
Self-Awareness & Mindfulness
SELF-AWARENESS
Self-awareness is our inner compass to study our beliefs, behaviors, thoughts, emotions, preferences and triggers, so we can access the greater aspects of who we are.
We live in a culture where we are praised for busyness and "doing.” It takes immense courage and discipline to explore what’s behind the autopilot impulses of “doing” and yield to inspired action through “being.”
Becoming conscious about when we’re in coherence with mind and body or when we are in reactive states and behaviors is the trademark of a primal leader.
On one hand, self-awareness helps us to identify brings us joy, leverages our gifts and engenders a deep satisfaction and connection. On the other, self-awareness helps us notice where we suffer so we can uncover and transform challenging patterns, and evolve.
2. MINDFULNESS
Mindfulness is the art of curating focused attention towards anything we want greater understanding, skill or expression with.
Mindfulness allows us to slow and suspend habitual and autopilot behaviors. This allows us to become more aware of subconscious patterning and make an empowered choice.
When we explore what’s happening beneath the surface, we may discover that we need to set a boundary, clarify our need, interrupt controlling patterns of fear, self-criticism or impulses to hide for fear of failure.
Through the awareness of our current state of mind, we initiate a “mindful pause” that allows us to stay green and keep going, or call red and course correct.1. Self-Awareness & Mindfulness
2. Leadership And Connection
“An integrated leader is the biggest change agent on the planet.”
LEADERSHIP
Knowing ourselves expands our capacity to know others.
We influence the world around us based on the quality of presence we bring to our interactions. This includes how we recognize, manage and communicate our emotions, thoughts and beliefs.
As primal leaders, we practice taking responsibility for our beliefs and behaviors that solicit connection and disconnection, acceptance and disapproval, defensiveness and vulnerability.
Becoming aware of, noticing, and owning one’s direct experience in relationship to others is an evolving art form.
2. CONNECTION
There are three key components that set the tone and quality of connection we experience with ourselves and others:
Self: Our level of self-awareness and relationship to ourselves
Other: The quality of presence we bring to each interaction including our ability to share authentically, listen, clarify, bring curiosity and check assumptions
System: Cultivating an ability to observe, name and discuss dynamics and patterns of our relationships that cause disconnection; by looking at everyone’s contribution.
As primal leaders, we lead conversations by owning our experience and sharing our needs, expectations and boundaries in an open-hearted way.
We take responsibility for our projections and practice seeing the other person as they are rather than an agenda or fantasy of who we think they should be.
We also practice being attuned to and naming the interpersonal dynamics that foster disconnection and the ones that foster connection.
3. Power-WITH (Versus Power-Over)
There are two paradigms of power systems: power-over and power-with.
To create cultures of vulnerability-based trust, respect, and collaborative innovation, it’s most effective to start from the ground of power-with, while dismantling the separating and marginalizing impacts driven by systems of power-over.
POWER-OVER
Power-over is a global phenomenon of destructive and un-integrated forms of power.
Power-over models are based on dominance, and they are prominent in various aspects of our culture, such as politics, certain religious institutions, global corporations, or other hierarchical structures that seek to create conformity through shame and fear.
2. POWER-WITH
Power-with is a consensual and integrated expression of power.
Power-with is founded upon a commitment to conscious leadership through self-awareness and personal responsibility.
When engaging in power-with, we’re attuned to the way our decisions impact the whole. We listen to a larger field of wisdom to guide our choices.
Signature influences of power-with reside in the art of love, presence, listening, befriending our shadow, embracing the unknown, accessing the wisdom of our intuition and body, patience, cultivating magic, and seeing beyond illusions — many of which have been forced underground and out of the collective currency of relating to ourselves and one another.
We become more integrated with our power as we increase and expand our capacity to feel empathy, love, and responsibility for our own fear-based reactivity and patterns of control.
Power lives within our vulnerability and willingness to see things as they are not only how we want them to be.
4. Vulnerability
Vulnerability is one of the most powerful leadership assets we can hold and cultivate, and yet culturally it’s been framed as weak.
Vulnerability opens us into our humanity. It interrupts the weight of holding our shame alone. Vulnerability can short-circuit the habit of pretending we’re not impacted by the disturbances in our own system as well as the larger systems that we participate in (our organization, family, community, etc).
“Vulnerability is not weakness.And that myth is profoundly dangerous.Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.”
To embrace vulnerability is to recognize and track it through noticing:
What's happening inside through a self-inventory of emotions, thoughts, sensations and habits that lead to results we don't desire.
Our capacity to open our heart towards parts of ourselves that we feel we should protect and hide.
Internalized shame stories that drive our behavior and keep us in boxes.
Reactive tendencies and taking full responsibly for our experience instead of dumping our emotional pain onto others in relationships.
“I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. To be human is to be in vulnerability.”
The most vulnerable attribute of being human is to live with so much uncertainty.
It's a practice to listen deeply and slow down instead of react from the arsenal of strategies driven by fear, patterns of control and scarcity thinking all of which are designed to keep us "safe".
For example, if as leaders we think we have to know everything about running the business, being a good partner, parenting, managing running our lives, then when a moment of uncertainty arises instead of saying, “I don’t know, I need help” we panic, make rash decisions from autopilot beliefs, and act from fear.
If we say, “I don’t know,” then our courageous surrender into the unknown will likely reveal a pathway potentially with solutions far beyond what we could have imagined.
4. Befriending Our Shadows
“Embracing our shadows is the pathway to becoming the change we wish to see in the world.”
Running away from our shadows and reactive tendencies reinforces strategies of protection, judgment, dissatisfaction, depression, loneliness and entrenched attachments to our self-image.
When we discover and accept our operating system, we can begin to integrate and weave exiled parts of us back into our basket of inherent wholeness.
To become our most integrated and whole self we must explore cultural as well as personal messages of disapproval and judgment. These are the messages that promote feelings of not being enough and shame for being who we are.
When we hear enough messages wrapped in "you should", "you're not enough" or "you need to work harder" from an early age, and long enough, it's easy to lose contact with who we are. Direct contact with our most authentic self is often replaced by living a life of who we think we “should” be.
Befriending our shadows is a process of revealing our wisdom by coming home to all the ways we create separation inside and out.
There are two types of shadow integration.
Self-Judgment Shadow: These are areas of disapproval that we consciously hold disapproval towards in others or in ourselves.
Blind Spot Shadow: These are blind spots about our thinking, emotional patterns, belief systems and our behavioral impact on others and ourselves. These shadows are the seat of our unconscious reactivity.
Blind spot shadows are often revealed when you hear yourself say, "I can't believe I did that, I couldn't stop myself." They are so automatic we don't even recognize them happening until after the fact.
5. Embodied Wisdom
Embodied Wisdom: To take full ownership for the wisdom and power through channels of wisdom beyond our rational, linear mind.
If you’re like me, you were taught to value your intellect, disregard your feelings, and treat your body like a machine. Maybe this approach has driven you towards utter exhaustion, illness and burnout, too?
When we are disconnected from our bodies and live primarily in our thoughts and habitual emotional patterns, we are missing a reservoir of our wisdom that waits patiently for our attention.
There are reservoirs of sophisticated wisdom that live within each one of us. This include our cognitive intellect, body sensations, emotional intelligence, intuition, heart guidance, gut feelings, and information that unexpectedly arises from a non-linear knowing.
Here’s a closer look at a few channels of intellect and wisdom:
Mind Intelligence — When we become intimate with our minds, we come into an honest relationship with our operating system. Developing an inner witness to build our self-awareness is the first step towards recognizing, dis-identifying, and interrupting the disempowering habits, beliefs, and behaviors the imprison through fear, control, or paralysis.
Somatic Intelligence— Our body wisdom is powerful. It’s the vessel that channels and directs the life force flowing through us; the home from which we experience life. The body is a potent messenger that delivers information about our internal conflicts and deeper desires. It tracks our boundaries and gathers information through movement, sounds, touch, smells, visuals cues, and so much more. It holds our repressed memories, emotions, and beliefs. Since unresolved trauma and emotional pains often manifest as disease, chronic illness, and a variety of physical complications, it’s helpful to befriend and listen to what our body is holding, as well as what is needed to heal and release old burdens.
Heart Intelligence — Our heart is filled with hormones that release when we feel love, gratitude, and connection. Our connection to the heart helps us regulate states of activation and fear, as well as express our passion and love, and metabolize our grief and heartbreaks. Heart intelligence often can sense and feel things long before they become known to the mind. The heart is our invisible eyes of clarity and inner knowing without conceptual thinking.
Emotional Intelligence — The ability to welcome emotions as guides for clues and information about undercurrents that are unspoken in ourselves or in the group. Such as, boundaries being crossed, contributions being dismissed, needs overlooked, dissonance in the group and other pointers to places of stuck-ness or shadows in group dynamics.
Spirit Intelligence — Our spirit is an expression of our expanded Self, which includes and also expands beyond the boundaries of ego patterns, personality traits, achievements, social, economic class, and other self-identifying markers. Our spirit is the inner compass that guides us towards remembering and prioritizing our soul’s destiny. It teaches us through life’s lessons and guides us towards the mastery of various human experiences.
Together and separately each channel of intelligence provides us with the essential ingredients to navigate states of harmony, collaboration, fear, uncertainty, complexity and chaos.
Want to learn more about 1:1 Executive Coaching or Organizational consulting, sign up for a discovery call here.