LEADING FROM ABOVE THE LINE
- When leaders are below the line, their primary commitment is to being right, and when they are above the line, their primary commitment is to learning.
- The first mark of conscious leaders is self-awareness and the ability to tell themselves the truth.
- Shifting is moving from closed to open, from defensive to curious, from wanting to be right to wanting to learn, and from fighting for the survival of the individual ego to leading from a place of security and trust.
- We often describe unconscious leaders as reactive.
- Four ways “states” of being in the world (not
stages of development):
- To Me (below the line): It is happening to me. We call this To Me mindset “victim consciousness.” Those operating in the To Me victim consciousness are constantly looking to the past to assign blame for their current experience.
- By Me: The By Me leader chooses to see that everything in the world is unfolding perfectly for their learning and development. Nothing has to be different. They see that what is happening is for them. To do the latter, a leader chooses curiosity and learning over defensiveness and being right (two cornerstones of the To Me consciousness). Instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?“ the By Me leader asks questions like, “What can I learn from this?“ “How is this situation ‘for me’?“ “How am I creating this and keeping this going?”
- Through Me: The key to Through Me is that leaders begin to notice something beyond themselves. As leaders open up to Through Me, their purpose question changes. They ask, “What is life’s highest idea of itself that wants to manifest in and through me?”
- As Me: As Me consciousness has two aspects. The first is oneness. The second aspect of As Me is the absence of a personal “me.”
COMMITMENT ONE Taking Radical Responsibility
- I commit to taking full responsibility for the circumstances of my life and for my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. I commit to supporting others to take full responsibility for their lives.
- We have observed that leaders typically use five
levels of motivation: (Levels one and two always leave a negative residue,
whereas levels three through five don’t.)
- Toxic fear: blame, shame, and guilt
- Extrinsic motivation: money, title, the corner office, and other perks
- Intrinsic motivation: learning, fulfilling purpose, and autonomy
- Play, creativity, and expressing our “genius “in the world
- Love
- Self-blame is equally as toxic as blaming others, or circumstances, and it is NOT taking responsibility.
- What if the great opportunity of life isn’t in trying to get the world to be a certain way, but rather in learning from whatever the world gives us? What if curiosity and learning are really the big game, not being right about how things should be?
- The first step in taking responsibility is to shift from believing that the world should be a particular way to believing that the world just shows up. Second, we need to shift from rigidity, close-mindedness, and self-righteousness to curiosity, learning, and wonder
- All drama in leadership and life is caused by the need to be right. Letting go of that need is a radical shift all great leaders make.
- Make a conscious decision to end blame and criticism and to take 100% responsibility for their lives, committing to learning and curiosity versus being right.
COMMITMENT TWO Learning Through Curiosity
- I commit to growing in self-awareness. I commit to regarding every interaction as an opportunity to learn. I commit to curiosity as a path to rapid learning.
- Current research on leadership shows that over
the course of our career, four competencies trump all others as the greatest
predictors of sustained success:
- self-awareness
- learning agility
- communication
- influence.
- Take a moment to pause, breathe (literally take a conscious breath), and ask themselves this important question: “Where am I — above or below the line?”
- When a leader is present they are totally available to the moment and to what the moment is bringing to them.
- Four conscious breaths with a four second inhale and a four second exhale deep into our belly literally shift our blood chemistry and breathing pattern.
- Wonder is open-ended curiosity.
COMMITMENT THREE Feeling All Feelings
- I commit to feeling my feelings all the way through to completion. They come, and I locate them in my body then move, breathe, and vocalize them so they release all the way through.
- We believe that great leaders learn to access all three centers of intelligence: the head, the heart, and the gut.
- Feelings are resisted and often repressed because they’re viewed as a distraction to good decision-making and leadership.
- There are five primary emotions — anger, fear, sadness, joy, and sexual feelings
- We find it helpful to label all sensations along the continuum from low to high intensity,
- Feelings are supposed to be released. In fact, they release themselves naturally and spontaneously if we don’t prevent it.
- Feeling a feeling all the way through (the main objective of Commitment 3) means letting that feeling have its full life cycle (less than ninety seconds) by breathing, moving and vocalizing, resting in calmness, and riding the next wave through to completion.
- Joy below the line looks like circumstantial happiness: I’m happy because the circumstances outside me are good.
COMMITMENT FOUR Speaking Candidly
- I commit to saying what is true for me. I commit to being a person to whom others can express themselves with candor.
- What I seek, I find.
- Leaders who lead from above the line take another approach. They reveal their thoughts, opinions, judgments and feelings
- Jack Welch said, “The team that sees reality the best wins.”
- When we think about candor, we think about three
overlapping circles.
- The first circle is the circle of truth.
- The second circle is the circle of openness. Openness addresses the question of how much we reveal, whereas truthfulness addresses the accuracy of our reveal
- The third circle is the circle of awareness
- Learning to “eat“ your projections is a master skill of conscious leaders. We accomplish this by listing our beliefs and complaints about others and then asking ourselves, “How is this true about me?
- Based on the work of The Hendricks Institute, three types of reveals are unarguable: a thought, a feeling, or a sensation
- To speak with candor is to reveal what is unarguable with truthfulness, openness, and awareness.
- If you want to support candor, you also listen to what the person is feeling as they speak.
- Finally, listen to their gut or instinctive center. It is our experience that people often repeat stories because their base desire is not being acknowledged, either to themselves or others.
COMMITMENT FIVE Eliminating Gossip
- I commit to ending gossip, talking directly to people with whom I have a concern, and encouraging others to talk directly to people with whom they have an issue or concern.
- Agreeing to listen to gossip is the same as speaking it.
- Conscious leaders make a clear and constant distinction between facts and the stories they make up about the facts.
- When you are asked, “Are you clear?“ what we mean is, “Have you said everything you have to say and felt everything you have to feel about this issue? Are you fully expressed?”
COMMITMENT SIX Practicing Integrity
- I commit to the masterful practice of integrity, including acknowledging all authentic feelings, expressing the unarguable truth, keeping my agreements, and taking 100% responsibility.
- Integrity breaches are a major cause of employee disengagement.
- Integrity, then, is wholeness, and wholeness is … The unbroken flow of energy and life force Congruence between what is experienced and what is expressed Alignment with life purpose
- Tom Peters, leadership and management expert, was correct when he said, “There is no such thing as a small breach of integrity.”
- Conscious leaders know when to lead unilaterally and when to lead bilaterally.
- In our experience, people who are impeccable with their agreements renegotiate less than 10% of them.
- We believe conscious leaders are always cleaning up unfelts, unsaids, unkepts, and unowneds, returning to integrity.
COMMITMENT SEVEN Generating Appreciation
- I commit to living in appreciation, fully opening to both receiving and giving appreciation.
- The first step of appreciation is awareness: simply paying attention.
- Refusing appreciation robs the other person of a chance to give you their gift.
- Research continues to show that a ratio of approximately five appreciations for every one criticism comment is the optimal ratio for strong relationships.
- Masterful appreciation must include these four
elements:
- Sincerity
- Unarguable truth
- Specificity
- Succinct language
- Committing to appreciation, along with avoiding entitlement, helps leaders and organizations grow value and connection in the workplace.
COMMITMENT EIGHT Excelling in your Zone of Genius
- I commit to expressing my full magnificence and to supporting and inspiring others to fully express their creativity and live in their zone of genius.
- If it’s a dead-end path — if you both dislike like the activity and do it poorly — dump it (stop doing it), delegate it, or do it differently
- Typically, fear guards the line between the zone of excellence and the ultimate zone of genius.
COMMITMENT NINE Living a Life of Play and Rest
- I commit to creating a life of play, improvisation, and laughter. I commit to seeing all of life unfold easefully, and effortlessly. I commit to maximizing my energy by honoring rest, renewal, and rhythm.
- Conscious leaders do the same. They take whatever life gives them and they improvisation-ally co-create with others in a spirit of playful pleasure. Often, they exert significant energy.
- They have been focused, often laser focused but they wouldn’t characterize their day as effortful and a struggle and they certainly haven’t suffered.
- Laughter is a key indicator of how much play is going on in a leader and an organization.
- Research from NASA found that organizations whose employees took a nap for at least thirty minutes every day were up to 35% more productive than their competitors
- At 3M, all engineers have an hour a day to do whatever they want, whether that’s working on a side project, taking a nap, or tinkering with a hobby.
- Energy management is key to long term effectiveness.
- Like all addictions, our work addiction must be faced head on if we are to experience the freedom of conscious leadership
COMMITMENT TEN Exploring the Opposite
- I commit to seeing that the opposite of my story is as true as or truer than my original story. I recognize that I interpret the world around me and give my stories meaning.
- Life doesn’t have a label until we give it one. Conscious leaders take responsibility for being the labeler of life. They learn to question all of the labels.
- “What if for the next few minutes, we could erase that software program [that represents our self-perception] so it didn’t exist anywhere in your brain — who would you be then? ”
- The purpose of The Work is to become curious about all the possibilities of life. We find that this is done most effectively if you remain unattached to any outcome.
- Exploring the opposite means being open to the notion that the opposite of your story (thoughts, beliefs, opinions) could be as true as or truer than your story.
COMMITMENT ELEVEN Sourcing Approval, Control and Security
- I commit to being the source of my approval, control and security.
- Humans have three core wants: approval, control, and security.
- Leaders who believe they lack approval, control and security are always trying to get them from someone or something on the outside. This wanting leads to all kinds of beliefs and behaviors that are counter to conscious leadership.
- The Sedona Method. It works by asking yourself
these questions:
- At any moment (especially when you are upset and stressed) ask yourself “What do I want?”
- “Could I welcome this wanting? Could I simply allow this wanting to be here just as it is?”
- “If I dig a little deeper, is this desire coming from wanting approval, control or security?”
- “Could I welcome this wanting? Could I just allow it to be here?””Could I let this wanting go, just for now, just in this moment as best I could?”
- “Could I rest for this moment as that (someone) which is beyond all wanting?”
COMMITMENT TWELVE Having Enough of Everything
- I commit to experiencing that I have enough of everything … including time, money, love, energy, space, resources, etc.
- Lynne Twist identified three toxic myths of
scarcity.
- The first is that there is never enough.
- The second myth is that more is better.
- The final myth is that’s just the way it is: it’s a hopeless, helpless, unequal, unfair world that we can never change or escape.
- Sufficiency isn’t an amount. It’s not comparative at all. Instead, sufficiency is “an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough and we are enough.”
COMMITMENT THIRTEEN Experiencing the World as an Ally
- I commit to seeing all people and circumstances as allies that are perfectly suited to help me learn the most important things for my growth.
- Conscious leaders shift out of the state of comparison and competition to see everyone — including themselves — as equally valuable.
- Conscious leaders welcome this experience because they see the benefit of pressure; it either causes them to wake up and take action or allows new things to come forth.
- If the universe were using this person or situation as a perfect ally to help you grow, what would you get to learn about yourself and life?
COMMITMENT FOURTEEN Creating Win for all Solutions
- I commit to creating win-for-all solutions (win for me, win for the other person, win for the organization, and win for the whole) for whatever issues, problems, concerns, or opportunities life gives me.
- Collaboration opens all kinds of possibilities that are not available from competition and compromise.
COMMITMENT FIFTEEN Being the Resolution
- I commit to being the resolution or solution that is needed: seeing what is missing in the world as an invitation to become that which is required.
- “What is the universe inviting me to be or become in this moment related to what I perceive as missing