The Conscious Lifestyle: The Soul of Leadership

Deepak Chopra MD (official) December 27, 2012

In almost every situation someone is called upon to lead. Taking up the call involves a conscious choice, and yet for many leaders, even those who are very experienced, not much consciousness is applied. If you ask a roomful of CEOs how they got where they are today -I've done this dozens of times when teaching a course on leadership for business people - the top answer is always "I was lucky." Looking back, CEOs and other top executives mainly recognize that they wound up in the right place at the right time. There are courses in leadership everywhere, and most of them, so far as I can tell, use case studies. The performance of successful leaders is analyzed, with comparisons to less successful leaders. These courses no doubt produce a set of skills, but the tendency is for these skills to be technical and managerial - human skills are far harder to teach and pass on. Yet they are the key to persuading other people to follow you.

I've taken a different tack, arguing that leadership is all about consciousness. It has to be, since the response that a great leader inspires (loyalty, respect, emulation, love) is lifechanging. Such responses are not evoked by well-trained managers. Skills can be developed in consciousness. This isn't a mystical area, although we must go beyond practical psychology. A successful leader isn't a psychological manipulator, power grabber, bully, or public relations hack. Success, as it is practiced consciously, brings a better life, inner and outer, to both the leader and the group he leads. We'll focus on seven skills that fit a conscious leader, organized into the acronyms LEADERS. Below is a thumbnail sketch of these skills, which will be discussed one by one in the next seven posts. L = Look and listen. Do this with your senses, being an unbiased observer who has not judged anything in advance. Do this with your heart, obeying your truest feelings. Finally, do this with your soul, responding with vision and deep purpose. E = Emotional bonding. Leading from the soul means going beyond melodrama and crisis mode, getting rid of emotional toxicity to understand the specific needs of your followers. A = Awareness. This means being aware of the following questions that underlie every challenge: Who am I? What do I want? What does the situation demand? A leader must ask these questions of himself and inspire his team to ask for themselves. D = Doing. A leader must be action-oriented. In whatever he does he must serve as a role model, held responsible for the promises he has made. This requires persistence but also the ability to view any situation with flexibility and humor. E = Empowerment. The souls power comes from selfawareness, which is responsive to feedback but independent of the good or bad opinion of others. Empowerment isnt

selfish. It raises the status of leader and follower together. R = Responsibility. This means showing initiative, taking mature risks rather than reckless ones, walking the talk, having integrity, and living up to your inner values. Seen from the level of the soul, a leaders greatest responsibility is to lead the group on the path of higher consciousness. S = Synchronicity. This is a mysterious ingredient from the unconscious that all great leaders harness. Synchronicity is the ability to create good luck and find invisible support that carries a leader beyond predicted outcomes to a higher plane. In spiritual terms, synchronicity is the ultimate ability to connect any need with an answer from the soul.

The Conscious Lifestyle: A Leader Must Look and Listen

Deepak Chopra MD (official) January 02, 2013

In the first post of this series on leadership, I divided the topic into seven headings using the acronym L-E-A-D-E-R-S. In this post we'll discuss L = Look and Listen. In the past, when leaders were more authoritarian, the people who were expected to listen - and obey - were the followers. Leaders had a monopoly on giving orders, laying down plans, and making all the crucial decisions.

To some extent this imbalance is built into the system. But leadership has shifted dramatically, because leaders and followers create each other. Followers have needs that

leaders fulfill. "Look and listen" comes first in the list of skills needed by a successful leader, since only by looking and listening can he keep with an ever-shifting situation. The greatest leaders are visionaries, but no vision is created in a vacuum. It emerges from the situation at hand. The situation can be a crisis or a routine project, a management problem or a financial emergency anything that requires a leader to offer guidance. The leader is someone who can assess the situation by looking and listening at the deepest level possible. When you are a conscious leader, you look and listen to the situation around you, but you also look and listen inside. Four steps are involved: Impartial observation Look and listen with your senses Analysis Look and listen with your mind Feeling Look and listen with your heart Incubation Look and listen with your soul

As a potential leader, you must develop your awareness on all four levels long before you win your right to lead. Imagine three people, partners in a start-up company, seated on a couch in an outer office. The office belongs to a venture capitalist who has agreed to give them half an hour to present a proposal for a start-up company. Success or failure depends upon this meeting; their whole future might ride on it. Who among the three will emerge as the leader of the group, the one with the best chance of persuading the venture capitalist? The first person feels so nervous his palms are sweaty. He tries to make casual conversation but realizes that hes babbling, so he grows quiet. He closes his eyes, repeating one last time the speech he is going to make. He got very little sleep the night before, because he spent hours perfecting every word of his speech. He keeps thinking one thing: Now or never. Its do or die. The second person looks much calmer. Hes quite confident, in fact. He believes in their idea; hes certain their new business will succeed once they find a backer. Tall and clear-

eyed, hes used to being looked up to. In the back of his mind, he wonders if he can talk the venture capitalist into going out for a round of golf or a pickup basketball game. One-on-one has always been his best mode of persuasion. The third person is scanning the room with open curiosity. She notices the rich Oriental rug and fresh flowers on the reception desk, but shes more interested in the employees going in and out of the venture capitalists inner office. Theyre dressed in jeans and shirt, not suits. They come out looking more focused and intent than when they went in, but they dont look stressed. Their talk is excited; they seem to be discussing things with real focus. Checking inside, the third person feels expectant but not stressed. Whatever happens, shes open to the outcome. She can be one of those excited people she sees emerging from the office. Once she sets eyes on the venture capitalist, shell know what kind of personality shes dealing with. Of these three people, the first one isnt perceiving anything outside his own mood, which is tense and closed off. Hes not responding to his environment. With his eyes he may notice the expensive room with its trappings of success, but even that registers very little. The second man is more comfortable and is beginning to see from the heart. He assesses people and situations by how they feel. The third person goes a step farther, however. She is entirely open to her surroundings and keeps picking up clues wherever she can find them. From these clues, which involve looking and listening, she begins to build a scenario. She can envision herself in the scenario, and as it unfolds, she will adapt. If it turns out that she doesnt fit in, she wont make the mistake of taking the venture capitalists money the compatibility isnt there. An everyday situation, yet you can see that the potential leader is the one who can look and listen from the deepest level. Leadership requires a sound basis inside yourself. If you can arrive at the point where looking and listening comes from your entire being, you are likely to be the leader in any situation, because you have set the groundwork even before

you had the first follower. (To be cont.)

The Conscious Lifestyle: A Leader Must Look and Listen and Know How to Resolve Conflicts (Part 2)
Deepak Chopra MD (official) January 10, 2013

If you examine the rise of a typical leader, the ability to look and listen decreases as power increases. That's a trend you need to be aware of. At the outset, a future leader often rises out of a group to present a grievance or to offer a new idea or way of doing things. Hands-on experience motivates him (or her), and the group supports his efforts because they recognize a need to be fulfilled.

But leaders at the top are often enmeshed in corporate politics and insulated by immediate aides. The notorious White House bubble that isolates presidents also encloses any leader who lives inside a small circle. Here are some pointers about

looking and listening all the way up the ladder. 1. Keep your feedback loop large. Leaders and followers cocreate each other. There is constant input and output. If you get input only from your closest circle, you won't be in touch with the whole picture. 2. Stay flexible. It's not hard to detect when a leader wants to hear only praise and support for his own ideas. Be flexible enough to allow your core beliefs to be challenged. 3. Welcome criticism and know our opposition. Leaders who rise high often feel insecure about their position. They are prominent targets for jealousy and attack. So start early on to embrace other points of view, accommodating them when you can and at the very least listening to them and taking them seriously. 4. Be good at giving feedback. No matter what face they put on it, people notice praise and blame. No one is indifferent. Make sure your feedback doesn't demean anyone, and if you are in doubt about hurt feelings, see the person privately. "Are we okay?" isn't enough. Look and listen to their personal reactions. 5. Don't claim a monopoly on the truth. Keep in mind that you do not see the whole picture. This will instill a desire to hear as many perspectives as possible. 6. In any meeting, never lose sight of the central question, "What do these people need?" Never leave the room feeling confused about this. Behind every discussion, somebody needs something. 7. Know the difference between what somebody needs and what they want. We all want more of anything that is available. But most of the time, what we need isn't clear. Ego and emotions stand in the way. This is such an important point that it deserves being expanded. In relation to a leader, a group of people has

individual and collective needs. They tend to overlap, and yet a successful leader tends to both. Sometimes you have to reach down to one person to provide a specific need (e.g., President Lyndon Johnson hated baseball, but he went to every game with a prominent Southern senator because the senator, who chaired a key committee, was a devoted baseball fan). Most of the time, however, what counts the most is being able to analyze a groups need. 1. All groups respond to hope. They need to be told that tomorrow will be better. 2. All groups need to be inspired about what they are doing. This is different from offer external motivations like money and raises. Feeling worthy is far more important. 3. All groups need to know that their leader is loyal and supportive. If a leader is just passing through on his way up the ladder, the group responds accordingly. The best leaders take their cohorts with them as they rise to the top. 4. Insecure groups need to be reassured that they are safe. Any threat such as layoffs, salary cuts, losing market share, being bought out, etc. must be addressed. The solution that comes out of the discussion should benefit everyone in the group if possible (as when companies hard hit by the recession lay off no one but instead provide part-time work to everyone). 5. Groups that are doing well competitively need greater challenges. Their motivation is to keep proving themselves. 6. Creative groups need new, innovative ideas. Here the leader functions as a sounding board for any and all suggestions. Suppressing the creativity of any member sends a signal that creativity isn't valued for its own sake. Such an attitude quickly kills the spirit of innovation. 7. All groups need morale. You need to be open and honest

about any person or behavior - including our own - that is hurting morale. As you can see, the so-called born leader isn't what a group needs. They need a leader who presides over a healthy, open, expansive feedback loop.

(To be cont.)

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers. FINS - Wall Street Journal, stated that The Soul of Leadership, as one of five best business books to read for your career. Co-author with Rudolph E. Tanzi, their latest New York Times bestseller, Super Brain: Unleashing The Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being (Harmony, November 6, 2012) is a new PBS special.