Leadership paradigm and ecosystem awareness
- Dec, 26 2010
- By Kamyar
- Dialogues, Featured, Reflections
- No comments
Many times when in a conversation with friends, we realize how the current paradigm of leadership does not serve the whole. And not only it does not serve, but it creates the results that none of us is looking for in the long run. Therefore, it’s important to shift the leadership paradigm in order for us to collectively innovate new social structures that are organic, holistic and at the service of the people and the planet.
A few days ago I had a heart-opening conversation with my friend Kristina, and this issue came to surface again. We recognized the following fundamental shifts in our modern paradigm that is already happening, which could be extended to the leadership paradigm as well:
From >> To
————-
Speaking >> Listening
Answers >> Questions
Reflecting on the Past >> Sensing into the Future
Egosystem Awareness >> Ecosystem Awareness
Ownership >> Stewardship
Passive Participation >> Active Contribution
Head >> Whole Body (Head, Hand, Heart)
One of the areas where this shift could take place is the leadership development programs. Currently in most of them, leadership is defined as a set of skills that gets transfered to the participants, through workshops, seminars, reading material and inspirational speeches by people in leadership positions. Similar to other modern educational systems, the knowledge and skills come from the external world and gets hard coded into the new leader. I think it’s time to question this model of purely looking outside for the source of energy and knowledge.
What if the source of authentic leadership is within each and every one of us and not in the external world?
Look at it this way: in a disintegrated world, each of us are carrying two separate selves. One is the story of the past, which is highly conditioned by the social values we have adopted throughout our lives, or, who we have become so far. The second self is the highest possibility that we are born into, or, who we are created to be. The latter is based on a new emerging and yet an ancient view, that life has embedded seeds of possibility within each of us when we are born. Those seeds hold the possibility of our higher self. In Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin refers to the higher self as our soul.
One reason we are so disintegrated, and therefore create disintegration in our environments is that we have lost our connection to our higher selves. We have lost our connection with our souls. Our childhood development and educational systems are not meant to connect us more to those seeds that we are born with. In fact, they do the opposite by creating layers and layers of conditioning around who we should become as a ‘successful’ person. Those layers of conditioning sit as a huge wall of noise between us and our seeds for a lifetime, disabling us from having clear communication with our higher selves.
Based on this view, I believe, the source of leadership in the individual level comes from within and not from the external world. We might get inspired by other people’s work, or learn new tools and techniques from others. But unless we don’t connect to those seeds that we carry for the world, we can not give birth to the authentic leaders that are already within us. Therefore, the goal of authentic leadership development can be re-framed as: catalyzing the connection between our two disconnected selves, or, creating the conditions to recognize and communicate with the seeds that we are born with. Once we do that, external knowledge and inspiration can find more meaning by serving as tools for giving birth to our seeds.
The inner journey to our seeds is at the core of authentic leadership development. It can also become a part of our daily lives, if we start witnessing each other as holders of seeds of possibility and not stories of the past. Those witnessing eyes will bring energy, courage and a safe space for the seeds to find their voice back. And once we connect and communicate with our seeds we start to feel more integral. We start to feel being at service of the whole, and not only the ‘successful’ self. That is the point where the shift from egosystem awareness to ecosystem awareness actually happens. That is where the fractal of wholeness and integrity starts to flourish.
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