Leader as Healer

“The key leadership challenge of our time is to shift the inner place from which we operate. As individuals, as teams, as institutions, and as societies we all face the same issue: that doing ‘more of the same’ won’t fix flawed and failed systems. We have to leave behind our old tools and behaviours and immerse ourselves in the places of most potential. We have to listen with our minds and hearts wide open, and then connect with our deep sources of knowing and self.”

Otto Scharmer

Establishing a new integration of Being and Doing – a foundational part of the work of Leader as Healer.

Each has a series of capacities and competencies. They are equally important, and completely different. In our full potential they are richly integrated in a deeper internal location of Presence, in which thinking, feeling and sensing function as a coherent unit of high, multi-faceted intelligence.

Restoring a more unitive and coherent function is central to the mission of Leader as Healer. The ‘feeling/sensing’ body is brought to the same pitch as the ‘thinking body’, and as this occurs that a person and a system can move into a powerful new coherence between mind, body and heart.

Topics:

• From Culture of ‘Absence’ to Culture of ‘Presence’
• Understanding the different modalities of Being/Doing, the over-dominance of Doing, and why a new integration of the two is essential
• Mindfulness as a core practice
• The neuroscience of mindfulness
• Making our rational mind our ‘servant’ rather than our ‘master’
• Moving from fragmentation to coherence
• The meaning of Presence – “I am here and I am available”
• Restoring the ‘Right to Be’
• Accessing information through multiple modalities
• Inner Silence as a primary resource

“People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

                  Joseph Campbell, ‘The Power of Myth’

 “When we begin to inhabit the body as a primary way of sensing, feeling and knowing the world, then we find that we as human beings are in a state of intimate relationship and connection with all that is”

Reginald Ray: ‘Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realisation in the Body’

Our bodies are hardwired to be a key source of our connection to life, our responsiveness to the world. They are the gateway to a primary aliveness, to multiple layers of information and direct ‘knowing’, and to a deep sense of being ‘at home’ in ourselves.

As adults, our disconnection from our body makes the culture of absence inevitable. When we leave our bodies, we leave ourselves in a fundamental way. We cannot be present, ‘here and available’ and when a leader is ungrounded, we instinctively feel less safe in their presence.

Restoring our connection to our body is therefore one of the foundational parts of the work of Leader as Healer.

Topics:

• Restoring our connection to our bodies, breaking our habit of ‘disembodiment’
• Understanding how physically open we were as children and how and why we closed this down and then forgot/normalised the closure
• The body as primary gateway to grounded aliveness and Presence
• The wisdom and ‘knowing’ capacity of the body
• The power of establishing and anchoring simultaneous inner and outer attention
• Working with the breath
• Grounding exercises
• The role of practices such as Yoga, Qigong
• Simple, practical everyday tools to maintain embodied Presence
• Establishing your own practice

“Vulnerability is at the heart of our human capacity for empathy; for suffering, but also for joy; for hurt, but also for compassion; for loneliness, but also for connection. When we are most vulnerable, we are most alive, most open to all the dimensions of existence. In our vulnerability is our power.”

                  Miriam Greenspan: “Healing Through the Dark Emotions”

“The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy”

William Blake

Our emotions are the gateway to our deep humanity and to a richly heartfelt and empathic relationship to life. Re-writing our relationship to emotion is another essential part of the inner work of Leader as Healer.

The way we relate or more often do not relate to our emotions is one of the biggest sources of fragmentation and disconnectedness in our culture. Most corporate cultures live in a chronic fear of emotions, and therefore endorse the belief that they are weak, unpredictable and ultimately counterproductive. Our inability to embrace our emotional life more fully distances us from life and risks incurring the gradual numbing of our hearts.

When we feel safe enough to allow fear or sadness to flow freely, we experience a very different result.

That the flow of fear grounds us deeply in our body, opens our energy, and is altogether a very connecting emotion. That the flow of sadness or grief deeply relaxes us and melts our hearts, leaving us feeling tender, open, and compassionate towards ourselves and the world.

Topics:

• Remembering why EQ is one of the most highly rated leadership capacities
• Understanding our motional map – the four key emotions
• Re-writing the concept of ‘positive’/’negative’ emotion
• Recognising how much our lives are driven by the unprocessed hurts and scars of our early life and by how much we suppress our emotions as adults
• That fear does not and has never ‘blocked’ us
• Harnessing the energy locked in our emotions
• Emotion as a key connector

“Just had a xxxx board meeting. Everybody was in the usual strategic planning mode. I asked the question ‘how is the leadership team feeling?’. It was a cathartic conversation and something completely different opened up in the call. It became one of the most powerful and ‘connecting’ conversations in a team that I have ever experienced”

 Memo from a CEO client during the Covid-19 crisis, also a board member of a major US chain

 “The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe”

                        Joanna Macy

Once people feel secure enough to speak openly with each other about their fears, the floodgates of new ideas and solutions always open. This is how energy works – when the physical tension we use to suppress emotion is relaxed, the blocked energy then naturally metabolizes into free-flowing energy.

Topics:

• Deepening your understanding and practice of listening
• Upgrading your relational capacity
• The power of authentic conversations
• Developing the Presence required to hold space for authentic conversations
• The importance of making our language much more precise – connecting mind and heart
• Understanding appropriate openness and appropriate boundaries
• The power of robust vulnerability
• Building team connectedness
• Deepening Presence as the gateway to innovation

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy”

                               George Bernard Shaw

“Nobody grows old living a number of years, people grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

                                     Unknown author

“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than boredom; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

                                          Studs Terkel

Purpose arises from the deepest essence of who we are.

No amount of money or anything material can possibly come close to living with a sense of purpose and meaning.

As Carl Jung reminded us, a life without depth is most grievous wound of all to our soul.

Purpose is always about contributing, about serving something beyond oneself. This sits in stark contrast to the rampant personal, corporate and national self-interest that is driving so many of our current crises.

It is also the ground of our deepest happiness, satisfaction and fulfilment

Topics:

• Coming home to the ‘the work that I was born to do’
• Understanding what is ‘the work’ that is mine to do
• To what am I most truly devoted?
• What is my true gift to life, my most natural contribution?
• Reviewing how I have departed from or stayed true to purpose, and the forces that have influenced that
• Recognising the circumstances and circles of people that support me staying true
• The ‘5 regrets of the dying’
• Soul needs vs ego needs
• Birthing a new intentionality
• Stepping into your truest ‘shoes’

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good dead: his eyes are closed.”   

                                           Albert Einstein

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real,

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

                                        Mary Oliver

In this final Module we:

• review and summarise the key principles and practices we have covered
• review and summarise how they become embedded in our ongoing development
• review and concretise the intention of becoming a Leader as Healer, and the key practices to take forward
• decide on the best learning support frameworks between participants

And we ask ourselves:

• Where is the place of wonder in my life?
• What are the ways I can most deeply and consistently support myself and each other in my devotion to contribute?