Within six months!

The text ‘Would I Follow Me?’ was celebrated in three virtual launches in Australia, California and the United Kingdom!

To listen to one or more of these recordings, click on the link below - and find out how you too can create something extraordinary when you learn to embrace conscious and collaborative leadership in your life!

Book Launch Recordings

On the calls, we made a special offer to purchase
the book at the discounted rate. If you would like
to take advantage of this offer, please click below
to purchase a copy now:

http://WouldIFollowMe.com/

It was one of the first questions they faced upon joining a group of founders to form the Path of Conscious Leadership member site.  After 6 months, their collaboration - aided by the online membership platform, teleseminars, blogs, discussions and phone - we have created an eight chapter book entitled ‘Would I Follow Me?’

This is truly an extraordinary achievement given that still not all the members have met face to face!

So come and join us for our virtual book launch - full details from http://www.WouldIFollowMe.com and find out how each of them answered this question - and in the process, learn how you too can create something extraordinary when you collaborative with creative and innovative others.

The era of the traditional ‘follow me’ leadership is over, instead a collaborative and conscious leadership is on the horizon.  How can we ensure we are not disappointed?

The world outside is merely a reflection of the world inside ourselves.  In order to respond to Obama’s invitation to change society, we must examine ourselves.  If we wish to lead others, to be the example to others of how we can all live together, we must first become the leaders in our own lives.  Then we will be the invitation to others to take responsibility for their impact on the world.  The world starts with ‘our world’ - our inner environment, then our family, our community, our nation and our planet.

Is Obama our new Ambassador of a New Dawn of Possibilities?  The answer to this question is more likely to be ‘yes’ if you make the changes in your life now.  If you want to see peace, become peaceful; if you want to see collaboration, open up to the gifts of others and if you want to see change, you must be willing to become the change you want to see in the world.

When was the last time you felt truly creative? What creative expressions have you planned for today?

The report goes on to relate this to what it calls ‘….the bleakest edge of the economic turmoil that is rattling Americans’ emotional wellbeing. Worries about home foreclosures, job losses and plunging stock prices have sparked a surge in mental-health problems’.

Whenever I hear these things, I can’t help but think that the media do  perpetuate the fear and implicit belief that financial crisis is at the root of the problem.  I think it is a symptom of a bigger issue - the way we have created our society, linked our identity and sense of self to what ‘we have and do’ rather than what we are and can be.

There could be many reason why Karthik Rajaram did what he did.  The impact of the financial crisis could be one of them. However, I am more interested in what leadership role I can play in  encouraging people to think differently about how think about the one life we each have.

Depending on where people are coming from, the solutions offered are varied.  An organisational or sociological perspective might point to increased stress, people investing too much time in their work and/or the rewards that money from such offers.  They might point to more need for policy or action to facilitate greater work/life balance.  This, as an example, indicates to me another version of the same problem - carving up our lives into separate ‘bits’ rather than seeing it potentially as an integrated whole with different activities, facets, inter-relationships etc.

I come back to it but, for me, becoming a conscious leader or author of our own life calls for a paradigm shift - not tweaking around the edges of society’s expectations and influences of how we should live our lives.  A conscious leaders of one’s own life means ‘leaping ahead’ and opening up possibilities to ‘choose how to be’ - not cutting off options because the road ahead is already mapped out (and decided up before even opening up the path).

This allows the 24 hour witness of our own life (ourself) to be more present in our life.  Thus, in the example of work/life balance I highlight above - I prefer the option of work/life integration - not a play on words but a pathway to get people thinking differently about the ‘one life’ they have not separate bits. This requires ‘old thinking using the same tools that got us where we are’ to be challenged. I look forward to the day when work-life integration is similarly challenged and ‘life’ as an integrated whole discussed.

The Los Angeles Times went on to bemoan the increase in mental illness as a result of societal turbulence.  Yes, there is evidence to suggest that when society goes through turbulent times and norms rapidly change, suicide increases - something the sociologist Durkheim referred to as ‘anomie’ - a state of normlessness.

What if an increase in so called mental health problems or the consequences of anomie offered the means of solution and not just the problem?  Perhaps we have to wake up and not use old thinking to get us out of the mess that the old thinking created in the first place.

This calls for leadership - not from the outside but the inside.  I think my role if I am to be a conscious leader is to really ‘be the change I want to see in the world’ and lead my life my example.

Closer examination revealed that the bankruptcy was indeed causing a lot of discomfort, reactions from children, criticism from family members and pressure to pay mortgages and school fees. The person using the analogy had never been made bankrupt before so it was a new experience and not something that one could presumably pass of as usual for him. However, the analogy and overwhelming sense of trust and belief that things would turn around was powerful. Also, the reminder that we NEVER know what the private world of another person is like - we can never assume. (I can hear Brendan saying ‘But what if you did know?’ Thank you Brendan).

I have heard stories of individuals committing suicide when hearing of their redundancy - a stark comparison to the common cold analogy; also of individuals with the last $100 to their name, alone with a newborn baby feeling they were ‘on the up’ whilst someone who has inherited millions feeling fearful of losing it so take a part-time lowly paid job to pay the food bill! How different our worlds are and how differently we create them. The existential givens of uncertainty, relatedness, choice, freedom, death etc are pretty standard in terms of existing (the ontological reality) but the experience of them, comes in as many guises as their are people (ontic experience).

A reminder always to check out others’ comments rather than assuming we know what they mean.

The key component of any highly achieving individuals is congruence between what they want to do and what they believe. As the late Earl Nightingale said ‘ …wise men and teachers disagree on many things but on one point, they are unanimous’. That one point is ‘We become what we think about’. Disraeli said ‘Everything comes if a man will only wait. I have brought myself by long meditation to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it and nothing will resist a will that will stake, even existence, for its fulfulment’. Ralph Waldo Emerson said ‘A man is what he thinks about all day long’. Other teachers say similar things when they remind us that there must be congruence between what we want and what we bring into our lives.

This level of consciousness is required for us to become the conscious authors of our own lives - questioning and denying (if we so choose) social and cultural myths that limit our choices. The power is in our hands - to live an epic extraordinary life - on our own terms - to be a thrillionaire or whatever else we might desire. Today, think about William James’ quote ‘The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind’.

I don’t believe that thrillionaires, achievers, people with purpose or those who are happy are not lucky - they believe, think and act in accordance with a positive purpose - and they won’t let any excuses or circumstances stand in the way of them achieving it.

What extraordinary thing would you like to create?

What do you offer that no-one else does? What excuses do you use to hold this back?

When I first wrote this question for Conversational Possibilities, the focus seems clear but now I now find it challenging to answer. My first reaction is to refer to what skills, qualities, experiences I might have. However, the question raises something very different really about the uniqueness of each of us - the reality is that ‘no-one else offers what anyone does’ - even if we see similarities in the type of outcomes, actions or approaches we offer.

The tendency which I assume many might have to answering this question by pinpointing actions or outcomes, highlights something about not recognising just how unique and special we are. There is no-one like us! Perhaps this is missed when we reach for outcomes - because ‘we are a unique variable in whatever we do’, that of itself is and has to be what no-one else offers.

Thus the answer to the second part might be another question like ‘What would it take for me to show up as the uniqueness I truly am and are?’

How many times today have you used the words ’should’, ‘ought’ or ‘must’? Who made these rules? What would happen if you broke them?

Does a conscious leader require to use these words, or if we are using them, does that imply that we are just following accepted ways of being or doing? Thus not consciously choosing for ourselves?

Can having a purpose which benefits someone/something beyond ourselves dramatically change our behaviour?

I learnt something from watching the behaviour of cows yesterday. Some cows have have recently been moved to the field at the end of my garden and I can see them from the window. Yesterday, a new calf was born! I had witnessed a calf being born when I was a child visiting a farm in the south of England - this taught me something different.

For the past two weeks, the cows have been rather timid and one of my dogs loves to tantalise them and her bark and leaping about sends them running in all directions. She tried to alarm them post the birth of the calf! This time they behaved completely differently. They formed a wall between the barking dog and the mother and new calf! They were firm footed, seemingly adamant that my dog was not going to move them. What did this teach me?

What I saw was that these cows, when operating in isolation and presumably without purpose (my assumption?), can easily be influenced to act in random ways. With purpose and a collective protective (in this case) stance, their behaviour became focused and strong.

Likewise, how does our behaviour change when we have a purpose and it offers a benefit beyond the individual?