Enlightened Leadership

Enlightened Leadership

I often say that when we enhance our ability to look and listen within, we access greater awareness and creative power to shape our world and be a force for good.

This statement is simply a high-level description you'll find on the SpaceB About page of what has been my experience. The inner leader journey changes your state of being and how you interact with yourself and the rest of the world.

But at the same time, it's much more than just an inner leader journey. We really don't have the words to describe the full nature of the experience. Peter Senge describes this challenge in the Foreward of Synchronicity by Joseph Jaworski.

On several occasions, colleagues with whom I interact tell me that describing my work as an inner leader journey fails to capture the full extent of it.

In my most recent article published by Cutter, I attempted to expand upon my experience by describing six categories that seem to define my writing and designs: forward-thinking, awareness, leadership, the journey, the mind, and dialogue.

In The Consciousness Quotient, author Claude Cloutier differentiates enlightened leadership from traditional forms of leadership that he refers to as "brain-mind leadership." In a recent interview with Claude, he says, "If our traditional leadership practices are all about ego and self-interest, and control, then we're not balanced. And therein lies the problem that we can't even recognize it."

So I was excited to discover the quote from Deepak Chopra describing enlightened leadership because it opens another doorway to understanding the true nature of the experience and can help make the notion of enlightened leadership more widely known. While I refer to it as the inner leader journey, it can also be described as enlightened leadership in that it awakens what many would describe as our spiritual or true nature.

I edited Deepak's quote for clarity and brevity in the opening of this newsletter, but I include the full selection here for more context:

Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love, and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight, and focused attention.

So how can someone or anyone suddenly and perhaps progressively go beyond their current human limitations and become a force for good and be greater expressions of goodness, beauty, love, compassion, intuition, creativity, insight, and focused attention?

Unmasking the Real You

In the last newsletter, Who am I?, I described my recent experience asking this question more deeply. New answers have arrived that are answering this question and impacting me in pretty remarkable ways.

They are not necessarily new answers or something I haven't heard before, but they open new levels of understanding and awareness that impact how I interact and show up in this world.

It's one thing to simply know something and another thing when it actually starts changing and unwinding your core beliefs.

I know what I'm about to write some may not believe or agree with. If that's the case for you, I'm not asking you to believe me but to be open to the possibility and begin your own deeper exploration of who am I? My understanding of this may be incomplete, so I would love to hear about your experience.

We are not the person we think we are.

I am not really the person called Bill. Bill is a fabrication formed over many years of conditioning. I did not arrive in this world as Bill. Bill is an appearance. An illusion that is almost impossible to recognize because "he" seems so real.

We are consciousness. Who we are is an emanation of one consciousness. We are a wave in an ocean of the same consciousness, the same energy.

Deep down, the consciousness of humanity is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don't see this, it's because we are blinding ourselves to it. — David Bohm

This emanation of one consciousness might be called the deeper I. I'd suggest that the inner leader journey is one where we are slowly and continually unmasking the surface level I to reveal the deeper I.

The more fully we can believe and be aware of who we really are, the more fully the deeper I influences who we are as the person in the reality we are living.

Living from and being more fully in deeper I, the more we express and experience the "values like truth, goodness, beauty, love, and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight, and focused attention" and much more.

What is your reaction to what I just shared?

What has been your experience?

If you'd care to share, I'd love to know. You can reach me at bill@billfox.co.

— Bill

P. S. We plan to explore Who am I? and the deeper I more fully at our upcoming workshop on Wednesday, July 6, 2022, at 11 AM Eastern Time. This workshop is free. Learn more and sign up here.

P. P. S. Over the past few years, there has been a movement to monetize content on the Internet. I have experimented with this idea too, but I have decided to make all my content available for free. At the same time, offer low-cost alternatives or value-add options if you'd like to help support my work in some way. Learn more about the latest options at SpaceB here.