How Shifting Perspectives Leads to Leadership Growth.

By Paul Morris

Leaders are often faced with many theories, books and articles as to how to lead and how to build inclusive cultures. I’m sure these offer useful insights, but core to this is understanding that we all experience the world differently. How you experience a given situation will be different to how I experience it. How we make meaning of the situation, how we feel about an event, will depend on our own developmental histories, who we are and who with think we should be.

By understanding more of who one is, rather than trying to be what society or work culture has told us we should be, we become more contented people, happier with who we are, more authentic, inclusive and effective leaders. As a Gestalt coach, the goal is to deepen the coachee’s awareness of how they are in the world. In exploring their experience, gaining a deeper and broader awareness of their responses, behavioural change will follow.

In a way it’s a matter of shifting perspectives.

Of understanding that there are many different ways to see the same situation. During the difficult time before South Africa’s first democratic elections there was widespread political violence. Not all political actors had signed up for the new dispensation. Some factions looked at the situation and decided to arm themselves for an expansion of the terrible civil war that was already happening in parts of the country.

Looking at the same country, Mandela projected a stance of hope.

He believed in a democratic vision that saw South Africans living in peace under a new, progressive constitution. He and his team engaged, compromised yet stood their ground on matters they saw as important for the country. Perhaps Mandela saw South Africa for what it was at that particular moment in history: exhausted by violence, desperate for peace and a longing to come together to build a new dispensation. If he had seen his opponents as grave existential threats rather than potential parliamentary adversaries in a new democracy, the alternative vision would be too terrible to contemplate. Mandela’s vision of hope prevailed and he did so, by many accounts, by engaging with people, listening deeply, taking what he heard and finding ways to bring the doubters on board.

So different people, looking at the same context can make completely different meanings of it. By deepening and broadening the experience of a client - in Gestalt terms, raising awareness – the client can gradually feel a shift in perspective. And within that richer experience of themselves in a situation, can come deeper and longer lasting change.