INTEGRAL U Coaching and Leadership: Waking up as part of an Integral African Vision.

Paddy Pampallis

What inspires you? What leads your heart to sing and move with aliveness inside of you and into the world? How can you bring this quality to others in organisations, in their management of life and work, and into a creative mode of living, whatever their profession or walk of life?

Waking up is so often attributed to a spiritual realisation. And yet, it is also so much more.

Perceiving content through the many stages we grow from in childhood and through our adulthood years, differs at each stage as does, what we identify with as important. Each stage holds particular life tasks that we need to accomplish through our growing up process and we can do these in an integrated, aware manner or simply stumble through with not much skill or grace.

Individuals come face to face with a vast array of social, political, economical, spiritual, and competing information fronted as the truth. And in the midst of this, we are trying to grow ourselves - or not! We all have a potential to grow. We all do this in different ways and speeds. Some, stay the same. The big question is - no matter what stage of maturity and development you reach - can you be the best you can be, and the most conscious, to fulfill your life where you are. To comprehend this - we have to wake up a little more than before and continue on this wonderful adventure of life through being and becoming (Ubuntu philosophy).

What does that mean? Waking up across our many intelligences can happen simply by being in life, or not! Trauma, or fixed ideologies, or biases, beliefs, and worldviews that are supported by a community, environment, policy, politics, religions, or educational or organisational systems, can hold us back from our individual potential. It is a profound act of courage to let go of (total) dependency and poke one's head out of the crowd (of thoughts and people), and allow our intuitive knowing and inner longing to shift us to a place in which we can see more, understand more, and take wiser actions. Becoming aware wakes us up to:

• our potential
• seeing that we are more than we thought or believed ourselves to be
• sensing into others in a way that builds connection and significant teams, communities, and families through empathic attuning
• create a sense of agency over our lives
• enables us to create necessary boundaries that we may previously have been blind to
• connect to the parts of ourselves or of our groups that have previously been shut down

Waking up our conscious mind, heart and body, takes us to the places where we can see more, feel more, live more, take more accountability, influence more, and access our vast capacity for living into our best lives, our thriving communities, and planet. When we combine this with intentional practice and the gentle disciplines across the mind, body, spirit while also engaging our shadow, a new way becomes embodied in 'me/us', and we start to live more fully inside of ourselves to show up with congruence outside there.

We comprise a spectrum of experience and many facets or parts that make up the whole. To access the fully spectrum requires we wake up to that which we are not yet aware. This happens as we come to shock points in our lives that force a letting go of our old familiar and often comfortable selves to which we have been attached even though we knew there was something that was not quite 'right'. Like an old sofa that serves a comforting purpose but in fact has lost its springs and filling and our spines are sapped of support. Or the executive whose team is getting along but some spark is missing. Or the doctor whose work is skilled but becomes a habit where the connection to a patient is lost. Sometimes the downward spiral is slow until we wake up through some unexpected shock, and ask - what happened?

It follows that there are shifts that need to happen: these come after a collapse has happened, or a shock point occurs, or, if we have the capacity and can start to listen to that tiny spark inside ourselves and make a choice to be intentional. This unspoken known sits with us, but the energy to move into motion is hard to find. Engaging a coach or mentor, can make a massive difference or embarking on a learning journey - one we have chosen - can offer a path to radical shifts for a more joyous, easeful and engaged life. As we journey towards such awakenings of our conscious mind, our perceptual, emotional, sensory, moral, spiritual, interpersonal and behavioural meanderings, are harnessed through intentional integral U practices to support this growth and development. As we wake up so we start to grow up. As we grow up so we wake up further, and then we as we begin to clean up, we open up to show up with a capacity and quality that is notable.

Do we have that capacity to take on a conscious intentional journey of awareness to radically impact the qualities of our worklife, parenting, teaching, leading, teaming, communicating as can? Is this a way to bring down conflict, to resolve difference, to embrace diversity and live with compassionate accountability? To what degree and for what purpose or grand design, can we chose to make this intentional? The intentional process of waking up for an IU Coach or Leader through a powerful Development Journey, facilitates this process to essentially create the highly skilled humane capacities to #dohumanbetter #behumanbetter #dobusinessbetter #dolifebetter.

If you really want to change the world.

you must first understand it adequately.

or all you will do is reproduce

larger numbers your own ignorance. Ken Wilber.

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