Love, lead, launch #EquityMoonshot: Why is personal mindfulness insufficient for large-scale transformation?

Scroll down if you have read this introduction before.

At the onset of the Covid crisis, I was laid off of work as a family doctor and used my unemployment sabbatical to re-invent myself and coin the phrase:?#EquityMuse.

The Covid crisis has triggered an economic crisis that has made the gaps between the haves and have nots so much worse, especially for women, children, minorities, marginalized communities and indigenous people. This crisis has also exposed our leadership fragilities in addressing the mega-problems of the 21st century. This is our global wake-up call.

This blog series invites slow thinking and self-reflection. It is for leaders, deep thinkers, human-centered designers, co-creative people, social (catalytic) innovators and heart-centered entrepreneurs who seek to connect the dots and exponentiate network power for scaling up transformational change.

You are invited to embark on a learning journey about how to open and align mindsets needed to launch?#EquityMoonshot: co-design an Equitable, Regenerative and Sustainable Future?(#ERSF).

Consider joining?the Clubhouse group, #UniteEquityMuses?to discover what it means to become an #EquityMuse and ask Big Hairy Audacious Questions?(#BHAQs).

Read?Blog 1: why do we have a global leadership crisis?

Read Blog 2: what do leaders need equity muses?

Read Blog 3: why do equity muses ask #BHAQs?

What prevents us from co-designing an #ERSF?

Personal mindfulness is a pre-requisite but insufficient for leading and launching the #EquityMoonshot project: opening and aligning our mindsets to co-design an equitable, regenerative and sustainable future (#ERSF).

The greatest barrier that prevents large-scale mindset transformations is our synergistic lack of intra-personal, inter-personal and systemic mindfulness needed to build an #ERSF. This transformational challenge calls for equity governance, tri-polarity stewardship, distributive leadership and a new co-creative story movement for generating the network power to align collective actions across all sectors and all levels.

The best ways to explore our multi-dimensional mindfulness is to create open spaces where people respond to big hairy audacious questions (#BHAQs) to understand how their emotional reactivity impairs their learning and inhibits the personal mindfulness about how to cultivate systemic mindfulness for complexity, systems and human design thinking. Emotional over-reactivity enhance closed-mindedness and impairs the full functioning of our brains, in terms of open-mindedness, free-thinking and truth-seeking. This calls for understanding the mindset war game.

What is the mindset war game?

The mindset war within all of us is between the three parts of our brain: the neocortical brain of executive functioning, the amygdala brain of emotional identities and the reptilian brain of fight, flight and freeze reactions. Activation of the reptilian and amygdala brain suppresses the neocortical brain of executive functioning. Conversely, the neocortical brain of executive functioning self-regulates emotional reactivity and ameliorates the dysfunctions of the reptilian and amygdala brains.

The mindfulness learning quest is about seeking truth with equanimity and without infringements by erroneous biases and beliefs. This truth-seeking challenge calls for learning how to co-elevate Love and scale up mindset transformations with self-awareness, open-mindedness and holistic brain functioning.

We have to move beyond the amygdala and reptilian tyranny of emotional reactivity and closed-minded fundamentalism.

We are stuck in fundamentalist identity politics and the mindset wars of religious, political and social dysfunctional polarizations.

Winning the "mindset war of the brain" calls for a renaissance of how we can learn, evolve and co-create together as learning communities, organizations and networks to facilitate mindfulness transformations at intra-personal, interpersonal and systemic levels. This holistic transformational process is essential to scale up systemic re-designs for an #ERSF.

Holism is our savior.

At an intra-personal level of mindfulness, transformation involves facilitating a deeper self-understanding about mindsets, assumptions, perceptions, biases, prejudices, values and virtues. At an interpersonal level, transformation involves facilitating a deeper understanding of how to address different perspectives and priorities in values and virtue profiles between people.

• How can we cultivate the intra-personal and interpersonal mindfulness to enhance the co-design of an #ERSF?

At an intra-personal level, #BHAQs can trigger emotional reactions, both negative and positive. Your emotional reactivity provides insights into your own implicit and explicit biases but also into moral psychology how your priorities in values and virtues differ from others.

The reflexes of emotional reactivity evoke defensive mechanisms (projections, insult-defend-offend chain reactions, etc) and regression to closed-minded, dichotomous (either/or) thinking: I am right and you are wrong. These reflexes inhibit the curiosity of the beginner's mind and prevent a shift from the emotional reactivity of self-righteousness closed-mindedness to the responsive equanimity of open-mindedness and humility.

At an inter-personal level, we need to develop the awareness about how our own intra-personal dynamics between open-mindedness and closed-mindfulness affects our communications and relationships. These dynamics affect how we enable and disable our abilities to manage the polarity between unifying social cohesion and divisive dis-integration.

How can we:

• Create civil spaces to better understand others with whom we disagree?
• Find middle ground about our common humanity while agreeing to disagree, such as our perceived differences between facts and opinions and between what is objective and what is subjective?
• Seek truth despite our differences and sustain togetherness?

People may share similar aspirations for positive outcomes, but their differences in priorities in virtues and values prevent their tribal and cultural instincts from working effectively together. These differences create biases and inside/outside dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that prevent the connections of dots amongst leaders, organizations and communities needed to build the innovation hubs and ecosystems. These hubs and ecosystems generate the network power to generate alignment for systemic re-designs.

#BHAQs bring people together to dialogue about how we can collaborate and co-create catalytic innovations to solve complex problems. #BHAQs vary in scope and size, but they are all larger than the sum of people's individual capabilities and capacities that demand cooperation.

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Why ask #BHAQs about personal mindfulness

#BHAQs?invite us to embark on intra-personal and inter-personal learning journeys without a final destination. They evoke generative dialogues to co-elevate the human and social capital needed to co-design an #ERSF. They challenge leaders, people, networks, organizations, communities and cult(ure)s to connect across our differences to mobilize the network power for building an?#ERSF.??

How can we, as teachers, educators, faculty, trainers, coaches, change agents, executive coaches and leaders, learn how to:

1. Muse and develop #BHAQs?
2. Become equity muses to open and align mindsets for an #ERSF?
3. Facilitate the co-creation of catalytic innovations to solve the complex web of wicked problems in the 21st century?

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How can we, as equity muses, facilitate the intra-personal mindfulness to:

1. Raise our levels of consciousness by opening our mindsets beyond dichotomous fundamentalist thinking (either/or, us versus them, win/lose) driven by negative biases and the emotional reactivity of defensive-offensive egos?
2. Develop interdependent, contextualized thinking (both/and/and, We = us and them, win/win/win)?guided by the emotional responsiveness of free-thinking egos aware of biases?
3. Develop the equanimity to engage in generative dialogues and move beyond the one-upmanship pitfalls of win/lose debates?
4. Enhance our self-awareness about how our differences in mindsets, virtues, values, biases and assumptions help and hinder collaboration, compromise and coopetition to act in the common good for the greater good of all?
5. Move beyond emotional reactivity to emotional responsiveness to prevent miscommunications when people start talking over each other and fail to hear each other's point of view by posing facilitating questions such as, "Which part of your point of view do you not feel was not heard by others?, and "what do you want others to make sure that they do understand about you and your point of view?"
6. Facilitate how we think, feel and perceive ourselves, people, situations, challenges, issues and/or problems in new ways that enable us to act more effectively and efficiently in addressing complex problems?

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How can we, as equity muses, facilitate the inter-personal mindfulness to:

1. Navigate through the troubled waters of dysfunctional polarizations caused by religious and political fundamentalism and move beyond the limitations of polarity management?
2. Shift beyond either/or and both/and thinking to tri-polarity stewardship using the equanimity of virtuous trifecta (To Love, truth-seeking and the pursuit of equity)?
3. Create serendipity spaces for inquiry, discovery, co-creation and innovative learning opportunities?
4. Evoke learning opportunities that allows people to understand more about themselves in relations to others?
5. Circumvent the top-down, executive styles of agenda-setting and controlling "facilitation" that exclude divergent voices and inhibits the dynamic emergence of generative dialogues?
6. Participate in inclusive agenda-making processes that assure that minority and marginalized voices are included?

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Use #BHAQs to co-create generative dialogues

Discuss the impact of any of following questions with others.

• Which of the #BHAQs (listed above and in this blog series) trigger you emotionally and intellectually to reflect and speak out, and why?
• Which of these #BHAQ do you want to discuss and why?
• To what extent did the framing of these #BHAQs open or close your mindset and shifted your frame of thinking, feeling, perceiving, being and becoming, for better or worse?

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#BHAQs help us explore how to make synergistic changes at intra-personal, inter-personal and systemic levels. The next blog will address systemic mindfulness

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Click on link to?join the Clubhouse group, #UniteEquityMuses?and engage in generative dialogues about why?#BHAQ?are important to building an?#ERSF.

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BHAQuote 5/7/21?inspired?after listening to the Club house, Our Mindset: you choose your topic, hosted by Manny Fernandez.

We do not choose our mindsets. Our mindsets are shaped and manipulated by family, cultural, propaganda, political and religious influences. We think that we are free, but we are prisoners of our own mindsets without full awareness.

#BHAQ. How can we:

• Facilitate self-reflection and generative dialogues to liberate our awareness about our mindsets?
• Become truth-seeking, free-thinkers in community with kindred spirits for the greater good of all?
• Cultivate the co-creative mindsets needed to design an equitable, regenerative and sustainable future?

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BHAQ: 5/5/21?after listening to the Clubhouse: Leadership Reinvented

How can Clubhouse 1.0:

• Evolve beyond the hierarchal, facilitator-centered, sage-on-the-stage, talking heads of mutual admiration and promotion to egalitarian, group-centered, guide-on-the-side, co-creative generative dialogues of reciprocal empowerment?
• Develop a text platform for the audience participation to interact with questions, comment, feedback and resources in order to capture the public intellectualism and the wisdom of the crowd needed to build an ongoing learning community about how to co-create an equitable, regenerative and sustainable future?

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Forthcoming blog 5: ?Why is systemic mindfulness insufficient for large-scale transformation?

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