On the Soul Void

Thoughts from our CEO and Co-Founder, Amy Elizabeth Fox :

I am just heading into the final day of one of the five day immersive leadership programs I have the privilege to guide. It has once again been stunning to witness as leaders find the most neglected and abandoned parts of their hurt psyche and bring back on line their innate beauty, aliveness, capacity to care and deep and reliable desire to serve life.

Watching the inevitable metamorphosis of leaders from the exhausted and narrowed executives who arrive at the beginning of the week to the intimate group of loving friends that will leave Lisbon later today one cannot help but wonder why we are choosing to live our lives in soul suffocation.

Day in and day out we relegate ourselves to our intellect as our primary source of intelligence, live inside routinized superficial conversation as our default mode, over give and overwork to the point that we are in low grade exhaustion all the time and actively neglecting the juicy and joyful dimensions of life so that we experience ourselves as listless, empty, lonely and fundamentally unhappy.

When leadership programs can offer a fresh ignition to the natural life force being squashed out by organizational and societal architecture and make a potent invitation for the Soul to re-emerge it suddenly feels like magic is happening. In these programs leaders unplug from the demands of daily routine and responsibility, take down their shields to have intimate dialogue with one another, turn the focus to their own emotional needs and spiritual longings and give each other permission to dream big again. Most importantly, they go back for the unconscious aspects of their leadership motivations and habits that are shaped in early life. They retrieve a connection to what is called in psychological circles their "inner child" and undertake a sacred reunion with their most essential selves. There is for many of them a fresh insight that the derailers, fears and stuck patterns they find themselves caught in are sourced in the early childhood hurts from which they look away.

This "soul retrieval" process brings back an innocence previously covered over by cynicism and doubt; a creativity previously covered over by metallization and ruthless exertion; a caring for others previously covered over by self-protection and deep mis-trust and a sense of self-worth and self-blessing that was overcome until now by shame and a lack of mirroring.

One cannot overstate the degree to which our social agreements, shaped by generations of untreated trauma, keep all of us unnecessarily numb, defeated, and outrageously compromising what matters most to our hearts and spirit. If organizations are willing to risk and invest in true transformation of leaders then these same organizations can become a wild catalyst for a new world. One made whole by workplaces where everyone dares to be bold, aspires to be generous and connected, yearns to contribute, and welcomes the uniqueness of each employee.