Are you a Conscious Leader or Leading with Consciousness?

Have you been dealing with an inordinate amount of disruption in your industry? In your organization? In your personal life? Today’s leaders are facing more challenges than at any time in history. The challenge range in scope from the global to the mundane. One approach to addressing these issues is in becoming a Conscious Leader. This article will propose another approach, leading with consciousness. In both cases, we’ll review some of the challenges and then the opportunities for moving ahead.

For those who are not familiar, Conscious Leadership is a set of principles to help organize the effectiveness of the leader in producing results for their organization. Strongly rooted in the development of ideal habits that promote transparency in communication, empathy for one’s followers and taking account for one’s personal and professional responsibilities, it exhorts leaders to take up a more conscious approach to leadership. In many ways, the Conscious Leadership movement has identified the ideal qualities of a leader and suggests that with practice and attention to details, the leader can become more conscious. However, it is not enough to desire more conscious leadership. A leader’s career is littered with course after course that only resulted in incremental change and then to only have it slide back into the previous leadership style. A new approach is needed. One that is based on a scientifically validated approach that develops the leader holistically. This is leading with consciousness. But first, what are some of the challenges leaders are facing today?

The Center for Creative Leadership identified the ‘top 20 leadership challenges’. I’ll list the top 4 based on the level of leadership.

?Frontline Managers: ‘Frustrations with people and time’.

?Mid-level Managers: ‘Personal Limitations’.

?Senior Leaders: ‘Credibility gaps’.

?Executives: ‘Dynamic business environment’

Engagedly notes that it is ‘lack of communication’ that is the fundamental issue with leadership. Infopro Learning states that it is ‘recruiting new talent for a job role’ and Forbes says it is ‘responding to change’. With a laundry list of ‘priorities’ a leader will find that being conscious of everything that needs to be addressed will be exhausting, if it isn’t already. How can a leader keep up? Harvard Business Review’s report on ‘Mental Health Trends for HR Leaders and Executives’ found that 69% of employees don’t feel better even when you’ve made all these changes. The workplace is under siege from stress, burnout and workplace toxicity. Eight-five percent of employees feel that they simply aren’t getting enough rest.

“81% of employees say they’ve struggle with nervousness, anxiousness and stress recently.” —Harvard Business Review

Being conscious is better than being unconscious, most certainly. However, to create a leader that is effective must also address the workplace culture and the state and condition of the staff. A new science, called collective neurobiology or collective neuroscience, is being used in medicine to predict outbreaks of illnesses and behaviour in groups. This science is informing us that the state and condition of our staff is largely influencing the state and condition of our leadership. You can’t improve one without improving the other. And while leadership has a role in setting vision, mission and direction, without addressing the issues the followers are having, progress can be limited or ponderous.

“…the state and condition of our staff is largely influencing the state and condition of our leadership.”—James Hea

Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon. It presents a different paradigm. Rather than focusing on the specific issues alone, we shift the focus to the underlying field, the collective neurobiology if you will. Individual behaviour in an organization is like iron filings chaotically arranged on a surface.. However, when an electromagnetic charge is introduced the iron filing line up in a beautiful pattern reflecting the electromagnetic field. Similarly when individuals, whether leaders or followers, are all behaving with limited self-interest, chaos erupts in the organization. Getting everybody on the same page is like herding cats. Instead, when the underlying social field is stimulated to become more orderly, then automatically, spontaneously and immediately the influence spreads throughout the organization. And this influence can be calculated with exact precision depending upon the size of the organization.

Collective neurobiology is generated by individual neurobiology, in other words, brain behaviour. The brain can function in two fundamental ways: randomly or coherently. Coherent brain behaviour is measured using an EEG machine. When the brain is properly stimulated, it becomes coherent, meaning all parts of the brain, front to back, side to side and top to bottom all align in their brain wave behaviour. This means that the brain is fully accessing all of its resources and functioning as a whole. Exactly what we want in an organization. What would it be like in your organization if everyone, all of sudden, was working towards the same vision and mission, collaboratively supporting each other? This is happening already in organizations that have trained some of their staff and leaders in creating EEG coherence for 20 minutes twice a day. This is the practice of Transcendental Meditation?.

The phenomenon of EEG Coherence is only seen in the practice of Transcendental Meditation? (TM). To be clear, mindfulness and concentration techniques do NOT produce this effect. Depending upon the size of the organization, as few as 1% can generate this effect in the organization. The smaller the organization, the percentage increases - the opposite of what you’d expect. This is largely because smaller populations are more influenced by externalities in the environment compared to larger organizations.

But TM does a host of other things as well. Brain wave coherence calms the amygdala. This means one communicates and listens more effectively. It provides greater access to the pre-frontal cortex, leading to better reasoning, intelligence and the ability to reconcile opposites. The shift to the default mode network makes one more open to others and other ideas, leading to greater collaboration and empowerment of one’s partners and direct reports. Naturally with a calmer limbic system, sleep improves, one feels more calm, and at the same time more resilient to stress. Measurements in increased IQ, emotional intelligence and social intelligence means that individuals are more adaptable to change while being able to secure their core values and improved moral and ethical reasoning. The ability to evaluate the environment for more opportunities and the energy and creativity to capitalize on them becomes a personal strength.? If there is a group practicing TM within an organization, it becomes an organizational trump card.

Being a conscious leader is admirable. It is the goal of being a good leader. Leading with consciousness, however produces the holistic effects on the individual and the group. Transcendental Meditation? is the only leadership technology that has demonstrated its ability to produce these holistic effects that distinguishes it from other approaches. Leaders become not only more conscious, but they become more at home in their consciousness, the underlying field that generates these wide range of benefits. If you feel that your leadership style could improve or that your team needs to be reengaged, we can help. Email me personally at [email protected] for your personal needs and [email protected] for your organization’s needs. Leading with consciousness will be the best decision you’ve made for yourself and your organization.