Your core - the starting place for a serious development

For the last two and a half years I’ve been supporting my executive clients in diving deep in their Leadership Circle Profile results to understand what they bring as leaders and how this intention of theirs is perceived and experienced by their environment. It is the most powerful leadership assessment tool that I know and the leadership philosophy that speaks deeply to my brain, heart and guts. And I’ve witnessed that for many of my clients it is a vulnerable discussion and a powerful experience. Their insights are many and the emotional impact is huge.

By all means, there is also a lot of resistance coming from these leaders looking at their assessment results. Someone dear once said to me: You’ve chosen to be in a business of change. You better get used to facing resistance. Sometimes it is heart-breaking to watch as my clients are resisting the opportunity to grow, sometimes it pushes my own buttons and I need to self-manage as a coach, and then again it always teaches me so much about the complexity of us human beings and our world.

The only way to face this complexity is by choosing to extend the complexity of our own minds and hearts. That requires all of us to take our leadership development seriously. And some leaders don’t. Some decide to stick only to the outer game of leadership focussing on the competencies, skills and techniques. Many of them say: this is what matters and what really works in our world. The rest is just a philosophical discussion. And that’s also OK, because many of those will continue as great managers. But leadership takes deeper developmental work. To start with, it requires us to boldly shift our focus to the inside game of leadership, to our meaning-making, to what we’re really here to do, to our connection to our soul, to our deepest knowing that goes far beyond our rational expertise. Shifting our focus from the outer to the inner game of leadership is what takes us off the surface and straight to our core. You can go and look for answers there, or you can keep struggling to find solutions on the outside. I’m directing this message to my clients as much as to myself.

So, make a bold choice to change your leadership game. Ask to do the Leadership Circle Profile assessment to support you or take another developmental approach – whatever feels right for you. Whatever you feel will take you straight to your core – the starting place for a serious development and a real change. 

“We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows” (R.Frost)