How often have you noticed that when things are difficult at work, when you feel stressed or overwhelmed, there is a correspondence between the physical body and the emotions? Inevitably, the emotions appear predominant but every so often, we may notice that there is a physical sense of anxiety or nervous feeling in the gut. Or, an overwhelming sense of fear associated with missing a deadline or disappointing a boss. What ever the circumstances, the mind and body are intimately connected. For every state of mind there is a corresponding state of physiology. Now, we think that the circumstances are creating the thoughts of fear or anxiety. But, if the truth be known, the thoughts are merely a convenient reflection of something happening in the body. We begin to feel the anxiety or discomfort in the body first. But, because the mind cannot have a feeling on an abstract basis, it pulls something from the hear and now to justify the feeling. If I am feeling a pit in the stomach, the mind says: “How can I ever make this deadline!” The deadline may indeed be a fact but worrying about it only serves to complicate one’s thinking and subsequent action. Better to acknowledge the deadline and move dispassionately as best as one is able. Worrying does nothing for the situation.
Using the Body to Manage Emotions
April 13th, 2012Belief-We Make It Up!
April 13th, 2012Some of the most startling shifts in my understanding have occurred as a result of the insights that my children have made and shared with me. One case in point was a conversation that I had with my son, Michael, when he was twelve years old.
It went like this:
Mike: I don’t understand belief.
Dad: What don’t you understand?
Mike: Why do we need it?
Dad: Because it’s part of life.
Mike: But Dad, if we know something, we know it, right?
Dad: Yes.
Mike: And if we don’t know something, we don’t know it, right?
Dad: Uh-huh.
Mike: And if we are not comfortable with not knowing, then we make something up and call it a belief, right?
Dad: Right.
Mike: Well, why don’t we just say what we know, not say what we don’t know, and save ourselves the trouble of having to create belief?
In his youthful innocence, my son had stumbled on an obvious fact: Most of the content in the human mind functions as a buffer for a large group of sensitive egos who simply can’t tolerate not knowing. My son had clearly seen that the emperor had no clothes.
In the previous post we teased out the difference between concept and experience. We pointed out that leaders today many times have lost the ability to distinguish between the two. In fact, we concluded that the map is a conglomeration of our concepts and that experience is the land of leadership upon which we are all required to walk. If concepts create our map then belief becomes the mountains that cannot be scaled and the oceans that cannot be penetrated. Belief is the enshrining of locations on our map that make them more dense than their very nature. Belief is the crystallization of concept. Much like when we travel to our favorite destinations, our beliefs become like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Empire State Building. We can’t help ourselves but to return to our favorite belief sites again and again.
But think about this for a moment. If leadership requires the space in experience for you to respond and arise in that specific defining moment, then the loving embrace of our long-held beliefs may very well keep us from that leadership moment. When humans engage in the addiction of belief it tends to accentuate the believer to the detriment of the followers. True leadership is not in the act of one man, but in the act of that man as properly situated within the whole of humanity- never losing touch with that totality.
So I want you to consider the possibility that your long cherished beliefs may block the very essence of who you are and the response of the leader that you hope to be. Can you suspend belief and stand in the unknown and unmarked place that all great leaders embrace?
Buddhist Mindfulness and Peter Drucker
April 6th, 2012Years ago as a young pup at Price-Waterhouse I was taught to read the Wall Street Journal as an everyday morning discipline. I have continued that practice to this day. But I was still surprised when I opened this morning’s edition and found an article entitled “Business Skills and Buddhist Mindfulness” by Beth Gardiner. You see I have just written a book titled Awakened Leadership: Beyond Self-Mastery, which ties the ancient path of seeking to today’s developmental style of leadership. And Buddhist mindfulness is central to that ancient path of seeking.
Now what does this have to do with Peter Drucker?
Many years ago while pursuing my masters degree in philosophy at Claremont Graduate School, I had the opportunity to occasionally wander in and speak with Peter Drucker. Because I was well known in the M&A world at the time, Peter had met me at various functions in Southern California. He was highly interested in my sense that the ancient seekers journey to awakening was the same as the path to adult maturity, which he saw being developed in leadership theory. I never expected that the themes from our conversations would still live within his legacy. But that is not the case as the article brought back the memories of our conversations.
Here is what the article said!
“Jeremy Hunter, who teaches at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University outside Los Angeles, believes mindfulness should be at the center of business schools’ teaching. That, he argues, is because it is about improving the quality of attention, and in the modern workplace, attention is the key to productivity.” (from the article)
Thank you Peter
I am grateful that Peter’s encouragement was one of the strong motivations in producing my book Awakened Leadership : Beyond Self-Mastery. You see neither one of us was sure that the corporate universe would be available to borrow understanding from thousands of years of experience. That kind of knowledge was not considered mainstream. If Peter were here today I would gleefully call him and say “We really were on to something way back when!”
Concept: The Very First Place To Start
April 3rd, 2012In today’s culture of high-speed communications and and nano-second response, we have lost an ancient distinction. This is the distinction between concept and experience. Many times in coaching I hear the statement made” he mistakes the map for the territory”. But why should this matter? Here’s the reason.
The whole essence of coaching and indeed leadership, is to utilize concepts as pointers to a real experience. The stories that we all share about leadership are simply a window on the world that really demands our participation. If we confuse looking through the window with executing on the ground that our leadership will be incredibly diluted. Why is that? The reason is concepts that are utilized as pointers to experience should originate in that experience itself. That is to say that if I am a leader with experience I should be able to look into my own sense of experience. And from that deliver a concept that operates as a pointer for those whom I lead. However, the opposite is not true. When leaders simply learn concepts and then deliver those as though concepts are executable on the ground, typically the results reflect a lack of leadership.
Remember the allegory of the cave as told to us by Plato. He postulated that certain men in the cave whose backs were to a fire would extract the entirety of their knowledge from the shadows that the fire created on the wall they watched. This would be rather than looking at the actual subject matter of experience. So if one of those wall-watchers were your leader you would be depending on their cognition of the shadows they interpreted. I don’t know about you but that doesn’t fill me with confidence.
As leaders we must stand in our own experience and find a way to sweep those around us to the obvious response. When we distribute well worn concepts, the energetic sense that calls others to follow simply isn’t there. How does it get there? It comes through the dedication of leaders to their own maturation. In that process they will rediscover the distinction between concept and experience.
So my question to you is : Are you doing the work necessary to recapture this distinction for those who follow you?
The Trap of Identification
March 27th, 2012Recently, I watched a 60 Minute’s segment on Olympic heavy weight wresting Gold Medal winner, Rule Gardner. He is the one who won the Gold against impossible odds, went on to win a Bronze medal in the following Olympics, gained 215 pounds in retirement, went on The Biggest Loser, and now is training to get to Weight for this summer’s Olympics. It is both an inspiring and heartbreaking story of a great athlete whose perceived Identity, that of a world class athlete and Olympian, propelled him to greatness and the perceived loss of that same identity in retirement led to his physical and emotional demise. Now, that same perceived identity is propelling him to recapture his former glory. I commend him for his courage and drive.
What arises for me in this drama is how our Ego identity engages us in the natural but tiring rise and fall of life’s experiences. Good things come and go. Great accomplishments come and go. Bad things come and go. Tragedies come and go. Clearly, the emphasis here is Come and Go. All life’s experiences arise and fall. They are not permanent. Rule drove to great heights, fell to a great low, and now struggles to arrive once again at a great height. The challenge of this natural flow is the identification with the highs and lows. When we are on the high, we want it to last as long as possible. When we are on a low, we yearn for the past High. It’s exhausting when you think about it. I suspect that all of us can relate to this in some way, shape or form. Read the rest of this entry »
Awakened Leadership
March 25th, 2012“For corporate leadership to be true leadership, it must result in—and derive from—the felt experience of the leader himself. This requires that the tools and devices for personal clarity track side by side with those of leadership development. A leader with a clear vision of himself extends this capacity to see to all who follow him.”
Hi, I’m Alan Shelton, the author of Awakened Leadership: Beyond Self Mastery. The purpose of this first writing on Awakened Leadership is to begin the leadership conversation.
Over the many years, in both the corporate and now the global digital world, leadership technique and method has been delivered to” leaders in waiting” as a stream of consciousness. That is to say that the various principles and concepts parading as leadership have no common foundation. The message of my book Awakened Leadership is very simple. We as leaders cannot expand our leadership presence beyond our own unseen reactive characteristics. Period. Now this may seem obvious to the majority of readers, but as you read those things that claim to improve your leadership, note whether this foundational characteristic is present. You will find great suggestions and incredible insights that would be helpful if only you could bring them on board.
Over the years many have asked me why it is that we see the obvious process of personal maturation overlooked. My response is that the work of personal development, including the recognition of our own unseen reactive characteristics, is hard work. It is simply much easier to teach a possibility that can never be reached, rather than convince a leader that hard work dedicated to their own personal awakening is necessary.
In order to make this all clear there are a variety of fundamental definitions including belief, ego, conditioning, and even unconsciousness itself that must be understood. I have isolated what I feel are the 8 basic building blocks upon which all leadership must be understood. These building blocks are all personal in nature and will require courage of each” leader to be” to apply their own ruthlessness to themselves. I will write a blog entry over the next 8 weeks illuminating one at a time each of these concepts.
So let me hear from you. Do you think leadership can be developed in a state of personal unconsciousness? Do you think there are crutches or devices that allow one to avoid the process of personal maturity? Or do you think there are systems and techniques wholly outside the need for personal work that allow for great leadership? These questions and any others I invite you to take on. And in the weeks to come we will build the conceptual” yellow brick road” that will reveal the path to Awakened Leadership.
When Culture Change Wants To Happen
March 13th, 2012Corporate Culture is a reflection of the whole enterprise, the qualitative impact of the sum of the parts. It is something that spontaneously arises from the interactions at every level. Typically,the need for culture change appears in the inability to meet new external demand and forces (market, product, etc) with existing systems. The leaders sense that something is ‘wanting to happen’ or change but the existing systems, both cultural and process, resist. As a matter of fact, they are designed to resist change. Systems create a sort of equilibrium that supports the status quo. For the most part, this serves. But, when change is required, a conscious effort, courage and commitment are required to make lasting change.
Sustainable culture change requires three things. The first is a clear vision of the kind of culture that is both desired and needed to move forward. The second is process design, what new systems will best support the envisioned culture. The third, and hardest, is focus on creative leadership that models and supports the desired culture.
Creative leadership is the hardest because it requires individual leaders to reflect on how they show up, what is working and what needs to change in their leadership behavior. You can not change a culture unless you take a deep, possibly humbling, look into your own leadership effectiveness. Typically, this starts with Sr. Leadership and if sustained, trickles on down the line. The key word here is Sustained. Culture change can not be sustained without involving the whole company. Sr Leadership has a huge impact on the corporate culture but the line clearly matters as well. To fully embrace culture change, the line must have its voice and participation in the process. Inviting all leaders and line managers to engage in some level of team and individual self reflection as well as new process design nurtures buy in, sustainability, passion and success. Done well, the inward reflection shifts the consciousness of the individuals to an appreciation of what they each bring as parts of a vibrant culture change. What wants to happen, happens waiting for the next emerging change.
You Never Know Where You Will End Up
February 28th, 2012Sometimes events in one’s life inexplicably lead to unforeseen outcomes. I remember such an event in my college days that conspired to impact and shape who I am today.
It was the spring of 1969. I had graduated from the University of North Carolina the previous summer. My work life had taken a downturn. I was involved in a failed clothing manufacturing business that a group of us had started. Looking for something else to do, I started working and subsequently running a drug crisis intervention center. During this time, a friend gave me a cross with the Star of David in the center. I was not a religious person but thought this was so cool looking that I wore it everywhere. There was something oddly but wonderfully rebellious about a good jewish boy from Newton, Ma wearing a catholic symbol imbedded with a six sided star. This cross was tiny, only 1/2 inch high but it hung outside my shirt like some fancy status symbol. Lord knows what status (pun intended)! Everyone I worked with was familiar with this piece of jewelry.
Some Thoughts on a Christmas Morning
December 25th, 2011Being an undisciplined writer, I tend to write when the inspiration arises. Thus, I have a number of unpublished drafts in my Blog Archives. This Christmas morning the inspiration arose to write before our guests arrived but nothing came to mind. So, I picked this former work in progress. By the way, this has nothing to do with Christmas other than it took place on Christmas morning. So, here goes: Read the rest of this entry »
Merry Christmas from Alan Shelton
December 22nd, 2011The stories of awakening are simply the spontaneous arising of love in action. These stories happen every day. I live in the coastal town of Oceanside California near San Diego. This town is clearly a mecca of the middle and lower class and in our little community those folks who live on the street are as much the part of the scene as any of the rest of us. Exactly 3 blocks from my home is the main train station which serves all rail lines and is the hub for transportation in our area. Every day at about 3pm in the afternoon I walk through the station with my 2 dogs and say “hi” to all my friends. One of my favorite characters is Mike who mans the hotdog stand and knows everyone who moves daily through the station. For $4 you can get the best hot dog with a drink and a bag of chips known to any hungry traveler. Two days ago as I was walking through the station I stopped and asked Mike how Christmas was going. He told me that it was a tough year and many folks couldn’t afford a hotdog and a ride on the train. For some reason unbeknownst to me I reached in my pocket and gave him $100 bill and told him to buy 25 Christmas hotdog packages for those who needed it most. Read the rest of this entry »
