Redefining Your Leadership Journey
This book helps you to find or revive you leadership quest. It offers insights into redefining your leadership contribution towards more sustainable action in the world and it does so by taking you into the thought processes of 14 other leaders from a variety of countries and organizational background.
It offers a summary of each chapter for further thoughts and suggests reflective questions at the end of each chapter to help you inquire into your inner world of leadership. It encopurages you to search for the underlying truth of your own transformative processes that allow your humanity to come to the forefront and with it your deeper concern for humanity’s future.
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Introduction
The
introduction creates a frame for the theme of the book: understanding the leadership journey as a pathway to a larger concern for
humanity and sustainable leadership action. It suggests that the essence of the
leadership journey is about growing into one’s true identity and in doing so
accessing an intelligence that encompasses the whole. It invites
you to review their own leadership journey in the light of other people’s
experiences.
Chapter One
Unfoldment
The first chapter addresses the desire to redefine your leadership contribution. It explains the existence an initial deeper intention, an intuitive insight during childhood or adolescence geared at healing or contributing to life. Illustrated by examples from leaders it shows that this intention is often born out of a perception of incoherence in the world, and that it is either a conscious thought or an intuitive feeling about an aspect of the world that needs to be rebalanced. It encourages you to search your memory and reveal the underlying theme of your journey. The quest of the early leadership journey becomes visible as an unfolding thread.
Chapter Two
Participation
The second chapter introduces the idea of participation as a lens to review your own leadership journey. Illustrated by examples from different leaders it shows how awareness about the way we co-creatively enact the world as leaders helps to get accustomed to a broader view of leadership as a certain form of participation. It encourages you to reflect your own relationship with impact and influence, and suggests that your contribution to wholeness is also healing the "maker" and therefore resonates with your own search for wholeness. In the process of reclaiming your potential to contribute, the chapter encourages you to reconstruct the history of your "voice" as a crucial aspect of the journey into redefining your contribution.
Chapter Three
Coherence
The third chapter take suggests ta new understanding of inner and outer change. Not every change on a leadership journey touches the heart, but some suggest a step into a deeper inquiry. Dreams die, the world does not respond to one’s intention with positive feedback, the best of all intentions get hijacked or blocked, or feelings of emptiness, insignificance and failure creep in. You hit obstacles. Crises can draw your attention back to unanswered questions, and although perceived as violently disturbing in the beginning, they can unfold a meaning that turns out to be of deeper benefit. Issues around power and powerlessness are worth to re-interprete. Transcending both experiences is a cornerstone for developing humanness, humility and compassion.
Chapter Four
Awareness
The fourth chapter takes up the idea of perception and consciousness development as a cornerstone for leading with concern for the future of humanity. If a contribution to wholeness requires finding one’s rhythm, becoming more at home in the universe and overcoming a fragmented sense of self, it has at its base not just experiences, but tyour capability of perceiving reality in a deeper way. One aspect of this is the ability to see your own story in the midst of other stories and gain a deeper empathy for yourself and others. When mindfulness grows, the appreciation for all components of experience grows. There is no disengagement from the world, but more presence in the world. The goal is to become fully present in one’s actions, and subsequently more responsive and aware.
Chapter Five
Contribution
The fifth chapter brings your individual development back into the world of
interdependence and explores the issue of leading as a collective
endeavour. It elaborates an approach to understanding collective
co-creation in leadership as a result of the development of the
individual’s mind. It suggests that leaders who have begun to listen to
a larger story begin to take practical steps towards a redefinition of
their leadership contribution. The chapter suggests that a redefined
leadership contribution can manifest inside and outside organizations,
with or without continuity of the career path. Its main characteristics
lie in a deeper responsibility towards the whole of life, and
subsequently the whole of humankind. As the redefined contribution
takes root you experiences sustainable action as a collective learning
space with no final answers. T
Chapter Six
Sustainability
The final chapter elaborates the interdependence between inner change of consciousness and collective consciousness and explains why sustainable leadership action become more sustainable if it based on a process of inner transformation. It also suggests that what sustainable leadership action is has not finally been answered and encourages leaders to join a global learning process. This learning process takes already place in various forms, forums, and initiatives. The chapter encourages you to resiliently nourish your deeper intention by becoming engaged in the shaping of your own and your company's contribution to sustainability. leadershio for sustainability does not necessarily require public status or external authority. It connects the individual leadership journeys with the global discussion on sustainability and shows the interdependence between the request for more profound social responsibility and the individual’s change of mind.
