In the field of leadership and personal development, executives and change-makers are commonly taught to lead with greater agility, authenticity, and strategic vision. Over the last 50-75 years, well-researched, well structured, and confidently delivered programs and have supported a generation of business leaders steer their ships in an ever-changing environment. However, that kind of leadership is often not enough to support the development of those leaders as happy, balanced, fulfilled, and open-hearted people. Stress, pressure, work-life imbalance, estranged families, estranged from oneself, nervous, constantly seeking more, unable to enjoy downtime and open time regularly plague even the most successful leaders. That is why when Inner Strength works with young people, we start with the inner foundation. The student’s relationship to themselves, and even more fundamentally, to the question about what it means to be a human being. What is our purpose in life? What is the wonder of human agency and human sentience? When students learn to quiet racing thoughts or at least not to follow their pull to chase one desire after another, and when they recognize their interconnectedness with all of life, care and sensitivity dawn and they are set on a path of discovery and fulfillment in life.
From Leadership as Role to Leadership as Being
Our work culture tells youth to become leaders — a leader is a person in motion, carrying responsibility, seeking to integrate their insight with their business’ purpose. Leadership programs teach executives how to manage teams, manage change, plan for the future, and realize results. It is all essential to run an organization.
When those skills rest on the individuals humanity, the foundation is observing, aligning with values, exercising skills to calm reactivity so the individual can choose how to respond. Mindful awareness becomes the ground for human growth and transformation. Constant growth and leaning into discovery becomes the stuff of exceptional leadership.
The Heart of Compassion and the Mind of Systems
There is a shift when leaders bring their lens of systems, functions, and complexity first to the deep time origins of our world, and the evolutionary time span of the development of our capacities to think, discern, and choose. Inner Strength weaves in ecological, cultural, social systems, so when a student looks at their concerns and problems, their context is much larger. They see the momentum that got us here as a culture. Their view is informed from deep knowing of who they are and how they got here from the inside out. This nurtures sensitivity and compassion as a response to recognizing the vast flow of interconnected factors. Compassion, we could say, is profound and integrated systems literacy within the human mind and heart. Leadership training is flipped. Rather than taking pieces and putting them together – how do we build strong teams – Inner Strength has students see how their lives and actions show up, recognizing they are part of an indivisible whole.
With the leaps of technological capability in the most recent times, human skills of empathy and care – not an empathetic response created from statistical probability – are going to be more and more rare and more and more valuable. Connecting with a probability may calm an immediate distress, however our system knows the difference between a living breathing connection, one that cares and connects with our humanity. Caring hearts, open minds, and kinder actions lend themselves to the qualities leaders need – collaboration, agility, ability to make tough calls, strategic vision, creativity, and a passion for the possible.
As Inner Strength continues to cultivate students’ well being and critical thinking, and as our students grow into leadership roles, we will see in real time how well they are able to draw on the strengths of the tools they learned. As they hold themselves with presence and stability, expressing purpose and a values-driven sense of direction, we will be able to see and assess how a focus on who are we becoming contributes to the success of how are we doing?
Tune into this episode of The Conscious Classroom with Amy Edelstein to explore this directionality further.
