The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kelly Klemp

At all times we are either “Above The Line” or “Below The Line” 

Above The Line

• Open, curious, committed to learning

Below The Line

• Closed, defensive, committed to being right 
• Further, we reveal that when leaders are below the line, their primary commitment is to being right, and when they are above the line, their primary commitment is to learning.

Into this common distortion (wanting to be right), we offer this coaching. We suggest that the first mark of conscious leaders is self-awareness and the ability to tell themselves the truth.

4 Ways of Leading in The World 

• These four ways of being in the world are states, not stages of development. Stages are progressive sequential eras in the life of a person or organization. For example, a person undergoes the stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. States, on the other hand, are not sequential. We don’t move in a developmental pattern from one state to another, but rather in an ongoing, irregular way. Think of the awake, dreaming, and non-dreaming sleep states. People move in and out of these states throughout the day and night. One is not better or more advanced than another.

1. As Me – Life is me 
   1. Posture: At one with all
   2. Experience: Peace, spaciousness
   3. Beliefs: There is just oneness. There are no problems, and no one to “solve” them.
   4. Key Question: No more questions – just knowingness
   5. Benefits: Experience oneness & non-dualism. Unlimited freedom & peace.
2. Through Me – I cooperate with life happening 
   1. Posture: Co-creator
   2. Experience: Allowing, flow, wonder and awe
   3. Beliefs: I am the source of all meaning I experience. Things are perfect, whole and complete. Life handles all apparent “problems.”
   4. Key Question: What wants to happen through me?
   5. Benefits: Non-attachment. Unlimited possibility, plenty of everything
3. By Me– I make life happen 
   1. Posture: Creator
   2. Experience: Curiosity, appreciation
   3. Beliefs: Problems are here for me to learn from.  I created the problem, so I can solve it.
   4. Key Question: What can I learn? What do I want to create?
   5. Benefits: Personal empowerment.  Define your wants & desires.
4. To Me– Life happens to me  
   1. Posture: Victim
   2. Experience: Blaming and complaining
   3. Beliefs: There is a problem. Someone is at fault. Someone should fix this.
   4. Key Question: Why me? Whose fault is this?
   5. Benefits: Experience separateness, drama as entertainment, and adrenaline high. Supports empathy toward others.

15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

The following 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership provides a road map to help you constantly determine where you are with respect to the line. Each commitment has an “above the line” version (the commitment of conscious leaders) and a “below the line” version (the commitment of unconscious leaders).

Commitment is a statement of what is. From our perspective, you can know your commitments by your results, not by what you say your commitments are. We are all committed. We are all producing results. Conscious leaders own their commitments by owning their results.

A specific leadership question that we see conscious leaders bring to every situation is “Where are we talking and listening from right now: above or below the line?”

1.Responsibility

BY ME

• I commit to taking full responsibility for the circumstances of my life, and my physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well being. I commit to support others to take full responsibility for their lives.

TO ME

• I commit to blaming others and myself for what is wrong in the world. I commit to being a victim, villain, or a hero and taking more or less than 100% responsibility.

2.Curiosity

BY ME

• I commit to growing in self-awareness. I commit to regarding every interaction as an opportunity to learn. I commit to curiosity as a path to rapid learning.

TO ME

• I commit to being right and to seeing this situation as something that is happening to me. I commit to being defensive especially when I am certain that I am RIGHT.

3.Feelings

BY ME

• I commit to feeling my feelings all the way through to completion. They come, and I locate them in my body then move, breathe and vocalize them so they release all the way through.

TO ME

• I commit to resisting, judging and apologizing for my feelings. I repress, avoid, and withhold them.

4.Candor

BY ME

• I commit to saying what is true for me. I commit to being a person to whom others can express themselves with candor.

TO ME

• I commit to withholding my truth (facts, feelings, things I imagine) and speaking in a way that allows me to try to manipulate an outcome. I commit to not listening to the other person.

5.Gossip

BY ME

• I commit to ending gossip, talking directly to people with whom I have an issue or concern, and encouraging others to talk directly to people with whom they have an issue or concern.

TO ME

• I commit to saying things about people that I have not or will not say to them. I commit to talking about people in ways I wouldn’t if they were there. I commit to listening to others when they gossip.

6.Integrity

BY ME

• I commit to the masterful practice of integrity, including acknowledging all authentic feelings, expressing the unarguable truth and keeping my agreements.

TO ME

• I commit to living in incompletion by withholding my truth, denying my feelings, not keeping my agreements, and not taking 100% responsibility.

7.Appreciation

BY ME

• I commit to living in appreciation, fully opening to both receiving and giving appreciation.

TO ME

• I commit to feeling entitled to “what’s mine,” resenting when it’s not acknowledged in the way I want.

8.Genius

BY ME

• I commit to expressing my full magnificence, and to supporting and inspiring others to fully express their creativity and live in their zone of genius.

TO ME

• I commit to holding myself back and not realizing my full potential by living in areas of incompetence, competence and excellence.

9.Play and Rest

BY ME

• I commit to creating a life of play, improvisation, and laughter. I commit to seeing all of life unfold easefully and effortlessly. I commit to maximizing my energy by honoring rest, renewal and rhythm.

TO ME

• I commit to seeing my life as serious; it requires hard work, effort and struggle. I see play and rest as distractions from effectiveness and efficiency.

10.Opposite of my Story

BY ME

• I commit to seeing that the opposite of my story is as true or truer than my original story. I recognize that I interpret the world around me and give my stories meaning.

TO ME

• I commit to believing my stories and the meaning I give them as the truth.

11.Approval

BY ME

• I commit to being the source of my security, control and approval.

TO ME

• I commit to living from the belief that my approval, control and security come from the outside; people, circumstances and conditions.

12.Enough

BY ME

• I commit to experiencing that I have enough of everything… including time, money, love, energy, space, resources, etc.

TO ME

• I commit to a scarcity mentality choosing to see that there is “not enough” for me and others in the world and therefore I have to be conscious of making sure I get and preserve what is “mine.”

13.Allies

BY ME

• I commit to seeing all people and circumstances as allies that are perfectly suited to help me learn the most important things for my growth.

TO ME

• I commit to seeing other people and circumstances as obstacles and impediments to getting what I most want.

14.Win for All

BY ME

• I commit to creating win for all solutions (win for me, win for the other person, win for the organization, and win for the whole) for whatever issues, problems, concerns, or opportunities life gives me.

TO ME

• I commit to seeing life as a zero-sum game, creating win/lose solutions for whatever issues, problems, concerns, or opportunities life gives me.

15.Being the Resolution

BY ME

• I commit to being the resolution or solution that is needed: seeing what is missing in the world as an invitation to become that which is required.

TO ME

• I commit to responding to the needs of the world with apathy or resentment and doing nothing or assigning blame to others.

• Learning combined with playing is the holy grail of their corporate culture. Great leaders aren’t that interested in being “right” or proving that they’re right, knowing that this takes care of itself if they focus on staying in a state of curiosity and high learning.
• For this reason, we say that knowing when you are below the line is more important than being below the line. Leaders are in real trouble when they are below the line (closed, defensive, and committed to being right and keeping their ego alive) and think they are above it. This leadership blindness is rampant in the corporate world.
• But once leaders develop self-awareness and locate themselves accurately below the line, they create the possibility for shifting, a master skill of conscious leaders. Shifting is moving from closed to open, from defensive to curious, from wanting to be right to wanting to learn, and from fighting for the survival of the individual ego to leading from a place of security and trust.

Example: 

• Sharon has become an expert at leading a high performing executive team. First of all, she is vigilant about only having people on her team who live the culture. Second, she only works directly with people around whom her energy increases. She pays attention to this and if her energy starts to drop in the presence of one of her direct reports she has a candid and open conversation to address the issue. Third, she is a master delegator. She lives and works in her areas of “genius” and empowers everyone else to do the same.
• Sharon is deeply committed to being present when she is with her kids at breakfast. She makes a clear distinction between being with her kids and being present with her kids. She does both but breakfast is a time to be fully present, no TV, no computers, no communication devices.
• Sharon doesn’t use her mind to try to keep track of her complex life but rather to do what a mind is good at: thinking creatively, daydreaming, figuring out solutions, and planning next month’s sales conference.
• Accountability is so artfully practiced by Sharon and her team that she would never think of having people work for her that she has to “hold accountable.” Everyone on the team gets that responsibility is something you take and not something that anyone else can assign to you. Her team takes responsibility for themselves, for the team and for the organization as a whole. With everyone working in their zone of genius, and no time wasted in drama, Sharon is able to get done in 7-8 hours of work what others could only imagine accomplishing in 24/7.

THE FOUR WAYS OF LEADING

• Conscious leaders experience what is here now and respond in the moment. They are not trapped in old patterns. They are free to lead and serve others, their organization, the world and themselves. In our experience, conscious leaders are rare. Most people live life largely unconsciously in the habitual trance of their personality, their regret and anger about the past, and their hope, fear and greed about the future. 
• Unconscious leaders have a “complete or near complete lack of responsiveness to people and other environmental stimuli.” They do not really see what is happening around them. They are cut off from an authentic experience of people, themselves, and their lives. We often describe unconscious leaders as reactive. They react from a “story” about the past or an imagined future, and their personality, ego, or mind takes over. They are not free to lead from creative impulse, nor are they tuned in to what the moment is requiring of them.
• We have already introduced you to Above and Below the Line. Like that model and all others, this next one is fundamentally flawed because no model can accurately describe reality, particularly the reality of human consciousness. All models are de facto distortions of reality. Just as a restaurant’s menu is not the same as its food but merely a pointer to something much more wonderful, so are models only pointers to something far more complex.
• Becoming aware of which state we are in at any moment is the first key to shifting.

THE “TO ME” WAY OF LEADING 

• The To Me state of consciousness is synonymous with being below the line. From our perspective, 95% of all leaders (and people) spend 98% of their time in that state. If I am in the To Me consciousness, I see myself “at the effect of,” meaning that the cause of my condition is outside me. It is happening To Me. Whether I see the cause as another person, circumstance, or condition, I believe I’m being acted upon by external forces.
• Leaders in To Me are “at the effect of” the markets, competitors, team members who “don’t get it,” suppliers, the weather, their own mood, their spouse, their children, their bank account, and their health, to name a few. They believe that these external realities are responsible for their unhappiness (if only my spouse weren’t mean, I’d be happy); for their failures (if only my sales team would work harder, our top line would go up); and for their insecurities (if my board gave me a larger share of the company, I’d be secure). The point is that they are pinning the cause of their well-being on external factors.
• We call this To Me mindset “victim consciousness”. In our experience, a significant difference exists between being a victim and having a victim consciousness. Most people would agree that children abused by alcoholic parents are victims. Thirty years later, if those same children, now adults, are still blaming their parents for their problems and suffering, they are living in a victim consciousness. Victim consciousness is a choice.
• Those operating in the To Me victim consciousness are constantly looking to the past to assign blame for their current experience. They fault themselves, others, circumstances, or conditions for what is happening in their lives.

THE “BY ME” WAY OF LEADING 

• When leaders shift from below the line to above it, they move from the To Me to the By Me state—from living in victim consciousness to living in creator consciousness and from being “at the effect of” to “consciously creating with.” Instead of believing that the cause of their experience is outside themselves, they believe that they are the cause of their experience.
• The By Me leader chooses to see that everything in the world is unfolding perfectly for their learning and development. Nothing has to be different. They see that what is happening is for them.
• We suggest to leaders that life is like one big learning university, where we all enroll in classes that are perfectly designed to support our education. In these classes, we can either be “at the effect of” the teacher, the curriculum, and the other students or “consciously creating with.” To do the latter, a leader chooses curiosity and learning over defensiveness and being right (two cornerstones of the To Me consciousness). Instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” the By Me leader asks questions like, “What can I learn from this?” “How is this situation ‘for me’?” “How am I creating this and keeping this going?”
• The gateway for moving from To Me to By Me is responsibility—actually, what we call radical responsibility: choosing to take responsibility for whatever is occurring in our lives, letting go of blaming anyone (ourselves, others, circumstances, or conditions), and opening through curiosity to learn all that life has to teach us.

THE “THROUGH ME” WAY OF LEADING 

• Central to both the To Me and By Me states of leadership is “me”: I am at the center of the consciousness. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think about other people or issues or God or the future or the past. Rather, it means that my thoughts in these states are about how everything relates to me. Again, from our perspective, this is not a bad thing. It is just the way the mind/ ego/ identity functions. From these states of consciousness, we can’t interact with the world in any other way.
• The “me” in the To Me state is “at the effect of” people, circumstances, and conditions. It is disempowered, invested in being right, and therefore defensive. In contrast, the “me” in the By Me state is “consciously creating with” people, circumstances, and conditions. It is empowered, interested in learning, and therefore very curious.
• Let us be clear that in our experience, leaders who ask these questions are not necessarily religious, though sometimes they are. We work with scientists who ask these same questions and conclude that the “other” is the energy of the quantum field. Some leaders experience this entity as love or the universe or presence or God. The key to Through Me is that leaders begin to notice something beyond themselves.
• When leaders move through the gateway of responsibility into the consciousness of By Me, they become very committed and aligned with their purpose. They first get clear about their individual purpose and then create organizational purpose. At any moment, By Me leaders are either on purpose or off it and if the latter occurs, they shift and get back on purpose. They come to their purpose by asking the question, “What do I want?” Often we coach them to ask the second, deeper question, “What do I really want?” By Me leaders sit with this question until they have an answer, and then they align themselves with this purpose. This purpose can and often does change, but By Me leaders are clear about their purpose.
• As leaders open up to Through Me, their purpose question changes. They ask, “What is life’s highest idea of itself that wants to manifest in and through me?” The word “life” could be love or God or the universe or presence or the quantum field.
• Through Me leaders do not try to “figure out” their answer, which would be By Me consciousness. Instead, they listen attentively to what wants to be communicated to them. They understand that there is another movement in the world that wants to make something happen in and through them.…surrender, or letting go, is the gateway to move from By Me to Through Me.
• The paradox in leadership is that when we are in To Me, we experience very little control because we are “at the effect of” what is happening in our lives. Part of the fun of By Me leadership is that we experience a sense of control and power. It is the power of being in a place of responsibility, creativity, and ownership. It’s exhilarating. Then leaders are asked to surrender, and often their response is, “What? I finally got a sense of empowerment and control and now you [life, love, God] are asking me to surrender.” Yes, this is what life asks of all of us. Surrender for the Through Me leader is not optional.

THE “AS ME” WAY OF LEADING 

• The fourth state of leadership is As Me, As Me consciousness has two aspects. 
  • The first is oneness. Most of the great religions, philosophies, and spiritual teachings have an understanding of oneness, the experience that there is no separation—there is only one reality and it is not divided. Sometimes, this is called non-duality, which simply means “not two.” Again, scientists give words to this when they say that energy is all there is and it is not divisible. What appears hard and solid to the senses is actually not so hard and solid. If we magnified everything under the most powerful microscope, we would discover that what appears solid is actually only space. We would also discover that boundaries of separation that appear solid (the boundary between your arm and the table on which it rests, or between you and me) are not solid at all. As Me leaders realize this oneness. It is not simply a philosophy or belief for them. It is a direct experience. Once a leader discovers the truth of what is—oneness—and who they are, their consciousness shifts dramatically. Just as a thought experiment, imagine for a moment how you would lead and live in a world without separation; no separation between you and your employees or you and your competitors or you and the environment. From our experience, everything looks radically different from this consciousness.
  • The second aspect of As Me is the absence of a personal “me.” Not only is everyone and everything one—there is no separation—and also no personal center. As one of our teachers Hale Dwoskin says, “In the As Me space, there are no problems and there is no you to have a problem.” In To Me and By Me, the “me” is central. In Through Me, the “me” begins to recede in surrender to the other, and in As Me, “me” doesn’t exist at all.

• The As Me state is unique because it has no questions. The full realization of As Me is the experience of no more questions, no seeking, no suffering. This doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t ask a question like, “How do I improve throughput in our plant?” What it means is that all questions about purpose, identity, life, and so on, are replaced by the constant experience of life in the moment. When we say that there is no more suffering, we don’t mean that pain, sadness, anger, and fear disappear, or that disease and death no longer occur. But in As Me, there is no suffering in the presence of these and all experiences.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

Leading from Above the Line – Leadership operates from one of two places: above the line or below the line. Above the line leadership is open, curious, and committed to learning.  Below the line leadership is closed, defensive, and committed to being right. Leading from below the line is not wrong—it is a common state. As a regular practice, conscious leaders notice when they are below the line and choose to shift to above the line. The Four Ways of Leading model shows the states of consciousness leaders operate in: To Me, By Me, Through Me, and As Me. Leaders are well served by focusing first on the shift from To Me to By Me leadership.

COMMITMENT ONE 

Taking Radical Responsibility 

• I commit to taking full responsibility for the circumstances of my life and for my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. I commit to supporting others to take full responsibility for their lives.
• WHY WE BLAME  
  • Blame, shame, and guilt all come from the same source: TOXIC FEAR. When things don’t go the way we think they should (whether it be spilled milk or missing our quarterly numbers), the natural human reaction is to become anxious. Once fear kicks in, a common defense mechanism is to blame someone, something, or ourselves so we can keep our sense of identity (our ego) intact.
  • The pattern is simple and predictable: Something doesn’t go the way we think it should. We become stuck in fear (often the anger that we feel is masking our fear). We blame others, ourselves, or the system. Relationships solidify around the roles of victim, villain, and hero.

• Victims see themselves as “at the effect of.” “It” is being done “to them” by someone or something out of their control. Typically they complain, either overtly or covertly, subtly or loudly, that “this isn’t fair.” Underneath all their words and actions is a tone of whining.
• Villains find fault and place blame. Sometimes they point the finger at a person, at themselves, or at the meta-cause, but they deal with fear by looking for who’s to blame.
• Heroes hate conflict, pain, and tension and seek to temporarily relieve their discomfort without really dealing with the issue. They habitually over function and take more than their share of responsibility. Yet we believe that heroing is a primary form of unconscious leadership. It is toxic because it leads to burn out, supports others in taking less than their full responsibility (being victims), and rewards behaviors that ultimately lead to individual and team breakdown.

5 Levels of Motivation 

• Toxic fear: blame, shame, and guilt 
• Extrinsic motivation: money, title, the corner office, and other perks Intrinsic motivation: learning, fulfilling purpose, and autonomy Play, creativity, and expressing our “genius” in the world Love

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY 

• The opposite of blaming is taking responsibility. The cornerstone commitment of leaders who move from To Me leadership to By Me leadership is Commitment 1: I commit to taking full responsibility for the circumstances of my life and for my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. I commit to supporting others to take full responsibility for their lives.
• Commitment 1 is both fundamental and extreme. It is fundamental because without it, leaders don’t live up to the other fourteen commitments and never get out of the “To Me” box. It is extreme because it is so counter to the way people normally lead and live.
• The key phrase is “taking full responsibility”—as opposed to “placing blame.” “Placing” is moving something away from ourselves, and “taking” is moving something toward ourselves. Psychologists refer to this as the “locus of control.” When we place blame, we locate the cause and control of our lives outside ourselves. When we take responsibility, we locate the cause and control of our lives inside ourselves.
• Most people believe that there is a way the world should be and a way the world shouldn’t be. In fact, we would assert that this is the most common belief among human beings. Of course there are great differences between the way people hold that belief (for example, Republicans versus Democrats), but they all hold their beliefs as right. 
• Simply put, life won’t always turn out the way we think it should. And when that happens, we typically react by becoming anxious, resentful, or controlling and try to force the world to fit our beliefs. One primary means of doing this is placing blame on others, ourselves, or circumstances. We place the locus of control outside ourselves and say life isn’t turning out the way it should because “they” messed up.
• Self-blame is equally as toxic as blaming others, or circumstances, and it is NOT taking responsibility.

🧠 Thought Experiment

• What if there is no way the world should be and no way the world shouldn’t be? What if the world just shows up the way the world shows up? What if the great opportunity of life isn’t in trying to get the world to be a certain way, but rather in learning from whatever the world gives us? What if curiosity and learning are really the big game, not being right about how things should be? Can you see how this would radically change the way we see and live our lives?
• What if the big questions of life were not “How can we fix this?” or “How can we keep this from happening?” or “Who’s to blame for this being this way?” but instead “What can we learn from this since life is all about learning and growing?” Or “Hmm… I wonder what this is here to teach me about myself and life?”

1. First step in taking responsibility is to shift from believing that the world should be a particular way to believing that the world just shows up. 
2. Second, we need to shift from rigidity, close-mindedness, and self-righteousness to curiosity, learning, and wonder (which naturally occurs once our beliefs change). All drama in leadership and life is caused by the need to be right. Letting go of that need is a radical shift all great leaders make. Create a culture that values learning over being right and taking 100% responsibility. Now when situations arise (formerly known as problems, crises, and issues), the standard response of the leadership of Athletico is “Hmm… this is interesting, what can we learn from this?” A second common response is “I want to take my 100% responsibility and see how I helped create this situation. I want to get all my learnings.”

TAKING 100% RESPONSIBILITY PROCESS 

• STEP 1: Identify an issue/ complaint about anything going on in your life. State the complaint in “unenlightened” terms. Be dramatic. Ham it up. Blame overtly. 
• STEP 2: Step into 100% responsibility. Physically find a place in the room that represents your internal shift to being 100% responsible for the situation.
• STEP 3: Gain insight by completing these statements, repeating each of them several times, until you have what feels like a breakthrough: 
  • From the past this reminds me of… 
  • I keep this issue going by… 
  • What I get from keeping this issue going is… 
  • The lifelong pattern I’m noticing is… 
  • I can demonstrate 100% responsibility concerning this issue by… 
• STEP 4: If during Step 3, you do not experience a shift, go back to Step 1 and repeat the process. On the other hand, in curiosity/ learning cultures, where people take 100% responsibility, leaders and others ask these questions: 
  • Am I willing to take full responsibility for this situation? 
  • What do I really want? 
  • If there were no obstacles, what would I be doing with my creative energy? 
  • Am I willing to learn whatever it is I most need to learn about this situation? 
  • Am I willing to see all others involved as my allies? 
  • Am I willing to see myself as empowered in this situation? 
  • How can I play with this situation? 
  • Where and when do I feel most alive? 
  • What am I distracting myself from doing or knowing?

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• From our experience, making the choice to take full responsibility is the foundation of true personal and relational transformation. The entire game changes when we choose to see that we’re creating our experience, and that someone or something is NOT doing it TO US.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Taking Radical Responsibility -Taking full responsibility for one’s circumstances (physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually) is the foundation of true personal and relational transformation. Blame, shame, and guilt all come from toxic fear. Toxic fear drives the victim-villain-hero triangle, which keeps leaders and teams below the line. This leads to high employee turnover and low innovation, creativity, and collaboration.
• Conscious leaders and teams take full responsibility—radical responsibility—instead of placing blame. Radical responsibility means locating the cause and control of our lives in ourselves, not in external events. Instead of asking “Who’s to blame?”conscious leaders ask, “What can we learn and how can we grow from this?” Conscious leaders are open to the possibility that instead of controlling and changing the world, perhaps the world is just right the way it is. This creates huge growth opportunities on a personal and organizational level.

COMMITMENT TWO Learning Through Curiosity 

• I commit to growing in self-awareness. I commit to regarding every interaction as an opportunity to learn. I commit to curiosity as a path to rapid learning.
• Current research on leadership shows that over the course of our career, four competencies trump all others as the greatest predictors of sustained success: 
  • Self-awareness
  • Learning agility
  • Communication
  • Influence
    • The last two deal with how leaders interact with their world, and the first two address leaders’ internal relationship to “reality.” Self-awareness and learning agility are what Commitment 2 of Conscious Leadership is all about.

People’s Need to be Right 

• Quite possibly, no other commitment is more central to the core of unconscious people than the one to being right. This is for good reason. Being right is connected to survival and survival is all that matters. Our brains are hardwired for self-preservation—we are constantly seeking to protect not only our physical well-being but our ego as well.
• Usually they discover two things. First, if they are honest with themselves, they see that they aren’t nearly as certain about the “rightness” of their viewpoint as they act. Second, they realize that wanting to be right, being seen as being right, and being validated and appreciated for being right are what they really want. This attachment is all about the ego. What is “right” doesn’t need to be defended. The equation 2 + 2 = 4 doesn’t require us to fight about its validity.
• But, contrary to unconscious leaders, conscious leaders regularly interrupt this natural reactivity. That means they take a moment to pause, breathe (literally take a conscious breath), and ask themselves this important question: “Where am I—above or below the line?” They’re committed to self-awareness, so they answer it honestly. If they recognize that they’ve become reactive and are below the line, they don’t shame or blame themselves or others. Actually, the first thing they do is accept themselves for being there. One breath of acceptance for what is true is essential. In fact, awareness and acceptance are the first two steps of all transformation.

Wonder

• Wonder is a very different experience. It is not about figuring anything out. It begins with a willingness to explore and step into the unknown, which involves taking a risk and letting go of control—not an easy commitment. Once we’re willing to be surprised by the unknown, the next step in accessing wonder is to ask a wonder question: an open-ended question that has no “right” answer.
• Here are a few examples of what might be wonder questions (remember that it’s not so much the actual words of the question but the consciousness from which the question is asked): 
  • I wonder what outrageous customer service would look like? 
  • I wonder what I can learn today that will benefit everyone? 
  • I wonder how we could get more done in less time? 
  • I wonder what choices I could make today that would allow me to experience greater and greater fun and creativity? 
  • I wonder what I could do today that would allow for a breakthrough in my life?

DEDICATION TO SELF-AWARENESS 

• Conscious leaders are passionately committed to knowing themselves. This is the basis of their willingness to “regard every interaction as an opportunity to learn” and their willingness to source a state of curiosity and wonder. 
• An astute person once said that all information falls into three buckets: What I know, What I know I don’t know, What I don’t know I don’t know

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• Commit to learning over being right. Decide that even though you will get defensive at times, you will make the choice to shift to curiosity whenever you recognize you’re defensive and below the line. Also decide that you will consider everything in life as a learning opportunity and value learning above all else. Share this commitment with key people in your life and request their support.
• Ask yourself regularly, “Am I above or below the line?” If you are below the line, can you accept yourself for being just where you are? If you’re below the line, ask yourself, “Am I willing to shift?” If you are willing to shift, choose a shift move to open yourself to learning. Ask wonder questions. Keep a list and share them with people close to you.

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• Commitment 1 and Commitment 2 are really the foundation for being a “By Me” leader. Commitment 1 says I’m done blaming and complaining and I see myself as the source of my experience. Commitment 2 says I value learning over being right. I value growing over the survival of my identity. I choose curiosity and wonder. These two commitments open a world of possibilities.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Learning Through Curiosity -Self-awareness and learning agility are known to create sustained success in leaders—they form the foundation of conscious leadership. Conscious leaders are passionately committed to knowing themselves, which is the basis of their willingness to live in a state of curiosity. At any point, leaders are either above the line (open, curious, and committed to learning) or below the line (defensive, closed and committed to being right). Being “right” doesn’t cause drama, but wanting, proving, and fighting to be “right” does. Even though conscious leaders get defensive like everyone else, they regularly interrupt this natural reactivity by pausing to breathe, accept, and shift. The issue is not whether we will drift but how long we stay in a drift before we shift. There are two kinds of shift moves: those that change our blood and body chemistry (such as conscious breathing and changing our posture) and those that change our consciousness (such as speaking unarguably and appreciation).

COMMITMENT THREE 

Feeling All Feelings 

• I commit to feeling my feelings all the way through to completion. They come, and I locate them in my body then move, breathe, and vocalize them so they release all the way through.
• Achieving emotional literacy involves two steps: (1) developing a clear, accurate definition of emotion and (2) identifying the core emotions.

Emotion 

• Emotion is “e-motion.” Energy in motion. At its simplest level, emotion is energy moving in and on the body. Or said another way, feelings are physical sensations.
• From our perspective, understanding this most basic definition is critical. If an emotion is merely energy, or a sensation, moving in the body, then it is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong—it just is. That means we are not our feelings any more than we are our hunger pangs or the discomfort associated with a sprained ankle. Feelings just occur.

Identify Core Emotions 

• The second step to emotional literacy is being able to identify the core emotions. All colors come from three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. Every other color is a combination of these three. Similarly, we suggest that there are five primary emotions—
• 5 Primary Emotions 
  • Anger
  • Fear
  • Sadness
  • Joy
  • Sexual feelings—each with a unique energy pattern or set of sensations in and on the body.

• When we refer to the feeling of anger, we are including low-intensity anger like upset, tense, annoyed, dissatisfied, displeased, frustrated, irritated, bothered, and bored (yes, from our perspective, boredom is usually anger we aren’t facing or expressing). We also include moderate-intensity anger like agitated, aggressive, belligerent, disgusted, indignant, irritated, resentful, and revolted; as well as high-intensity sensations like embittered, enraged, furious, hostile, infuriated, seething, and vengeful.
• Fear, sadness, joy, and sexual feelings have comparable gradations. In our work with leaders, we find it helpful to label all sensations along the continuum from low to high intensity, with the simple core feeling they match, e.g. angry, sad, scared, joyful or sexual. Many other words can describe the nuances

LOCATING FEELINGS 

• To develop Emotional Intelligence in leaders we follow a practice of pausing in the conversation and asking them, “What are you feeling right now?” This powerful question invites people to look beyond thinking and see what is occurring in their heart and body. It sounds like a simple question, but it’s more difficult than you think.
• The primary learning is this: When asked to check in with current feeling states the accurate answer is “I feel…” followed by one or more of the five core emotions. If the words “I feel” are followed by “that” or “like,” you are expressing a thought, not describing a feeling.
• We learned from two of our mentors, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, that the core emotions/ sensations tend to show up in certain regions of the body. For example, fear often manifests as a sensation in the belly (like butterflies in the stomach), whereas anger appears in the back, shoulders, neck, and jaw, as well as down the arms to the hands. We typically experience sadness as a sensation in the heart area, the front of the throat and face, and in the eyes. Joy is often experienced as a rising, effervescent sensation in the core of the body or up the spine, and sexual feelings are typically experienced as tingling sensations in the erogenous zones. For those more sensitive to sexual feelings, this tingling sensation can be spread throughout various parts of the body. Learning these emotional zones of the body can be a shortcut to emotional maturity. When you feel a sensation in one of these areas, check to see if the corresponding emotion is present. Let the body lead you to awareness.

REPRESSING AND RECYCLING EMOTION 

• This commitment is not just about locating and naming feelings. That is just the first step. The real mastery comes from being able to fully release those feelings.

RELEASING EMOTION 

• Releasing emotion is radically different from repressing or recycling. Releasing involves the following steps: 
  • LOCATE THE SENSATION IN YOUR BODY. Bring your attention to the sensation and describe its precise nature as accurately as possible. We like to tell people to imagine that their body is made up of billions of “bits.” Ask yourself this useful question, “What are the bits doing?” Words like twisting, popping, tightening, spinning, and flowing are good descriptions. Be as specific and as granular as possible.
  • BREATHE. So simple, yet so profound. We know that when feelings occur, especially when they are intense, we alter our breathing pattern, which freezes the emotion in place and restricts its release. Once the sensation is located, take a few gentle full breaths, breathing as deeply into the belly as possible.
  • ALLOW, ACCEPT, OR APPRECIATE THE SENSATION. Begin by simply allowing. Ask yourself the question, “Can I allow these sensations to be here?” If you can, go beyond that by accepting or even appreciating the sensations, but just allowing them is sufficient. Remember that allowing emotion is the opposite of resisting or repressing it.
  • MATCH YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH YOUR EXPRESSION. The expression that we promote involves moving, breathing, and vocalizing to match the sensation occurring in or on your body. Matching is the key. This occurs by asking yourself, “If this sensation could make a sound, what would it be?” and “If this sensation could move, how would it do that?” The body releases naturally when you vocalize and let it move to match energy. By vocalization, we don’t mean “talk about it,” because that usually leads to recycling. Rather, we just mean make a sound. We intuitively understand this because we see babies and animals do it all the time. Beings who aren’t encumbered by the ability to think obsessively about feelings simply release them. Babies cry, dogs growl, and cats hiss. They naturally match experience with expression and release emotion. Babies and animals don’t hold on to feelings. They let them go.

• In her book My Stroke of Insight, Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte-Taylor says that emotions last at most ninety seconds. We agree. Most emotions—sensations occurring in and on the body—move through the body in a minute and a half or less (usually far less) if we match our expression with our experience. If you repress or recycle emotion, it can harden into a mood: Anger becomes bitterness. Fear becomes anxiety. Sadness becomes apathy. And these moods can last for years.
• 🌊 It is also our experience that emotions come through the body in waves, similar to waves on the shore. An emotion rises, crests, and releases (if we release it), followed by a period of calm, still spaciousness, which is often followed by another wave. Learning to release feelings is the key to experiencing the calm spaciousness that is always in and around the next wave. Once leaders understand emotion in this way, they are free to actually enjoy the waves (the sensations) and experience the calm. For some who have been practicing for a long time, the experience of any and all emotions/ sensations can be delightful, but in our experience, this level of emotional maturity is radical and rare.
• At the same time, we believe that great leaders know that eradication is occasionally necessary, as in eliminating old beliefs, old ways of relating, and old ways of seeing the world. Nature understands this and is not afraid to destroy something no longer sustainable. Destruction opens the possibility for new birth—when a wild fire burns a dead forest, the heat releases the seeds into the newly created fertile soil. That is the intelligence of anger.

FEAR

• Fear tells a leader that something important needs to be known. One form involves something that is not being faced. Fear is the body’s way of saying, “Wake up!”
• A second form tells a leader that something new wants to be learned. Fear invites your full attention and presence.

SADNESS

• Sadness tells a leader that something needs to be let go of, said goodbye to, moved on from. Sadness is the energy of loss. Something once meaningful is going away. It could be a person, a dream, a vision for the company, a belief, an opportunity. Leaders who can’t feel sadness are dangerous because they hang on to old ideas, people, projects, and dreams long after they have served their purpose. Also, such leaders have a very difficult time connecting with people at a heart level, a critical missing piece of their leadership.

JOY

• Joy tells a leader that something needs to be celebrated, appreciated, or laughed at, or someone needs to be patted on the back. Countless leaders fail to create a culture of celebration and appreciation because they’re cut off from their joy. In our experience, people are as afraid of feeling their joy all the way through to completion as they are their fear, anger, sadness, and sexual feelings. They mistakenly believe that it is inefficient or boastful to feel this emotion. Leaders who can’t experience joy are dangerous because they can’t adequately celebrate and appreciate themselves and others, unconsciously committed to limiting things that would be celebratory.

SEXUAL FEELINGS

• Sexual feelings are the energy of creativity and creation. They tell the leader that something new wants to be birthed, to be created, to come into the world. Think of a leader and a team as being pregnant with ideas and innovations. Because of the abuse of sexual feelings in the workplace, our society has tried to legislate them out of that environment. We understand the reason behind this but we believe that in doing so, we have limited creative potential. Leaders without access to their creative sexual feelings are dangerous because they demand creativity and innovation while limiting both because of their lack of sexual flow.

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• To practice this commitment we recommend the following: 
  • Stop periodically throughout your day and simply ask yourself the question, 
    • “What am I feeling right now?” The answer to the question must be one or more of the five core feelings: sad, scared, angry, joyful or sexual. Do not analyze the feeling and search for “why” you are feeling the feeling. Simply label it and then go back to doing what you were doing.
• When a feeling arises pause and… Locate the sensation in your body. What are the “bits” doing? Breathe and allow the bits to simply do what they do. Move and/ or make a sound to match what the bits are doing.

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• Feelings are one of the universe’s greatest gifts to human beings. They add richness and color to life. When emotions are understood (they are simply sensations occurring in and on the body), enjoyed and released (locate, describe, breathe, move, and vocalize), and wondered about with curiosity (what is this here to teach me?), they are a leader’s essential ally.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Feeling All Feelings. Great leaders learn to access all three centers of intelligence: the head, the heart, and the gut. Resisting and repressing feelings is standard operating procedure in most organizations. Feelings are viewed as negative and a distraction to good decision-making and leadership. Conscious leaders know that feelings are natural and expressing them is healthy. They know that emotion is energy in motion; feelings are simply physical sensations.
• The five primary emotions are anger, fear, sadness, joy, and sexual feelings. Knowing how to express them all of the way through to completion helps us develop emotional intelligence. Each primary emotion has a unique energy pattern and set of sensations in and on the body. Every feeling we experience invites us in a specific way to grow in awareness and knowing. Repressing, denying, or recycling emotions creates physical, psychological, and relationship problems.
• To release emotion, first locate the sensation in the body (“ What are the bits doing?”), allow or accept the sensation (“ Can I allow or even welcome these sensations?”), and then match your experience with your expression (“ What sound or movement does this sensation want?”). Conscious leaders learn to locate, name, and release their feelings. They know that feelings not only add richness and color to life but are also an essential ally to successful leadership.

COMMITMENT FOUR 

Speaking Candidly 

• I commit to saying what is true for me. I commit to being a person to whom others can express themselves with candor.

WITHHOLDING 

• According to Jack Welch, leadership expert and former CEO of GE, “the team that sees reality the best wins.” In our experience, seeing reality clearly requires all the team members to be candid.
• For the individual who withholds, the major problem is a decrease in energy. Great leaders know that to bring their gifts fully to the world and to realize their vision, they need as much energy as possible. Energy, in this case, is the flow of life force, whether it be intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, relational, or economic. When we “withhold,” this energy flow is dampened, or in some cases, blocked altogether.

REVEALING OR CONCEALING 

• At any moment, individuals and leaders are either revealing or concealing. They are either becoming more transparent or more opaque. In our experience, leaders who reveal (facts, thoughts, feelings, and sensations) have a free flow of abundant energy for accomplishing their vision. Leaders who conceal and withhold interrupt this free flow of energy in themselves and in their organizations.
• Leaders who lead from above the line take another approach. They reveal their thoughts, opinions, judgments and feelings. These leaders realize that the mind generates all kinds of judgments about people, circumstances, situations and conditions. Again, this is just what a mind does. The conscious leader doesn’t see his judgments as RIGHT. Rather, he simply sees that judgments are arising. He also notices that the judgments that arise are more about him than they are about the other person. Our judgments about the world tell us a great deal about ourselves and very little about the world. They reveal something about our reactions, beliefs, listening filters, unconscious habits or expectations.
• The key is to reveal our judgements to make ourselves known. 

Connected Relationship 

• In our view, a connected relationship is the second step in a conscious candid relationship. In relationships we control how much we reveal to the other person about ourselves and we control our level of acceptance when others reveal themselves to us. These are two powerful aspects of any relationship which are totally under our control. When we say to another, “I want to create the potential for connection with you, so I choose to reveal,” we’re doing all that is under our control to have a conscious relationship.

Own

• Finally, the third step in conscious leadership and conscious relationships is to own. In unconscious relationships we project: we put our internal experience on others and believe it is true about them. Ownership is the exact opposite. When we own our projections we see that our judgment about our boss that he was disrespectful is an insight we can own about ourselves. To own our projections we notice that a judgment has arisen about being disrespectful. Once we notice this we ask the following kinds of wonder questions from curiosity:
  • How am I being disrespectful in my life? 
  • How am I being disrespectful toward my boss? 
  • How am I being disrespectful toward myself? 
  • How is it as true or truer that my boss is being respectful of me? 
  • How am I requiring people, including my boss, to be disrespectful toward me? 
  • How do I create this and how do I keep it going? 
  • How am I not seeing the value of interrupting? 
  • I’ve made interrupting a bad thing and am I open to seeing how interrupting could be a good thing? 
  • Am I willing to see how interrupting could actually be a sign of respect instead of a sign of disrespect?

Before we leave this model we notice that every time we teach this paradigm a question arises. You are probably asking this question as well, “What if I act this way and my boss doesn’t (or my husband doesn’t or my children don’t)? Aren’t I setting myself up for trouble?” To this question we have many responses but two are foundational. Initially, we suggest that you practice this kind of candor—reveal, connect, own—only when you have a shared commitment to candor. If you agree to practice the commitment of candor, then you have a laboratory where you can experiment and grow. If everyone doesn’t have a commitment to candor, we recommend that you get clear with your work partners about which conscious commitments you share. In life, we also recommend practicing with people with whom you share a commitment to conscious living, and in this case, candor.

• Two keys to this experiment. First, pick people with whom you would like to be closer. You are risking for the sake of closeness and connection. Second, don’t practice candor in order to change the other person. If you’re trying to change the other person by using any of the skills taught in this book, you’re still below the line and will create drama. Remember, candor is about you revealing to learn about yourself and to build the potential for relational connectedness.
• If we all speak candidly and don’t withhold facts, thoughts, feelings, or sensations, it greatly increases the probability that collectively we can see reality more accurately.
• I commit to saying what is true for me. I commit to being a person to whom others can express themselves with candor.
• When we think about candor, we think about three overlapping circles. 
  • The first circle is the circle of truth. When we speak from the circle of truth, we tell the truth as we see it. If we’re not speaking from this circle, we’re lying or distorting the truth.
  • The second circle is the circle of openness. Being open and being truthful can be two different things. Most people believe that we’re candid if we tell the truth and don’t lie, but down deep, they know that candor also involves openness. Openness addresses the question of how much we reveal, whereas truthfulness addresses the accuracy of our reveal.
  • The third circle is the circle of awareness. The first circle answers the question, “How accurate was my reveal?” The second circle answers the question, “How complete was my reveal?” The third circle answers the question, “How self-aware am I?” It’s possible to be truthful and open but not fully aware. Again, if your boss asks you what time you arrived at work and you say 9: 15 because that’s what your watch says, you are being truthful and open. You are reporting reality as you see it and not concealing relevant information. If, though, your watch battery died and your watch stopped at 9: 15 and you really arrive at 9: 40 but didn’t know it, you are being truthful and open but not aware.
  • Learning to “eat” your projections is a master skill of conscious leaders. We accomplish this by listing our beliefs and complaints about others and then asking ourselves, “How is this true about me? How am I not facing this in myself?” In the Twelve Step movement they have a wonderful motto, “You spot it, you got it.” This simple phrase explains projection.

SPEAKING UNARGUABLY 

• Another key part of our understanding of candor is “saying what is true for me.” A different way of saying this is that candor calls for revealing what is “unarguable,” a powerful and useful distinction. Most “To Me” leaders, who lead from victim, villain, or hero, spend a majority of their time in drama about what is highly arguable. In fact, all drama in the triangle revolves around what is arguable and a commitment to being “right” about it. Great leaders learn to reveal what is true for them by revealing what is unarguable.
• Based on the work of The Hendricks Institute, three types of reveals are unarguable: a thought, a feeling, or a sensation. By unarguable, we simply mean that people can’t argue with it.
• For example, if you say, “We have to get a new head of our department of surgery,” that statement is arguable. Many could and would argue its truthfulness. Most suboptimal, drama-based conversations involve people arguing in an attempt to be right. On the other hand, if you say, “I’m having the thought that we ought to find a new head of our department of surgery,” that statement is not arguable. You are merely reporting the fact that you had a thought. That the thought occurred is unarguable. That the thought is true or right is highly arguable. Great leaders and teams become experts at revealing their unarguable experience (“ I’m having a thought…”) without forming any attachment to being right about it. They share it and are curious about it, but they don’t need to defend it from an ego standpoint. When this candor is met with curiosity and deep listening “Tell me more about that thought. I’m curious to know what you think,” amazing breakthroughs of insight and innovation often occur.
• Here are three forms of unarguable communication: 
  • I’m having the thought that… 
  • I feel… [sad, scared, angry, joyful, or sexual]. 
  • I’m having a body sensation of… [pinching in my shoulder blades, swirling in my belly, throbbing in my temples].

• To speak with candor is to reveal what is unarguable with truthfulness, openness, and awareness.
• At any particular time, leaders are operating from either fear or love. This is simple yet profoundly true. Underneath all withholds is fear. We choose to withhold because we’re afraid of losing approval, control, or security. Conversely, candor comes from love. The Bible says, “Speak the truth in love.” It couldn’t be said better. Real candor is expressing the unarguable truth from love. When you develop a mastery of candor, you speak the unarguable truth to all relevant parties with thoughtfulness and kindness.
• Rather, speaking from love asks this question: “How do I say all my truth in the most loving way possible?”

CONSCIOUS LISTENING 

• The commitment to candor includes two parts. The second is, “I commit to being a person to whom others can express themselves with candor.” This part is equally important as being a person who speaks with candor. If you want to be someone who encourages candor in those around you, we suggest you practice the art of conscious listening.
• We learned from The Hendricks Institute that a filter is an internal lens that influences what we hear and how we respond. It translates a statement and gives it additional meaning, usually changing the way that the person responds. For example, we see many leaders listening to fix. This means a statement like, “I’m having trouble communicating with my director of sales,” gets reinterpreted with a filter to fix it. In the “fixer’s” head, it might sound like the person said, “How can you fix this communication problem I’m having with my director of sales?” The other person—of course—responds with solutions. Often the true intent of the statement, and certainly the speaker’s emotions and desires are missed.
• We teach our clients to listen to the three centers of intelligence in another person. 
  • First you want to listen to the head center. What are the words, thoughts and beliefs you hear the other saying? If you really want someone to feel heard, do your best to repeat back exactly what you heard them say and be sure to get confirmation that you accurately heard them without leaving anything out or adding your own content.
  • Secondly, you listen to their heart center. What emotions are being expressed either directly or indirectly as they speak? Look for cues from their tone of voice, facial expressions or breath patterns. Do your best to reflect back to them how you imagine they are feeling. For this practice, it is important to be willing to get it wrong. Emotions often come in layers and reveal themselves after a few tries. Often, simply putting your attention on their emotions will help them contact their most authentic feelings.
  • Finally, listen to their gut or instinctive center. It is our experience that people often repeat stories because their base desire is not being acknowledged, either to themselves or others. One of the great gifts we can give one another is the reflection of awareness of what the other most wants. Often this is a revelation for both people. We’ve found that once core needs are acknowledged, conversations easefully shift to above the line resolution.

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• A key to the masterful practice of candor is learning to speak unarguably. Here’s how: practice completing these sentences throughout your day. Begin by simply saying them to yourself and then you can practice saying them out loud to others who are committed to practicing candor: I’m having the thought that… We could do a better job with our recruiting effort. You’re not giving us your full attention. The game should have turned out differently. My daughter doesn’t respect me.
• I feel… [sad, angry, scared, joyful, or sexual] The key to this practice is to answer only with feeling words. We recommend using the big five listed above. I notice… [report a sensory experience in or on the body] Tingling in my right arm. Pressure in my shoulder. A pinching sensation in the front of my forehead. Heat rising up the center of my chest.

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• For us candor is a simple yet profound commitment to reveal and not conceal. Our commitment is to reveal our stories, holding them lightly and expressing them lovingly. At any moment we are either choosing to reveal or to conceal. When we choose revealing we’re choosing trust. When we choose concealing we’re choosing control. Trust is rooted in love and control is rooted in fear. We believe love-based organizations win over fear-based organizations.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Speaking Candidly -Leaders and teams have found that seeing reality clearly is essential to being successful. In order to see reality clearly, leaders and organizations need everyone to be truthful and not lie about, or withhold, information. They need candor. Candor is the revealing of all thoughts, feelings, and sensations in an honest, open, and aware way. Speaking candidly increases the probability that leaders and teams can collectively see reality more clearly.
• Withholding is refraining from revealing everything to all relevant parties. Withholding also decreases energy in leaders, which often shows up as boredom or lethargy in them and relational disconnection in the team. Rather than withholding, conscious leaders practice revealing. They reveal not because they are right, but because they wish to be known. Through this transparency, they create connection and open learning.
• Conscious listening is one of the most important skills for effective leadership: by identifying our listening “filters,” we can let go of them and become fully present to the expression of the other person. Conscious listening takes courage: we must listen for the content (head center), the emotions (heart center), and base desire (gut center) being expressed by the other person. It is best to start with candor in relationships only when you have a shared commitment to it, along with the necessary skills, including being able to speak unarguably.

COMMITMENT FIVE 

Eliminating Gossip 

• I commit to ending gossip, talking directly to people with whom I have a concern, and encouraging others to talk directly to people with whom they have an issue or concern.
• Our work with clients has shown that candor and authentic feeling expression are more effective in the long term health of the organization. Issues get resolved faster, relationships are more trustworthy, and solutions are permanent and created with less energy.
• It is not gossip if your comments are serving the people you’re discussing. If you can have the conversation without any sense of making them wrong, it is more likely a constructive exchange. Verify this by testing to see if you have a high level of curiosity. Then run the statements through this two-part test: Is there any negative intent? If so, stop. You’re gossiping. Would you be willing to speak directly and in exactly the same way to the person? If not, stop. You’re gossiping.

SEPARATING FACT FROM STORY FACT 

• That which is unarguable, e.g. people don’t argue with it WHAT A VIDEO CAMERA WOULD HAVE RECORDED FACTUAL AND OBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION BLACK AND WHITE REALITY STORY That which is arguable, e.g. people argue with it OPINIONS BELIEFS JUDGMENTS INTERPRETATIONS MOTIVATIONS ASSUMPTIONS

THE CLEARING MODEL (Click Here for Jim’s Clearing Model breakdown)

• PERSON A (BRIAN) CLEARS THE ISSUE AFFIRM A MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIP: “Jim, I want to clear this issue with you because I value our business relationship.” ESTABLISH A TIME TO TALK: “Is now a good time to talk?” “If not now, when?”
• “THE SPECIFIC FACTS ARE…” (Recordable facts; not judgments) “The facts are that for four of the last five meetings, you showed up after the start time.” “I MAKE UP A STORY THAT…” (I imagine…; My story is…; My judgment is…) “I make up a story that this meeting isn’t important to you. You aren’t prioritizing this project, and because you’re overcommitted, it will fall through the cracks.”
• “I FEEL…” (Angry, Sad, Scared, Sexual, Joyful…) “I feel scared and angry.” “MY PART IN THIS IS…” (My role in creating or sustaining the issue) “My part in this is that I didn’t speak directly to you the first time it happened. I also didn’t create a clear agreement with you at the onset about the timing or priority of these meetings. My own fear about completing this project is making everything feel significant.”
• “AND I SPECIFICALLY WANT…” “I want to make clear time agreements with you and renegotiate them beforehand, if necessary. I would really like you to check in with yourself to see whether you are aligned with this project and to tell me if you aren’t.”
• PERSON B (JIM) LISTENS TO UNDERSTAND “WHAT I HEAR YOU SAYING…” (Reflect or paraphrase without interpretation.) Reflect back each section of person A’s (Brian’s) clearing. Match that person’s words as closely as possible. The value of mirroring exactly is that the person experiences being listened to. The second is that when a person (in this case Brian) hears their own words repeated back they may realize that what they said is not what they mean. So Jim would say to Brian, “What I hear you saying is that when I was late to four meetings, you made that mean that I wasn’t committed to the project and that with my priorities as they are now, this project might fall through the cracks. You feel scared and angry. You see that we lacked a clear time agreement and that you feel heightened awareness around this because of your own fear. You want us to have clear time agreements for the future and for me to check about my own commitment to the project as a priority.”
• AFTER REFLECTING, ASK, “IS THAT ACCURATE?” (If not, reflect again.) “Brian, did I get that right?”
• “IS THERE MORE?” (Ask in a kind, genuine, curious voice.) Ask the question “Is there more?” to verify that you have addressed the complete issue. “Brian, is there any more about this?” “ARE YOU CLEAR ABOUT THIS?” (If yes, move on. If not, go back to “Is there more?”) If person B (Jim) has an issue, A and B switch roles (Jim clears with Brian).

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• Begin to eliminate gossip from your interactions by committing to yourself and to key people in your life that you will no longer gossip. This is a simple and profound commitment. Then, identify any areas in your life where you have gossiped and use the clearing model described here to clean them up. For some, this practice alone has revolutionized their relationships, resulting in great leaps in their leadership both at work and at home.

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• Conscious leaders recognize the cost of gossip to their organizations and shift so that expression is done instead with candor and authentic feelings. They free up creative energy and collaboration, which can’t exist while gossip is present.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Eliminating Gossip -Even though gossip has long been a part of office culture, it is a key indicator of an unhealthy organization and one of the fastest ways to derail motivation and creativity. Gossip is a statement about another made by someone with negative intent or a statement the speaker would be unwilling to share in exactly the same way if that person were in the room. Gossip is an attempt to validate the righteousness of a person’s thinking and is below the line; it is not a comment designed to serve the person being discussed.
• People gossip to gain validation, control others and outcomes, avoid conflict, get attention, feel included, and make themselves right by making others wrong. In short, people usually gossip out of fear. If you gossip, clean it up by revealing your participation in the gossip to everyone involved. Use the issue-clearing model as a tool to separate fact from story and to learn to speak directly to one another. When leaders and teams learn to speak candidly with each other, they benefit from the direct feedback about issues within the organization that otherwise could derail creative energy and productive collaboration.

COMMITMENT SIX 

Practicing Integrity 

• I commit to the masterful practice of integrity, including acknowledging all authentic feelings, expressing the unarguable truth, keeping my agreements, and taking 100% responsibility.

ENERGY MANAGEMENT (Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr) 

• We have found that conscious leaders are masters at managing energy. When they allow energy to flow, they are alive, engaged, passionate, on purpose, creative, innovative, intuitive, clear, visionary, playful, relaxed, and refreshed. Energy flow is our natural state, but when it’s blocked or interrupted, the life force so essential to great leadership is dampened, and effectiveness wanes immediately and drastically. 
• From this perspective, we want to define an integrity breach as anything that interrupts or blocks the flow of energy.

CONGRUENCE 

• Integrity is wholeness. One form of wholeness is the uninterrupted flow of energy or life force. A second form of wholeness is congruence, which relates to matching what is on the inside to what is on the outside. Congruence is a characteristic of powerful conscious leaders. Yet many leaders believe that good leadership calls for not matching experience to expression, or their insides to their outsides. If they feel scared on the inside, they do everything they can to avoid letting that fear show on the outside. If they have a judgment or an opinion, they’re very careful not to express it. We understand this belief—and the consciousness from which it originates—but this is not congruence, wholeness, or integrity.

ALIGNMENT 

•  For us, then, integrity means the unbroken flow of energy, inside-outside congruence, and, finally, alignment. Alignment is about purpose and directionality. We are whole or in integrity, not just when energy is flowing and we are congruent, but also when we are “on purpose.” Integrity is knowing what we’re up to in the world and being in complete devotion to it. This purpose can change and often does. It doesn’t have to be something great or grandiose, but it must be clear and compelling to leaders—clear enough for them to know at any moment whether they are on purpose and compelling enough that they passionately align their energy to fulfill it.
• Integrity, then, is wholeness, and wholeness is… The unbroken flow of energy and life force. Congruence between what is experienced and what is expressed Alignment with life purpose. An integrity breach is anything that breaks our flow of energy, blocks the matching of our experience and expression, or moves us away from being on purpose.

FOUR PILLARS OF INTEGRITY

• Take 100% responsibility Speak authentically Feel feelings through to completion Impeccable agreements

IMPECCABLE AGREEMENTS 

• To be impeccable concerning agreements, this model asks us to master four practices: 
  • Making clear agreements 
  • Keeping agreements 
  • Renegotiating agreements 
  • Cleaning up broken agreements

MAKING CLEAR AGREEMENTS 

• Making clear agreements first requires being very precise about who will do what by when. So many unconscious leaders are sloppy about this. For a blatant example, take the leader who says during a meeting, “Will someone look into that and get back to us?” There is no clarity around the who (“ will someone”) or the what (“ look into that”) or the when (“ and get back to us”).
• The second part to making a clear agreement is ensuring that everyone involved is fully committed to making it. Agreements are by definition bilateral, whereas assignments, demands, commands, and orders are unilateral. Conscious leaders know when to lead unilaterally and when to lead bilaterally. There is a time and place for both. If a leader is choosing to make an agreement, then he is choosing to invite buy-in—or what we call a whole body YES. This response is a total and unequivocal YES, with your mind, emotions, will, and body. For many leaders, teams, and organizations, it’s a radical way to live. Instead of a whole body YES, many leaders practice the “corporate nod,” nodding their head yes when they actually mean one or more of the following. We encourage leaders to teach their teams the practice of the whole body YES and to practice accepting and refusing agreements based on this awareness.
• The third requirement for making clear agreements is keeping track of all the agreements you make. Gay Hendricks says that if your life is any more complicated than a Bedouin sheepherder’s, you need to write down your agreements. David Allen’s work Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is the best resource we know for learning how to keep track of your agreements in a complicated world.

KEEPING YOUR AGREEMENTS 

• Simple enough. Do what you say you will when you say you will do it. Don’t do what you say you won’t do. Conscious leaders who are impeccable about their agreements keep about 90% of all the ones they make. You might ask, “Is 90% completion actually being impeccable?”

RENEGOTIATING AGREEMENTS 

• Renegotiating agreements means that as soon as you realize you’re not going to keep an agreement, you communicate directly with the affected parties and renegotiate it.

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• We believe that integrity is essential to conscious leadership. It is foundational. In fact, we contend that without it, there is no conscious leadership. Most of us would agree that integrity is important to leadership, but our view is that integrity goes far beyond simply “doing the right thing.” It is living a life of wholeness. Conscious leaders who are in integrity are whole leaders. Whole leaders have a better chance to create teams and organizations that operate in integrity and to lead them to creativity, production and success.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Practicing Integrity -Integrity is the practice of keeping agreements, taking responsibility, revealing authentic feelings, and expressing unarguable truths. It is essential to thriving leaders and organizations. Integrity is not defined here as conforming to a moral or ethical code, but rather as facilitating wholeness and congruence.
• Integrity is an unbroken flow of energy and life force, congruence between what is experienced and expressed, and alignment with life purpose. Organizations have a natural flow of energy, but when it is interrupted by integrity breaches, leadership is dampened and employee engagement decreases. Conscious leaders are masters at managing energy, which leads to an organizational culture that is alive, engaged, passionate, on purpose, creative, innovative, intuitive, clear, visionary, playful, relaxed, and refreshed.
• There are four pillars of integrity: 
  • taking radical responsibility (Commitment 1)
  • speaking candidly (Commitment 4)
  • feeling all feelings (Commitment 3)
  • keeping agreements (Commitment 6). 
• Conscious leaders are impeccable with their agreements. They make clear agreements, keep them, renegotiate them when needed, and clean them up when broken. Integrity is fundamental to conscious leadership and successful thriving organizations.

COMMITMENT SEVEN 

Generating Appreciation 

• I commit to living in appreciation, fully opening to both receiving and giving appreciation.

THE MEANING OF APPRECIATION 

• For our purposes, the definition of appreciation has two components. 
  • SENSITIVE AWARENESS. The first step of appreciation is awareness: simply paying attention. That requires being present in the moment and bringing all of our attention to the person or situation. But sensitive awareness implies more than simply paying attention. It involves the capacity to make fine distinctions. For example, someone who appreciates art notices subtle differences and minute details, such as brush strokes, variation in color, and the effects of light and shadow. Similarly, a wine connoisseur, who appreciates wine, can detect fine flavor distinctions, from the wood of a barrel to the quality of the soil in which the grapes were grown. A layperson who doesn’t fully appreciate art or wine overlooks these subtleties. “It’s a pretty painting” or “What a tasty bottle of wine” are appreciations but they are a long distance from the statements made by someone with a fine-tuned awareness.
  • FULLY RECEIVE APPRECIATION. In our work with leaders and teams, By Me leaders practice fully receiving appreciation. They know that their own ability to appreciate starts with their self appreciation and receptivity to others attention.

DEFLECTING APPRECIATION 

• We’ve found that for many, it’s more difficult to receive than to give appreciation. Usually unconsciously, they use internal and external strategies to refuse the appreciation.
• A few favorite scenarios: 
  • The Inner Critic Interception. Regardless of outward signs to the contrary, the recipient internally dismisses the appreciation. The inner critic says, “What he’s saying isn’t really true. He wouldn’t be saying that if he really knew me. There are plenty of counter examples.”
  • The Hand-Off. The recipient passes credit to someone else—“ It wasn’t really me. It was Paul over there”—or redirects the appreciation to someone else: “Oh, you think that’s a gift of mine, but you should really be paying attention to Suzy; she has that much more than I do.”
  • The Downgrade. The person responds by comparing herself unfavorably to an ideal that she didn’t meet. “Well, this was okay, but it wasn’t perfect. Next time, I’ll do it better.”
  • The Dismissal. The recipient diminishes the quality or action as unnoteworthy. “That was nothing. I hardly did a thing,” or “That’s not anything special. Everyone is like that.”
  • The Reciprocation Race. The person reciprocates in kind: “Oh, you’re the nicest person for saying that. And I appreciate you even more than you appreciate me.”
• We have discovered at the core of these strategies are several reoccurring fears about receiving appreciation: If I receive appreciation I am going to have to give appreciation and I am not sure I have either the capacity or the desire to appreciate. They don’t really mean it. They are just flattering me in order to get something from me. If I take in appreciation it requires me to be vulnerable and I don’t want to expose any weakness. Receiving appreciation ups the bar of expectation and I am not sure I can live up to that every time. If I receive the appreciation I will get lazy and not improve myself. If I accept this appreciation it means I am not humble.

RECEIVING IS A GIFT

• Think of appreciation as a valuable gift, something to be cherished. If a good friend came to your housewarming party with a gift, would you give it back to him and say you didn’t want it?
• Refusing appreciation robs the other person of a chance to give you their gift. You cheat both of you out of an experience of growth and connection. And usually you deny a truth about yourself.
• Research continues to show that a ratio of approximately five appreciations for every one criticism comment is the optimal ratio for strong relationships.

THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF MASTERFUL APPRECIATION 

• A masterful appreciation must include these four elements: 
  • Sincerity. Appreciation must be real and true. If it’s not genuine it’s not appreciation. Insincere comments often create more harm than good because people come to doubt the intention (Are you trying to manipulate me?). Masterful appreciation doesn’t only involve your head (what you think), it also involves your heart (what you feel) and your body (what sensations you are experiencing).
  • Unarguable truth. Appreciation is most effective when it is unarguable (see Commitment 4). This prevents any judgments, comparisons, or conscious or unconscious challenges. In the context of appreciation, this is the difference between “That was a great report!” (arguable) and “I appreciate you for the detailed appendices in this report; I noticed how at ease I felt having all the information at my fingertips” (unarguable).
  • Specificity. Sometimes appreciation is expressed in vague terms, leaving the recipient guessing at its true meaning. “I like your shirt” can make the recipient wonder whether the statement referred to the color, fit, fabric, or some other attribute. Those practicing the art of appreciation use specificity and clarity. 
  • Succinct language. A masterful appreciation can be completed in a single out breath, meaning everything you can say in one exhale. It’s like the best chocolate: a little goes a long way. And like chocolate, too much can spoil the experience. Additionally, once you go beyond one out breath, usually the appreciation becomes arguable.

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• If you’d like to enhance appreciation in your organization, try these four ideas: 
  • 1. Do the white/ green (or other appropriate colors for your space) exercise (described earlier in this chapter) with your team to exemplify “What you place your attention on grows.”
  • 2. Place three dimes, heads up, where you can regularly see them. Every day commit to finding three people to appreciate. Whenever you deliver an appreciation (following the keys to mastery: sincere, unarguable, specific, succinct), flip the dime over. 
  • 3. Use this chart to come up with various ways to appreciate. Choose the method that feels most authentic for the person and situation you are appreciating.
  • 4. Do thirty days of corporate appreciation, which you can find on our websites.

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• Appreciation allows us to recognize the unique gifts of both others and ourselves. It also supports the expansion of what is most valuable in individuals and organizations. Conscious leaders become masters at giving as well as receiving appreciation and are committed to showing gratitude even in the midst of great challenge and conflict.

CHAPTER SUMMARY   

• Generating Appreciation -Committing to appreciation, along with avoiding entitlement, helps leaders and organizations grow value and connection in the workplace. Appreciation is comprised of two parts: sensitive awareness and an increase in value. Entitlement arises when rewards and benefits become an expectation instead of a preference. Living in appreciation has two branches: being open to fully receiving appreciation and being able to fully give appreciation.
• For most, it is more difficult, and people are more afraid, to receive appreciation than to give it. To avoid receiving appreciation, people strategically deflect it. Masterful appreciation is sincere, unarguable, specific, and succinct. Appreciation allows the unique gifts in the community to be recognized.

COMMITMENT EIGHT 

Excelling in your Zone of Genius 

• I commit to expressing my full magnificence and to supporting and inspiring others to fully express their creativity and live in their zone of genius.

THE ZONE OF INCOMPETENCE

• Here, you spend time doing things that you don’t enjoy and don’t do well. Consider tasks that leave you feeling frustrated, and where someone else could have done a much better job.

THE ZONE OF COMPETENCE

• In this area, you spend time doing things you can do just fine, but others can do them just as well and usually with more efficiency, improved quality, and more enjoyment. These activities might include administrative tasks, like renting a car, finding the cheapest flight, or organizing a corporate party. Or home chores, like mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, or paying bills. The key is a lack of fulfillment and that someone else could do it better. You don’t feel that you’re wasting time completely, as you do in the zone of incompetence, but at the end of the day, you typically feel unsatisfied and drained. It’s like eating a microwave dinner just because it contains adequate caloric content; it has no flavor.

THE ZONE OF EXCELLENCE

• This is the trickiest zone, where the majority of successful people get stuck. Here, you are good at what you do. Better than most, in fact. You often receive accolades, prestige, a good paycheck, and many enticing reasons to stay. It’s comfortable. It’s known. The problem is that it costs you energy: it might be a slight leak, but is a loss of energy nonetheless. The joie de vivre is missing. It feels like work. The passion dies along with your creativity and potential if you stay too long.

UPPER LIMITS

• Typically, fear guards the line between the zone of excellence and the ultimate zone of genius. The fears holding people back are many. Who are you to live in your zone of genius? You’re not that special. Who can do that? Work is work. Unless you’re independently wealthy, you can’t just delegate the things you don’t want to
• Hendricks outlines some of the categories of false beliefs that keep us from moving into our zone of genius, calling them the Upper Limits Problem. The big idea is that each of us has a gauge—like a thermostat—that measures how good things are, with a limit just shy of “too good to be true for me.” We have a limit for different areas of our lives: how much money we’re allowed to make, how much love or closeness we can feel, how much joy we can experience, how much fun we’re allowed to have. Everyone’s Upper Limits vary, which is why commissioned sales people seem to “top out” at such different numbers. What seems consistent, though, is that when people bump into an Upper Limit, “something happens” that helps bring them back down to a level where they feel safe and comfortable again.
• These are the four top (false) beliefs that trigger the Upper Limits Problem:
  • Feeling fundamentally flawed. People believe that they cannot expand into their full creative genius because something is inherently wrong with them.
  • Disloyalty and abandonment. Especially those who have grown up with more humble circumstances believe they cannot experience their full success because it would be disloyal to their roots and they would end up alone.
  • More success = bigger burden. Those who hold this belief think they can’t expand to their highest potential because they will have burdens to handle: more to do, people who want things from them, etc. Life will demand more.
  • Outshining. Especially for those who are talented or gifted, this belief is that if they expand to their full success, they would outshine someone important to them and make that person look or feel bad.
• To create the space and allow the nervous system to develop this new capacity, we encourage leaders to integrate just after they experience a new high. For example, you close the deal you never thought you’d be able to close; you get the promotion you’ve always wanted; you have a great weekend away with your partner and experience a new level of closeness. At these moments, we suggest leaders integrate by doing things that are grounding, ordinary, mindless, soothing, mundane, and/ or repetitive. This could be going for a walk, mowing the lawn, sweeping the floor, washing the car, making a meal, flipping through a favorite hobby magazine, or taking a little longer shower. This allows for the gentle raising of old Upper Limits (the reprogramming of the nervous system), without forcefully blowing past them in a way that actually causes a big crash.

THE ULTIMATE ZONE 

• Commitment 8 says I commit to expressing my full magnificence, and to supporting and inspiring others to fully express their creativity and live in their zone of genius. When you’re in your zone of genius (a.k.a. “flow” or “in the zone”), you spend time doing what you love, what you’re uniquely gifted to do. All sense of time disappears. These activities may feel like “nothing” (I would have done that anyway because it’s so much fun) yet are often what you get appreciated for. When people are in their zone of genius, we frequently hear them say, “Can’t everyone do that easily?” They don’t realize that it seems like a Herculean effort to others.

GENIUS EMAIL EXERCISE 

Step 1: Create an email list of 30-50 people who have known you from different areas of your life and for different lengths of time.

Step 2: Create an introductory paragraph similar to the one below. We have learned that our clients get a high ratio of participants when they state a specific time and date to receive responses. 

Step 3: Organize the responses by question so you are easily able to see themes.

Step 4: Thank everyone who participated and consider sharing something you have learned from the exercise with them.

• Dear community, I am in the midst of discovering my unique zones of genius (when I’m “in the zone”) and would appreciate your help. I am asking for your support by briefly answering a few questions to reflect back to me what you see. If you are willing to offer your input, I request that you respond to the following questions by (give a specific day and time within the next week).
• Briefly answer the following questions: What am I doing or talking about when you experience me MOST energized and happy? When you experience me at my best, the exact thing I am doing is__________________. (Fill in the blank) What do you see as a special skill I am gifted with? What are your three favorite qualities you see in me? (Do your best to use one word per quality)
• Optional questions to send to participants: What reliably shows up in the room when I do? How have I most contributed to your life? What would you miss most about my presence if I passed on?

BEST STUFF EXERCISE 

• For those committed to living in their zone of genius, we recommend complementing the email campaign with another exercise. Kaley, along with our friend and colleague Jim Warner, created the “Best Stuff” exercise, where you identify Genius Moments. It involves writing down and telling someone, who is skilled at listening for genius, eight stories from your life when you were in the zone—when you loved what you were doing and you did it well. For this exercise, you can’t include something you enjoyed but did badly. So the karaoke nights when you had a blast singing, but blasted everyone’s ears don’t qualify. Similarly, if you excelled at something but didn’t enjoy it, leave it out. The award you won for teaching the course you hated is off limits.

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• Genius equals juice. The more we live and work in our genius the more the juice of life is flowing through us into the world. As many have said, it is not our failure that we are most afraid of but rather our magnificence. Conscious leaders face the fear of stepping fully into their magnificence. They embrace their magnificence, live and work in their genius and give their gift to the world.

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• Once you know what your zone of genius is, you can start to shift your calendar to allow more and more time there. 
• Step 1: Look back over your calendar from the last two weeks and make a list of 25 activities you performed in the course of doing your job. Be very specific, e.g. weekly staff meeting, emailed boss updating him on latest client meeting, filled out expense report, client meeting with ABC Products, read report on performance evaluation, had lunch with administrative assistant, etc. Put an arrow next to each activity.If your energy went up when you did the activity put the arrow pointing up.If your energy was flat when you did the activity make the arrow go horizontal. If your energy went down when you did the activity put the arrow pointing down.
• Step 2: Look at the amount of time you spent doing each activity and assign a rough percentage to the amount of time you spent with energy increasing activities, activities that left your energy flat, and activities that decreased your energy. Would you be willing to have a 10%-20% increase in energy? Don’t skip over this willingness lightly. Many leaders aren’t willing for the Upper Limit reasons above. If your answer is yes, then go to the next step.
• Step 3: What could you do with activities that drain your energy (arrow points down) so that you could have more time for activities that increase your energy? Delegate it Dump it Do it differently. Do it in a way that doesn’t de-energize you.
• Step 4: If you want to spend more time in your zone of genius, put one of these actions next to each down arrow.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Excelling in your Zone of Genius -Conscious leaders build an organization that allows all team members to realize their full potential—and they support and inspire others to do the same. People tend to work and live in four zones: incompetence, competence, excellence, and genius.
• Conscious leaders are committed to maximizing their zone of genius, where their full magnificence and creativity can be expressed without hesitation. Unconscious leaders get stuck in the zones of excellence, competence, and incompetence, never living up to and expressing their extraordinary brilliance. The Upper Limits Problem, named by Gay Hendricks, identifies the fears and beliefs that keep people from stepping into their zone of genius.
• We can program our nervous systems to allow for greater happiness, fulfillment, and relational connectedness. Becoming aware of our unique giftedness, as well as the environments where that is most valued, (the Best Stuff Exercise) helps us spend more and more of our time thriving. Conscious leaders who spend time with team members to assess, understand, and appreciate their own unique genius qualities and talents create organizations that excel on all levels.

COMMITMENT NINE 

Living a Life of Play and Rest 

• I commit to creating a life of play, improvisation, and laughter. I commit to seeing all of life unfold easefully, and effortlessly. I commit to maximizing my energy by honoring rest, renewal, and rhythm.
• When adults commit to creating a life of play they are often very focused and they exert huge amounts of energy. But there is a difference between being focused and exerting energy and “hard work, effort and struggle.” Hard work, effort and struggle come when: (1) I make meaning out of life and work that causes stress and worry; and (2) I resist and force life rather than cooperate and improvise. For this reason this commitment says, “I commit to creating a life of play, improvisation, and laughter.”
• The cardinal rule of improvisation is “YES AND.” No matter what my fellow creators give me, my answer is always “YES AND.” In other words I take what is given to me and I adapt, create, and change. This is the great fun and creative juice of improvisation. I can’t control what is going to be given to me and as soon as I try to control it, I anticipate, force, effort and struggle, and all possibility of improvisation is sapped from the moment. This is also the source of both the excitement and fear of creative improvisation. In life and work conscious leaders give up trying to control what life is giving them and they step into the fun of YES AND. Together with other collaborators they experience the excitement and fear of the unknown. They experience life. As a fun field trip take your team and go watch improv or even more powerful, go DO improve while suspending self-consciousness. As you do it, ask yourself if you’re having fun. Ask yourself if this is the way “work” feels. If your answer to the second question is “no” you’re not living this commitment.

Exertion and effort are not the same thing. 

• Effort implies resistance and exertion doesn’t. If you watched her ski a double black diamond mogul run you would see exertion (elevated heart rate, muscles contracting, heavy breathing, sweat covering her body) but you wouldn’t see effort. When Kaley skis she doesn’t resist the mountain. Most beginners resist the mountain. They effort, struggle and often suffer. She takes whatever the mountain gives her and flows and improvises her way to playful pleasure.
• life gives them and they improvisationally co-create with others in a spirit of playful pleasure. Often they exert significant energy. They sometimes come to the end of a day physically tired; that good tired that comes from having given it all and left everything on the field.

Laughter

• The final test of the first part of this commitment is laughter. Laughter is a key indicator of how much play is going on in a leader and an organization. The humor in most organizations is sarcastic humor that pokes fun at others often when they are not present or sophomoric humor that trivializes what is good and beautiful in life. This kind of humor is actually a sign of unconscious leadership. The laughter being referenced in this commitment is the lighthearted playful laughter that refreshes the soul and is contagious and infectious in its impact.
• Stuart Brown, in his book Play, suggests that people have a dominant mode of play that falls into one of eight play personalities: 
  • THE JOKER: Play always revolves around some sort of nonsense. Making silly sounds with a child or playing a practical joke on a friend fall under this category.
  • THE KINESTHETE: Those in this group include athletes, dancers, and others who like to push their bodies and feel the result. 
  • THE EXPLORER: These people delight in trying new experiences, such as physically going to new places, emotionally exploring and deepening feelings, and mentally researching or discovering new points of view.
  • THE COMPETITOR: This person enjoys a competitive game with specific rules and loves fighting for number one! 
  • THE DIRECTOR: These players like planning and executing scenes and events. They are born organizers who give parties and instigate group events. 
  • THE COLLECTOR: This type of player relishes the thrill of having the most and best collection of objects or experiences, such as antiques, cars, or wine.
  • THE ARTIST/ CREATOR: This person’s joy comes from making things. Sculpting, woodworking, sewing, and gardening are a few examples. The point is to make something beautiful or functional. 
  • THE STORYTELLER: Here the imagination is the key to the kingdom of play. This group includes novelists, cartoonists, and screenwriters as well as those who like reading stories and watching movies. They are also the performers who use dance, magic, and acting to create an imaginative world.

🤯 NASA found that organizations whose employees took a nap for at least thirty minutes every day were up to 35% more productive than their competitors. Equally impressive, scientists have also determined that people in a relaxed state and good mood are far more likely to develop innovative or creative thoughts.

Productive Hours

• How many hours of productive work do you do a day? Answer: about three. Leaders’ productivity would go up drastically if they understood this and maximized the brain’s ability to do great work by prioritizing, eliminating multitasking, checking email later in the morning, taking naps, going for walks, doing creative play projects, and feeling authentic feelings.

MAXIMIZING ENERGY BY HONORING REST, RENEWAL AND RHYTHM 

• The second part of this commitment is a commitment to maximize energy. We agree with Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr in their book The Power of Full Engagement when they assert that energy management is key to long term effectiveness. In fact, energy management is more important than time management or money management or any other kind of management when in it comes to effective leadership.
• All of creation is a living testimony to honoring the rhythms of life. Conscious leaders become expert in understanding and living by the natural rhythms of their life. This includes the rhythm of the waking state, the dream state and dreamless sleep.

WORKAHOLISM

• From our perspective workaholism is an addiction just like alcoholism, drug addiction, food addiction or sex addiction. The definition we use for addiction is “any behavior we do compulsively (repetitively, with no real experience of freedom to choose another behavior, ‘I’ve got to do it,’) in order to avoid experiencing our experience in the moment.”
• Conscious leaders, and for that matter, conscious people, become practiced at living in the now moment and welcoming whatever is being experienced; whatever feelings, sensations and thoughts are arising in the moment are welcomed with no desire to control what is being experienced. This is actually a pretty good definition of consciousness. But many leaders don’t welcome what is being experienced. Instead they resist their experience and run from it.
• In our experience many leaders work (in all of its many forms including but not limited to those listed above) because they are terrified of being with themselves in this now moment and being with what is arising in them. They don’t know how to simply welcome core emotions like fear, anger and sadness. They struggle to be with thoughts without being taken over by thinking or how to feel sensations in their body without numbing them. From our perspective this addiction to work is epidemic in our culture and it is not being faced. There is a collective collusion to live in denial about the reality of our lack of real freedom to choose to do anything other than work.

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• When you feel the need to get serious or work much harder, consider doing the following: Take a couple of minutes to argue for why you can’t have what you really want. Make up a country song title that describes your current issue and sing a line. Have a fifteen-second temper tantrum. Be sure to include your whole body and make noise. For thirty seconds, hop on one foot and flap your arms as you discuss your serious issue. Radically (and we mean RADICALLY) change your current body posture and then talk about your issue for one minute. Sing “I am right—you are wrong” to the tune of your favorite nursery rhyme.

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• Possibly nothing we teach is more mysterious, more resisted and more transformational and healing than the commitment to play and to maximize energy through honoring the rhythms of life. This is one of the great lessons children have to teach all leaders committed to consciousness. They are masters of this commitment and beneficiaries of its gifts.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Living a Life of Play and Rest -Creating a life of play, improvisation, and laughter allows life to unfold easily and energy to be maximized. Play is an absorbing, apparently purposeless activity that provides enjoyment and suspends self-consciousness and a sense of time. It is also self-motivating and makes you want to do it again. An imposed nose-to-the-grindstone culture will lead to higher levels of stress, guilt, employee burnout and turnover.
• Energy exerted with this type of “hard work” is wrought with effort and struggle, whereas energy exerted through play is energizing. Most leaders resist play because they think they will fall behind if they aren’t seriously working hard. Organizations that take breaks to rest and play are actually more productive and creative. Energy is maximized when rest, renewal, and personal rhythms are honored. Conscious leaders who value and encourage an atmosphere of play and joy within themselves and in their organizations create high-functioning, high-achieving cultures. Workaholism is just like any other addiction, and it is an epidemic in the corporate world.

COMMITMENT TEN 

Exploring the Opposite 

• I commit to seeing that the opposite of my story is as true as or truer than my original story. I recognize that I interpret the world around me and give my stories meaning.
• Almost all the challenges we see businesses struggle with arise from people believing they are right about the way they perceive situations, one another, or themselves. Whenever we don’t allow reality to be what it is, we are in opposition to life. This opposition is the cause of all suffering.
• When we don’t accept the reality of how our five year old is playing with her friends—when there is a right way to play with children—our suffering occurs in the experience of being separate from our child. And in wanting to force her to be something other than who she is. The overarching truth is that whenever you don’t accept the suchness of life, suffering occurs. It is actually not the issue that causes the pain but your interpretation of it. Life doesn’t come with labels. It just comes. We give life the labels. And the label that we give life determines how we experience.
• Conscious leaders take responsibility for being the labeler of life. They learn to question all of the labels. Wanting to be right is the compulsion of the ego. In fact, the ego believes that unless it is right, it cannot survive. So the mind is addicted to believing that there is a right way to be.

IS YOUR STORY TRUE? 

• In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathon Haidt, former associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, suggests that one of the keys to happiness is using reframing to challenge our automatic, stressful thoughts. His research shows that if we are willing to reframe our subjective perspective, we can feel a sense of well-being in a matter of minutes. This practice requires us to let go of being right and get deeply curious about how we see ourselves and the world around us.
• This tool invites us to ask four questions about a stressful thought. The purpose is to help us find our own truth. Is it true? Can you absolutely know that it’s true? How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? Who would you be without the thought?
• Example: John is unkind to me. Turn it around to the opposite: John is kind to me. Turn it around to the other person: I am unkind to John. Turn it around to yourself: I am unkind to me. How is this statement as true or truer? (For “I am unkind to me,” exactly how have you been unkind to yourself in this situation? In other situations?) Give at least three specific, genuine examples. Find a minimum of three examples in your life where each turnaround is true.
• The purpose of The Work is to become curious about all the possibilities of life. We find that this is done most effectively if you remain unattached to any outcome. This is not about valuing one thought above another, but staying truly open to the exploration.

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• We find the resources from Byron Katie to be invaluable in this process. Her website www.thework.com has examples, videos, and Worksheets for the practice of questioning thoughts. We recommend watching the videos of Katie doing The Work with participants to have the experience and really “get it.”

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

•  When we let go of the righteousness of our beliefs that drive us to live in the drama triangle, we open to curiosity and align with our deepest desires. We live our lives free of “shoulds” and “have tos” and enjoy both great freedom and peace.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Exploring the Opposite – Exploring the opposite means being open to the notion that the opposite of your story (thoughts, beliefs, opinions) could be as true as or truer than your story. It is not the issue itself that causes pain, but your interpretation of it.  Conscious leaders take responsibility for being the labeler of their experiences and their life, and they learn to question all their labels.
• The Work of Byron Katie (www.thework.com) is a powerful tool in learning how to question beliefs that could likely be holding us back. Conscious leaders practice simple ways to question the beliefs that cause suffering, starting with “Is it true?” and “Can I absolutely know it is true?” The turnaround exercise allows leaders to practice shifting their beliefs from knowing to curiosity. When conscious leaders let go of the righteousness of their beliefs, they open to curiosity and align with their deepest desires.

COMMITMENT ELEVEN 

Sourcing Approval, Control and Security 

• I commit to being the source of my approval, control and security.
• Humans have three core wants: approval, control, and security. All other “wants” stem from these basic desires, whether it’s wanting success, a raise, fame, a new car, healthy children, a unified leadership team, greater profitability, or dependable coworkers.
• The point of this chapter is that all wants, regardless of their size, are actually just three core wants showing up in a multitude of manifestations.

Security 

• The wanting of security is the most basic of the core desires. At its root, wanting security is wanting to survive. Another word for security is safety. Most of us believe we are a separate self that has a beginning and an end (birth and death), and therefore we do everything we can to make sure this separate self survives. We want to survive physically, to live and not to die. From this deepest want for physical survival comes the desire for security.

Approval

• The second core want is approval. Approval is the desire to be loved, liked, wanted, valued, appreciated, respected, to belong, and to be part of something. The desire for approval comes from the desire to survive. Quite simply, at its most evolutionary core, if others approve of me they won’t kill me. Since survival is my deepest desire then my strategy for survival is to gain approval.

Control

• The third core want is control. If I can’t gain security through approval then I’ll get it through control. If I can’t earn your approval, then I’ll try to control you and life. Wanting control is trying to make sure that everything in life goes the way I want. I try to control myself, people, circumstances, God, and everything else. I invest significant energy in my control plan.

Conscious leaders regularly ask themselves, “What is the core want driving this (surface) desire?”

•  Most leaders and most people believe and are deeply committed to the belief that what they want (approval, control and security) is “out there.” Out-there-ness is the belief that my approval, control and security are dependent on someone or something other than myself. Put simply, I don’t have it within me and something or someone needs to give it to me.
• One thing we highly recommend for leaders who desire to wake up out of this common trance is to identify how out-there-ness and if-only-ness are showing up in their life. This can be done by simply completing this sentence over and over: “If only ___________________ would _________________ I would have approval/ control/ security.”
• You can start by simply making a list of things in your life you wish were different. Once you have the list look underneath the issue and find the “if only” and the “other-ness” and see which want is at the center of the issue. 
• For example: If only I would lose weight, I would have approval and security. If only I would quit making stupid mistakes, I would have control and approval. If only my clients would take time to listen to my presentation, I would have approval and security.
• Just a quick comment as you begin this exercise. Many people we coach through this process ask about happiness. They think that what they really want is happiness, that happiness is the core want. What we have learned is that happiness for most people is a result of feeling that they have approval, control and security. Our advice is to go below the desire for happiness and see which of the core wants is missing. The issue is “wanting” approval, control and security. As soon as we want something, anything, it implies that we don’t have it. Wanting comes from a belief in lack. Wanting says I don’t have it and I need to go outside of myself to get it. This belief in lack can be found at the root of all suffering and the cause of all seeking.
• “You cannot go anywhere to get what you already have and you cannot do anything to become what you already are.” In an oversimplified way, all leaders at any moment are operating from one of two beliefs/ experiences: those who believe they lack something and want it and are seeking to get it from someone or something outside of themselves, and those who believe they are already whole, perfect, and complete and lack nothing. These leaders move in the world from a very different energy. Those who believe they lack move in the world from fear and those who believe they are already whole, perfect, and complete, lacking nothing, move in the world from love and creativity.

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• One of the things we do with leaders we coach is invite them to explore both their beliefs and their actual experience. This process takes many forms but a very simple starting point comes from the Sedona Method. It works by asking yourself these questions: At any moment (especially when you are upset and stressed) ask yourself “What do I want?” Don’t try to edit your answer or be mature about it. Just blurt. Ask yourself, “Could I welcome this wanting? Could I simply allow this wanting to be here just as it is?”
• Ask yourself, “If I dig a little deeper, is this desire coming from wanting approval, control or security?” (The key to this is to answer from your heart not your head. You can’t be wrong about your answer and if you’re not sure just pick one.) Ask yourself, “Could I welcome this wanting? Could I just allow it to be here?”
• Ask yourself, “Could I let this wanting go, just for now, just in this moment as best I could?” Ask yourself, “Could I rest for this moment as that (someone) which is beyond all wanting?”

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• What if everything in this moment in your life is actually whole, perfect and complete? What if you are lacking nothing? Not just what if you believed you lacked nothing (which is a mind game) but what if your actual experience in this moment was that nothing was missing? How would you be? This commitment suggests that there is nothing missing—no lack—and that conscious leaders experience this moment by moment as they live and lead in the world.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Sourcing Approval, Control and Security -Humans have core wants of approval, control, and security. All other wants are versions of these three basic desires, which show up in a multitude of ways. Security is about survival, approval is about belonging and being part of something, and control is the ego’s last resort if it cannot achieve security through approval.
• The challenge is not in having approval, control, and security, but in believing that they are missing. This causes people to seek these core desires outside themselves—somewhere “out there.” The “If Only . . . I Would” exercise can help leaders wake up from the trance that their happiness is located outside themselves. It’s not the wants but the “wanting” of something different that leads to an unsatisfying life.
• The Sedona Method offers questions and practices to source security, approval, and control from within. All leaders at any moment are operating from one of two experiences: either they think they lack something and seek to get it from somewhere or someone, or they believe they are already whole, perfect, and complete and move in the world from love and creativity.

COMMITMENT TWELVE 

• Having Enough of Everything I commit to experiencing that I have enough of everything… including time, money, love, energy, space, resources, etc.
• Lynne Twist identified three toxic myths of scarcity. 
  • The first is that there is never enough. It generates a fear that drives us to make sure we’re not the ones left out. 
  • The second myth is that more is better. The primary cost of this belief is that it never allows us to arrive—we are always pursuing something more. 
  • The final myth is that’s just the way it is: it’s a hopeless, helpless, unequal, unfair world that we can never change or escape. As Twist argues, this is one of the most challenging myths because the less willing that people are to question beliefs about scarcity, the more entrenched the culture of scarcity becomes.

PERSPECTIVE MATTERS 

• Rather than getting sucked into comparing your perspective with others’, consider that your own perspective matters. Think of a time when you were exercising and every second seemed to last for hours. In contrast, think of a conversation with a close friend when the time flew by and an hour felt like minutes. The “same” amount of time shifts based on our perspective: whether we want something to be over or last longer.

THE SUFFICIENCY MEDITATION 

• To experience the shift from scarcity to sufficiency in this moment—since sufficiency is a state of being, not just a data point—we recommend doing this meditation: Check in this moment to see what your experience is right now. In this moment, allow yourself to take a few deep breaths. Notice the air moving in and out of your lungs. And notice the breath that sustains you. And that there is enough. And bring your attention to your physical body. Pay attention to any sensations. Notice what is. See if there is anything lacking. Check to see in this moment right now what your experience is. As you breathe in, notice the wholeness of your physicality. In this moment now, notice your experience of time. Notice that there is no past and no future. There is only now. The past is behind and the future is ahead. In this now moment, what is your relationship with time? Notice that the edges of time begin to blur as now refreshes itself with each moment. Always now. And check to see in this now moment if you have enough time. As you continue this exercise, bring to your mind anything that you have been believing is scarce, that you don’t have enough of. And check in this now moment if anything is missing. Or if you have everything you need, neither excess nor scarcity. Notice that when you are fully present in this now moment, you have plenty of everything.

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• MEDITATE. Do the Sufficiency Meditation each morning on one scarcity thought. Breathe for several minutes while seeing if you can find any experience other than enough in the now moment. CHALLENGE BELIEFS. Identify your beliefs about scarcity. Apply the four questions from Byron Katie’s The Work (www.thework.com), which is discussed further in Commitment 10. Check to see whether the scarcity thoughts are true.

DO BREATH WORK. 

• Experiment with the physical contrast between scarcity and sufficiency. Hold your breath for as long as you can. Experience not having enough breath. Then breathe shallowly—almost as though you are panting like a dog. Notice the difference between no breath and some breath. And notice if there is a feeling of scarcity or “not enough.” Then take deep belly breaths. Let yourself slow down your inhale and exhale. Be aware of the experience of fullness. Reflect on whether you were staying present in each moment of the breath work or anticipating a future moment.

NOTICE SPACE. 

• Move through a crowded space and focus on the obstacles. This works particularly well in a busy airport. Approach your gate by trying to avoid people. Be in a hurry. Notice your thoughts and experiences. Then shift to placing all your attention on the gaps between people. Allow yourself to move into empty space. What is your experience of movement from this mental paradigm? Note: This exercise also works if you are a snow skier (and are wearing a helmet!). Ski as fast as you can through the trees by trying to avoid the trees on one run, then moving yourself into the space between the trees the next run. Which one brings a feeling of ease? Where do you experience scarcity and sufficiency beliefs? How is the same run different or the same?

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• For individuals committed to conscious leadership, the belief and experience of sufficiency creates a profound shift in their relationship with others and with life. These leaders shift to living life from a place of enough—not just for themselves, but for everyone.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Having Enough of Everything -Conscious leaders experience their lives as having enough of everything: time, money, love, energy, space, and resources. The scarcity belief that there is “not enough” causes leaders to focus on making sure they get what is “theirs.” The myths that feed scarcity are that there is never enough, more is better, and it will always be this way.
• Conscious leaders notice this focus on the toxic myth of insufficiency and shift from a mentality of scarcity to one of sufficiency. To unwind scarcity, conscious leaders notice their reference point and check in with themselves, actively challenging their beliefs. Conscious leaders can practice checking in with their experience in the present moment, bringing attention to the physical body, and noticing the abundance of each moment.
• To those committed to conscious leadership, the belief and experience of sufficiency creates a profound shift in their relationship with others, work, and life.

COMMITMENT THIRTEEN 

• Experiencing the World as an Ally I commit to seeing all people and circumstances as we learn the most important things for my growth.

REACTIVE VS. CONSCIOUS LEADERS 

• The way leaders view people and circumstances dictates whether they are reactive or conscious. Reactive, “To Me” leaders like Suzanne see people as either on their side in getting what they want or obstacles. Virtually every leader we coach starts with this mindset. They are convinced they will feel happy once they get what they want.
• Conscious leaders, on the other hand, are able to shift out of this state of comparison and competition to see everyone—including themselves—as equally valuable. Everyone is an ally in the bigger game of learning.
• For our purposes, the common cause or goal we have with our allies is our individual learning and growth. Other people don’t even have to consciously commit to being your ally. If you are committed to experiencing them that way, they are always instrumental to your growth. Every person or situation is “for you” in serving your learning and growth, nudging you to become more conscious.
• By showing up in the world in this way, you can welcome everyone and everything as an ally. No matter the situation, rather than wallowing in resistance, you can get curious and ultimately feel gratitude for whatever prompted you to wake up, deepen your consciousness, and grow as a leader.

THE ROLE OF CHALLENGE 

• In the experience of growth, pressure plays a critical role. Reactive leaders often revert to seeing obstacles when they encounter a challenge. Alternatively, conscious leaders welcome this experience because they see the benefit of pressure; it either causes them to wake up and take action or allows new things to come forth. Before something changes, it usually breaks down first. For example, athletes know that the workouts that make them faster are the ones that breakdown their muscles—literally tearing the muscle fibers—so they grow back stronger.
• Supportive pressure is a catalyst for learning, change, and growth. It challenges the leader to fulfill their potential and live in their full magnificence.
• Other people don’t even have to consciously commit to being your ally. If you are committed to experiencing them that way, they are always instrumental to your growth.

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• When we consult with leaders working on this commitment, we ask them this key question: If the universe were using this person or situation as a perfect ally to help you grow, what would you get to learn about yourself and life?
• Here are additional questions to help you shift your perspective to seeing every person and situation as an ally in learning. Before you start asking these questions, first ask yourself this question: “Would I be willing to see this person and these circumstances as an ally for my learning?” Your willingness is essential for any shifts to occur. If yes…
  • What is it that I could not have experienced without this person/ circumstance? What part of this am I most resistant to? Can I see that this is true about me? And am I willing to welcome/ love that part in myself? What is my biggest judgment about the way it is? Am I willing to see that the opposite of my judgment is as true or truer?
  • How is this person or circumstance helping me face something that I have been unwilling to acknowledge or face? What quality could not have been developed in me without this person/ circumstance? How is the universe using this person or situation to give me feedback?
  • How is this in service to my growth? What part of me is this bringing forward to welcome, honor, accept, or love? In twenty years (or two), what will I say I learned from that”? In twenty years (or two), what about this will I be grateful for?

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• Conscious leaders look at life through the perspective of learning and growth. They wonder about how everyone and everything—especially challenges and potential obstacles—are actually allies in their development.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Experiencing the World as an Ally -Conscious leaders commit to seeing all people and circumstances as allies in their growth. Unconscious reactive leaders view other people and circumstances as obstacles to getting what they want. Most leaders start with this reactive mindset: they are convinced they will feel happy once they get what they want and if they can’t get what they want, it’s because others are standing in their way. Rather than seeing all people as allies, unconscious leaders think either/ or: “people are either with me or against me.” 
• This does not mean that competition is nonexistent, but that even competitors are supportive catalysts for growth and that adversaries can be extremely beneficial. Challenges create the positive pressure often needed for conscious leaders to expand beyond the comfort zone and into their full magnificence. Conscious leaders are able to shift out of the state of comparison to see everyone and everything as equally valuable. This perspective recognizes that all people and circumstances are allies in learning and growth.

COMMITMENT FOURTEEN 

• Creating Win for all Solutions I commit to creating win-for-all solutions (win for me, win for the other person, win for the organization, and win for the whole) for whatever issues, problems, concerns, or opportunities life gives me.
• Scarcity beliefs lead to zero-sum, win/ lose solutions. Many people think of life as a pie of fixed resources, for which they must compete with one another. Any money you have is money I don’t get. Energy I use with you is energy I don’t have available for someone else. In this zero-sum game, we must choose between competing and compromising. Competing means that I win and you lose.

CREATING WIN FOR ALL 

• Another option for resolving issues is expressed in this commitment: I commit to creating win-for-all solutions (win for me, win for the other person, win for the organization, and win for the whole) for whatever issues, problems, concerns, or opportunities life gives me.
• From the To Me mindset, the only options available are competing and compromising. From the By Me mindset, a third option becomes available: collaboration. In our experience, collaboration opens all kinds of possibilities that are not available from competition and compromise. Conscious leaders approach solutions with full transparency and openness. They know that to create win-for-all solutions, they must be completely available and willing to reveal their own experiences with honesty and integrity.

ADDITIONAL WIN-FOR-ALL COACHING QUESTIONS 

• Whether or not you do the process here, these questions (and questions like them) support the creation of win-for-all solutions: 
  • Are we committed to seeing others as equals and allies in this collaboration? What is the biggest idea that our teamwork could create? What do we need to become to create this vision? What do we need to let go of to create this vision (beliefs, attitudes, feelings, experiences)? What resources do we already have that could support this vision? Who else could join in this partnership? How can our collaboration support us all to get what we want?

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️

• The following steps can help you create win-for-all solutions. Keep in mind that the underpinning of this work is a commitment to support, sufficiency, and curiosity.

Step 1: Identify the problem, issue, or challenge For example; staffing, email, management style, or conflicting desires. 

Step 2: Get candid Tell the whole truth about the issue from your perspective; what is the issue behind the issue? Open a space for others to be candid. Listen deeply to one another.

Step 3: Tell the story on the triangle Identify victim-villain-hero dynamics and personas. Create several win/ lose, zero-sum solutions. Have different sides of the issue win. See if you can make the solutions as egregiously unfair as possible: one side “really” wins and one side “really” loses. 

Step 4: See if you are willing to shift Check in to see if you have a full body yes to create a win/ win. If the answer is no, stop the process and explore what emotions or thoughts have not yet been faced, felt, or expressed. If willing, go to Step 5.

Step 5: Claim 100% responsibility Option: Do the 100% responsibility process from Commitment 1. 

Step 6: Get curious, Wonder about win-for-all solutions. (Do this while using some of the shift moves: radically change your body position, move, breathe, use other voices) What resources do you have available that you haven’t used? How else could you think about this? If you were the other party, what would you propose? 

Step 7: Create an action plan to implement the new win-for-all solution( s)

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• When conscious leaders experience an issue, problem, dilemma, or challenge, they explore possibilities with open curiosity and from a foundation of sufficiency and support to arrive at win-for-all solutions.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Creating Win for All Solutions -Win-for-all solutions are a goal of conscious leaders and organizations. Conscious leaders commit to moving beyond the zero-sum game into a creative solution that serves all. Unconscious leaders see situations as win/ lose and create a culture that promotes competition and compromise. Win-for-all solutions require the building blocks of the other conscious leadership commitments, providing a concrete example of how conscious leaders integrate all the commitments into a way of being in the world.
• Within an organization, win-for-all coaching questions help create a culture that supports and encourages everyone. The energy resulting from win-for-all collaboration allows solutions to be implemented quickly. A win-for-all culture allows an organization to thrive as creativity, collaboration, vision, and achievement are optimized.

COMMITMENT FIFTEEN 

• Being the Resolution I commit to being the resolution or solution that is needed: seeing what is missing in the world as an invitation to become that which is required.

BEING AND BECOMING 

• In our experience, this commitment offers an alternative: I commit to being the resolution or solution that is needed: seeing what is missing in the world as an invitation to become that which is required.
• This commitment begins with “seeing what is missing.” From our perspective, this does not mean seeing what is wrong or seeing a problem. We believe “problems” exist in the To Me box. Rather, something can be perfect but have a “missing” element. There is simply more that could be; there is more possibility, more magnificence, or contribution, or harmony, or alignment, or love. If we understand “missing” to be “lacking,” we fall back into scarcity and the To Me consciousness.
• When you look at your world, whether at work or in your personal life, what could be more? What is missing (not lacking)? What could be even more beautiful, efficient, aligned, or productive? With this awareness, conscious leaders receive an “invitation”—not a demand or a responsibility or a “have to” or “should.” An invitation comes with no obligations. You are free to accept or decline it. From this place of freedom, conscious leaders check to see if they have a whole body YES to the invitation. Again, this whole body yes is a master skill of all conscious leaders.
• If leaders have a full YES to receiving the invitation to add to what is already whole, perfect, and complete, their next step is to “be” and “become.” Please note: People often ask us, “If the world is whole, perfect, and complete, why would anyone ever want to do anything?” Our experience tells us that the answer is “because we can!” Because we can join in the creative dance. Because we can bring our gifts to a perfect world. Because we can write another verse to an already-beautiful song. This is what it means to be a human with freedom to take up the invitation.
• Notice that we are talking about being and becoming, not doing. That doesn’t mean there won’t be doing. There often will be. But conscious leaders initially focus on who they are being and becoming. From this place, all action is possible. Action not rooted in beingness is usually short-lived, exhausting, and guilt producing (if I fail to do it). When “being” is prioritized, the doing happens naturally—just as an apple tree does not exert effort to give its fruit to the world. It knows its beingness and rests as apples come forward (doing).

🏌️PRACTICING THE COMMITMENT🏌️ 

• Place your attention on your world at work or at home. Allow something that is “missing” to come to your attention. Is there an invitation in what is “missing?” An invitation is not an obligation, a should, a responsibility or a duty. This is an invitation you’re really free to accept or reject. The invitation is to “be” and “become” something or someone that responds to what is “missing.” Check and see if you have a “whole body YES” to the invitation. If not, move on. If YES… Ask yourself, “What is the universe inviting me to be or become in this moment related to what I perceive as missing?” Listen. If there is “doing” that is to come forth from your being and becoming then go and do.

🌰 IN A NUTSHELL🌰

• Commitment 15 combines the mastery of several of the other commitments. As we become proficient in shifting from To Me to By Me consciousness, we move through our work and personal worlds seeing that everything is whole, perfect, and complete just as it is. There is no lack or problem. We can express our creativity in response to invitations from life to move what is in our world to even greater beauty, alignment, productivity, efficiency, and grace. For conscious leaders, this creative contribution flows effortlessly from the center of who they are. They are the resolution to what is missing in their world.

CHAPTER SUMMARY 

• Being the Resolution -Being the resolution means that conscious leaders recognize what is missing in the world and view that as an invitation to become what is needed. When unconscious leaders grow weary of an intense version of the victim-villain-hero triangle, they often shift to an “indifferent” experience of drama, characterized by apathy and resentment. Many unconscious leaders, who have spent their entire careers problem-solving, delivering results, and pulling people along, often feel drained and want to disconnect.
• Team members who don’t feel heard by unconscious leaders stop caring about making changes and give up on creating solutions that could benefit the organization. Conscious leaders see what is missing, not from a perspective of lack, but of opportunity. They then follow a calling to respond to the perceived need. Being the resolution takes place only from a conscious leader’s whole body YES! Being the resolution incorporates the mastery of living from several of the other commitments and, once mastered, allows conscious leaders to move the world to greater beauty, alignment, productivity, efficiency, and grace.

THE CHANGE FORMULA

(V X D) + FS > R = C C = CHANGE 

• “C” stands for “change,” whether in an individual, a team, or an organization. It can be personal or professional: changing our exercise routine or our marriage, or changing an accounting system or a product-launch process.
• R = RESISTANCE Change is about letting go of the known and stepping into the unknown. It is about releasing control and appears to always involve the possibility of “failure.” This resistance to change is rooted in fear. Thinking about radical change triggers fear in almost all the leaders we’ve worked with—lots of fear. They are afraid of what they would risk if they changed. Ask yourself this question: “If I changed, what am I afraid would happen?” Or put another way, “What’s at risk if I stop being the way I’ve been or doing what I’ve been doing?”
• (V X D) + FS V = VISION “V” stands for “vision,” a picture of a preferable future. If people have a large, inspirational vision, it alone can motivate them to face their fears and step into and through their resistance. For vision to overcome our resistance to change, it must be real, heartfelt, deeply desired, and inspirational. How big is your vision? How motivational is your dream? What is it that you want, really want, that you can’t attain by playing the same game? What is your picture of a future that is so compelling it motivates you to overcome your resistance to change, to let go of control and step into the unknown? The answer to these questions is fundamental to whether you will be a To Me or By Me leader. By Me leaders have compelling personal visions and By Me organizations have motivational, transpersonal visions that embolden others to take all the risks associated with change.
• D = DISSATISFACTION But having vision, even a deeply inspirational vision, is rarely enough. Most people do not change because of vision alone—they change because of pain. The “D” in the formula stands for “dissatisfaction,” specifically dissatisfaction with the status quo. Most people and organizations overcome the resistance to change by becoming extremely dissatisfied with the status quo. How are you denying your pain and dissatisfaction? What conversations are you avoiding with the important people in your life, and with yourself, so you can maintain the status quo? Someone once told us that life first whispers to us in a still, small voice. If we don’t listen, it speaks to us firmly, and if we avoid those words, it screams at us, often in the form of a crisis or suffering. Life tickles us first, pushes us second, and then hits us over the head with a brick.
• V and D (vision and dissatisfaction) are multiplied: V x D. Think of it as needing a hundred points of motivation to overcome R (resistance to change). This can come from a hundred points of vision and one point of pain or ten points of each. Again, for most people, the dissatisfaction/ pain number usually far exceeds the vision number.
• FS = FIRST STEPS -Many leaders have the energy to change but no way to actualize it, so they remain stuck in place. They need FS, “first steps,” the drivetrain that can put the energy of motivation into action (V x D + FS > R = C). V x D gives us the “why,” while FS gives us the “what and how.” FS was used as a multiplier, just like V and D: V x D x FS > R = C. In our experience, this is not the case. First steps are not equal to vision and pain in their efficacy for overcoming resistance. They are necessary but not equal. Our experience is that where there is real willingness the how makes itself known. People avoid facing their lack of willingness by asking “how” questions.

WILLINGNESS TO CHANGE 

• It all comes down to willingness. Willingness to change is very different from knowing how to change, or further still, truly wanting to change. Many, many people want to change, but most are not willing to change.
• What in your life do you want to change? Make a list. Now ask yourself, “Am I willing to change? Am I really willing to change?” At this point, you might find yourself saying, “I’m willing but I don’t know how.” And we’d say that this is just an excuse to avoid your resistance.
• “Trying is wanting credit for something you never intend to do.”

ARE YOU WILLING TO CHANGE? 

• Think of an issue in your life, one that you believe you want to change. Now read these questions slowly. Let them sink in and see if you can answer each of them with a whole body YES. 
  • Are you willing to take 100% responsibility (not more or less than 100% responsibility) for this issue? Are you willing to stop blaming and criticizing others and yourself? Are you willing to let go of being right? Are you willing to get more interested in learning than defending your ego? Are you willing to feel all of your authentic feelings (fear, anger, sadness, joy, sexual feelings)? Are you willing to reveal to others all of your withholds? Are you willing to speak unarguably? Are you willing to listen consciously to others? Are you willing to stop all gossip about this issue? Are you willing to clear up all past issues with all relevant parties using the clearing model?

• Any answer other than a whole body YES reveals a lack of willingness. This is not a bad thing. The ego will want to make it bad, but it is not. It is just the suchness (as the Buddhists say) of where you are and it’s perfect. Even so, if we don’t face and own our resistance, we can stay stuck forever. We call it being in limbo: thinking we are willing yet not facing that we are really more committed to staying where we are than to shifting. We tell leaders all the time that the first step to willingness is owning—fully owning—our unwillingness.
• When we own our resistance, we see that we simply need more motivation: more vision or dissatisfaction. This is not a problem. It is just what is so in this moment.
• Keep in mind that willingness and fear usually go hand in hand. If you don’t have some anxiety, you’re probably not really willing to change, and you don’t understand what it means to let go of control and step into the unknown. By Me, transformational leaders are always stepping into and through fear of the unknown. Get used to it.

Conscious Leadership Group’s website is an incredible resource for additional information