What Is Conscious Leadership?

In challenging times, we need a kind of leadership that can disrupt the status quo with as little pain and as much elegance as possible. I believe the times we live and work in demand that we focus our entire mind and body on ensuring our organizations—and the systems we are part of—remain match fit for the future.

Conscious leadership involves taking responsibility for our own inner processes as we lead an organization, team, business and, indeed—our own personal lives.

It is about mastering how to lead ourselves through our own transformations so we can then lead others, and our organizations and systems, to land their own transformations. The focus is always about increasing our palette of potential and fitting responses to difficult challenges so we don’t rely on one or two familiar strengths, within our comfort zone or box, to deal with anything.

For an outline of transformational leadership, see this blog post.

Conscious leadership is not about an end-result. You can’t achieve perfection; rather it’s about an on-going awareness of where your personal edge is and how you can evolve to serve more efficiently the needs of your organization, whether that’s your own business or a global corporation.

What happens when we don’t engage in conscious leadership?
If leaders don’t engage in their own growth, they offer solutions to problems and challenges that fail to meet the needs of a dynamic and rapidly changing world.

How can we engage?

At the core of conscious and personal leadership is mastery of transformation practices—they are called practices as we must practice them regularly so they are of use when we need them—that allow us to become more aware of, and then change, our state of mind and body in each moment.

We must become world-class experts at discerning, decoding, and then shifting our own unique bodymind reactions with all their history, baggage, shadow, and potential. Initially, we start by developing full bodymind awareness around when we are feeling an emotional “charge” that reveals that we are triggered by a perceived threat and so “in pattern.” We become increasingly sensitive to the tell-tale signs and signals within our bodymind that show when we are reacting to life (switched off) and when we are creatively responding to it with fitting ideas and actions (switched on).

Self-Mastery Pays

The research on self-mastery is extraordinary. People who have high levels of self-mastery live longer, are happier and wealthier, are better at relationships, are more popular and trusted, and are less likely to be addicted or arrested. In the workplace, those who are masters of themselves earn more than other employees, give better customer service, adjust better to new assignments, and earn 50% to 150% more income.

As we deepen this embodied wisdom over months, years, and decades, we develop more emotional intelligence, emotional range, and emotional granularity: we can name and understand our emotions as well as rapidly gain insight into why they might be arising in the moment. We no longer see them as ‘negative’ or ‘positive,’ but simply signs that there is valuable information to discover, name, explore, unearth, and defuse. This is conscious leadership.

Switch On’s Transformational Leadership services:

We design and deliver for organization’s neuroscience-based transformational leadership programs that develop transformational leaders who take charge of change to land outstanding immediate results and long-term transformation in complex and challenging times.

Personally, if want to master the foundations of transformational leadership, take a look at our Mindsets of Transformational Leadership Toolkit. Work independently or team up with a colleague to boost your leadership agility, creativity, and adaptability with our “plug-and-play” toolkit.

Access Our On-Demand Online Course: The Essentials Of Transformational Leadership Learn the fundamentals of leading successful, lasting, and necessary change—in our times of intense disruption, uncertainty, complexity, and turbulence. ACCESS NOW