There are endless blogs and books about how to be a better leader and manager. So one of my favorite questions to ask is, given that we have all this information on how to be a better leader/manager, why is it that it doesn’t seem to work very often, or least not very consistently? Why are “results not typical”? Why is it an endless uphill struggle? Why does utopia still elude us?
Well I have a theory to share. It’s not about knowledge or hard work. It’s about healing of the spirit.
Your true inner self is going to manifest itself in every motion you make, and if your spirit is damaged, no amount of methodology, physical work, or conscious thought is going to undo its destructive and limiting effects.
Let’s illustrate this concept with a slightly absurd idea:
Let’s suppose you have a group of people who have smallpox. Obviously, they are all going about their day with a certain amount of lethargy and time spent dealing with their symptoms. What to do? Well, ideally, they would stop doing certain things, like having temperatures of 102 and lying in bed all day. So you could bring in a motivational speaker (who doesn’t have smallpox) who could give a rousing speech, and then share a litany of “tips and tricks for looking like someone who does not have smallpox.”
Okay, that might have some beneficial short term effect, but wouldn’t it be far better to address the root cause? If you cure the smallpox, they will immediately– and effortlessly – start to act like people who don’t have smallpox.
Again, this is an admittedly somewhat absurd illustration, but then, it isn’t when we see the same thing in the emotional realm. Very few people are blank slates with no old injuries, and many people are emotionally unprepared for the trauma and stress of becoming a leader for the first time. If they are not being good leaders, a rational argument may not be the best fix. You have to address and heal the underlying cause, and when you do that, their natural good energy takes over and everything becomes effortless.
I once had a dance instructor who often used the phrase “the essence of effortlessness.” When the emotional negatives that can cloud our hearts are dealt with, your core emotional energy is becomes fully engaged, everything else just flows out from there. Sure, there is technique to learn, but that is always a secondary element; without the music and joyful energy flowing from within, the technique is useless, it is just going thru the motions with no life in it. It fools no one except those who want to be fooled by it.
So, speaking as a “holistic management coach,” let’s consider at least one “tip and trick” to making yourself into a purified management spirit.
Let’s start with an easy one: “listening skills.” This is a skill? Okay, maybe. But if you have issues of narcissism, I could quote “listening skills” technique until I am blue in the face, and it will fix nothing. If you have unresolved issues and memories of not being listened to yourself, you will always be fighting and competing for attention. You will feel– and everyone around you will know – that you are in need of being heard, and you will always feel (let’s emphasize the word “feel”) that someone else having the microphone is a re-enactment of some unresolved past insult or injury.
So if these past injuries have gone their standard route of leading you into a “shame state,” in this case, of always feeling (again, feeling, not thinking) that if you don’t “win” the argument you will be a loser, you will offer resistance to normal collective energy flow. If you always feel that you are being personally diminished if you take the role of listener; you always will have a need to fight for a perceived state of higher state of authority and status. Thus, your true effortless “listening skills” will never manifest.
Shame-state injuries need to be healed, not “fixed.” If you try to just override them with sheer will power and following a set of rules, it will always be a tiring internal struggle for you. And everyone will know you aren’t really listening, you’re just pretending to do it.
That is just one example of how internal spiritual injuries have to be addressed if one is to rise to higher levels of consciousness, and “walk with a higher order of being,” as Thoreau put it. And the beauty of it is, if you do it this way, not only are you getting more stuff done, but it takes far less time and effort to do it. Even better, and everyone likes you, and you are just calmer and happier as a human being.
Many management books are a little like beginner musical method books. They will get you up and running fairly quickly at the beginning, but they will never lead you to mastery. They offer some superficial skills, but their systems and research studies are in constant need of attending, tweaking, and checking with a teacher go see if you are “doing it right.” They take endless hours to maintain, and their complexity prevents their working beyond a rudimentary level. They dance around the core energy issue.
Every artist speaks of that moment of “transcendence,” where you “just do it without thinking.” There is in fact a process for getting to that state, but it takes full commitment to cleaning out your subconscious, not just being obedient to outside methodologies. And that is really the “hard part,” because it involves dealing with our fragile vulnerable selves. Granted, this requires trust, and if you assume that trust-based systems cannot work, we are lost from the get-go.
Technique is handy, but healed energy is the true source of change. If you heal the energy, the tips and tricks become unnecessary, as everything just flows naturally.
© Justin Locke
