Leadership

by Angel S. Buster

Leadership is a continuous dialogue with the internal and external.  It is not enough to go about your daily tasks without spending time for reflection and deepening of your awareness. The leadership of today has become largely disembodied, which leads to a problem-solving approach marked by quick fixes and short-term solutions.  There is an illusion of time pressure that we have placed on ourselves due to the incessant drive for growth, competition, and profit. Most of our days are spent in a frenzy, a whirlwind of tasks which we move through without any real understanding of why we are having these experiences. We have all but stopped making a connection between our inner world and our outer world, which has led to a severing of our relationship with soul and nature.  It is specifically in these times when our increase in screen time, sitting behind our desks for hours without moving, or the endless, frenetic rushing from one meeting to the next, barely catching our breath, when we need to learn to slow down and reflect.  We have become unconscious of our inner world, and we fail to realize the magnitude of its influence on our daily behavior. 

Our bodies have become mere objects, tools, and machines that we use just to complete tasks, rather than as sacred extensions of consciousness.  We dismiss the body and anything which feels or seems irrational, discounting it and dismissing it as unreal. This discredits and undermines our potential and full capacity as human beings and leaves the heart out of how we conduct all matters related to society.  We are so busy trying to climb a hierarchy in the external business world that we forget that there is also a vertical dimension of our own self-development and individuation process – think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Most of us working in Western society in companies have our basic needs fulfilled but we fail to take the time for our self-actualizing needs, like love, belonging, purpose and meaning.

Through dialogue and reflection, we can learn to become more embodied, authentic and ensouled leaders.  It is these types of leaders who are desperately needed in today’s world of the hyperreal¹. In this highly uncertain and transformative time period, when we are being asked to transition from one level of consciousness to the next, we find ourselves in unknown territory as human beings (who are we? What do we really want? What is truly important?); and to answer these questions we need much more heart-centered ways of being and doing, selfless action and activity to help everyone deal with our collective existential crises.  This growing complexity and increase in humanitarian issues, which require authentic and ethical decision-making, which cannot be carried out in a disembodied way, are also asking us to come together to co-create a new vision for the future of humanity.

¹Hyperreality is a concept proposed by philosopher Jean Baudrillard which refers to “the process of the evolution of notions of reality, leading to a cultural state of confusion between signs and symbols invented to stand in for reality, and direct perceptions of consensus reality.”