Without trust there is no leadership. Seems so simple, doesn’t it? However, in reality, it is not. You only need to scan the headlines to quickly understand we do NOT trust the people in charge – and for good reason. The mismanagement of the pandemic was accompanied by an even more sinister plague: false and misleading information. These falsehoods have not only come from whacky fringe-dwellers but also from our senior official authorities – both global and local – perpetuated and promoted by the mainstream mockingbird media. Conscious Leaders do not tolerate liars. We choose to be honest, no matter how painful the truth is. Weak people are treacherous by definition – because they are weak. Conveniently, it’s the cowards who make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they use hatred as revenge for being intimidated. Only gutless cowards hide behind lies and deceit.
History tells us that only unpopular, deeply insecure governments fear the voice of their people: questioning, learning, discovering, discerning. The only thing politicians fear is the media. If they own the media, they have nothing to fear. Politicians have decided to witch hunt free speech on social media as an easy way to account for problems within their leadership. The solution to terrorism, civil unrest, digital monopolies, collapsing economies, medical tyranny, inconvenient historical facts, and political dissatisfaction is to introduce heavy-handed censorial legislation. These laws do not solve the moral problems of a nation or the stranglehold from Silicon Valley. Instead, the people find themselves stuck between two powerful censors, the Government and Big Tech. We are witnessing the culmination of a century of machinations by western social engineers. Predatory philanthropy uses euphemistic framing such as “Living Cities,” “Healthy Cities,” “Resilient Cities,” and “Build Back Better” to package the profoundly anti-human and anti-life initiatives coming out of Davos as aspirational goals for “smart” living.
The western world learned long ago that the best way to maintain peace within the melting pot of civilisation is to have the incontrovertible freedom to call each other out. The freedom to speak is the freedom to think. Without free speech, our civilisation is worth nothing. As the iron fist chokes the throat of the masses, we must remember: authoritarianism never ends well. The superficial premise of short-term security and social freedoms are a masquerade for the loss of real personal security and freedom to the state. If history teaches us anything, it is that you can never be compliant enough to earn your freedom. Hoodwinked, we have now entered a cyborg era in which sociopathic billionaires and defense contractors are fundamentally altering what it means to be human, tapping nano-technology and morally bankrupt scientists to do their dirty work. To the wealth hoarders, the masses exist as nodes in the Internet of Bodies, nodes that must be separated from the cosmic dance through the force of law, hydro-gel biosensors, and blockchain.
“It’s good to see the snakes revealing themselves. They weren’t actually hidden at all. People hide behind the masks, but eventually, you see them for who they truly are.”
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The Business of Honesty
We are looking at a future where the masses will forfeit their innate human freedoms in exchange for the behavioral currency needed to survive within the global panopticon. Oligarchs are using the UN Sustainable Development Goals to justify imprisoning the planet with sensor networks. Once greedy FinTech has nature and humanity firmly in its grasp, transnational global capital can channel its concentrated wealth through our bodies, our social relationships, and our non-human kin. Conscious Leaders everywhere stand ready to defend the children of Earth and the natural world from this abomination. We are here to grapple with the root cause of our schizoid society because it is carcinogenically corrupting our humanity. We are here to heal and elevate humanity’s relationship with wisdom. Under the light of truth, Conscious Leaders will ensure our societal endeavours are founded in the Pure Love of real Life.
“Fake it until you make it” has infused our business cultures and been etched into the minds of society. People think that if they don’t fake it, they won’t make it, which essentially relegates integrity to the basement. This belief basically tells you that it’s OK to lie and take shortcuts in order to succeed. It has created the delusion that somehow integrity is optional. As a leader, you are tasked with setting an example. If you allow yourself to fall into the ‘fake it’ trap, you are creating a culture of fakers. Fakery is a lie. You cannot build a sustainable business on fakery. Customers, stakeholders, and employees will figure it out, and your reputation and brand will begin to disintegrate before your eyes. What is done in the darkness always comes to light. The truth is that the truth always comes out, and when it does, you will be exposed. No one wants to do business with a liar. The biggest challenge we have is our own awareness and capacity to see with new eyes and hear with fresh ears. Today, our mainstream way of attending to life – our collective worldview – is so narrow and constricted that it warps what is seen and sensed. Perception is everything. If your awareness is corrupted, you are out of tune with the universe, caught up in an overactive ego-mind in an illusion of separation – carcinogenic consciousness .
We are destroying ourselves and the world around us. The root cause is not carbon but our own awareness. It’s all too easy to go into the ego-mind to formulate, fix and fiddle while applying the very level of consciousness to our well-intended solutions that created the problems in the first place. It requires real courage to move in a different direction, out of the status quo mindset and dominant worldview of Mechanistic Materialism. The very essence of Conscious Leadership is the choice to work the way nature works. Organisations are interconnected, purposeful, evolving systems of messy, unpredictable human relationships that thrive amid a rich and diverse web of relationships – all intimately interrelated with wider society and the natural world. Organisations display non-linear dynamics and self-organising behaviours because they are not machines, they are living systems. Living organisations are responsive to continuous change. They learn, evolve, and thrive amid unceasing transformation. The machine mindset relies on top-down perspectives far removed from the customer and expensive cumbersome change-management programs that all too often fall woefully short in future-proofing the business.
“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
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What About the Bottom Line?
The old machine logic has an inherent control-manage dynamic that basically subverts and manipulates. Truth is the first casualty in a culture of people trying to cover their asses. Living-systems logic has a sense-respond dynamic that empowers and enables. This shift in relational dynamic from control-manage to sense-respond requires a personal shift in consciousness, from separateness to relational interconnectedness where honesty and trust are the lifeblood of the living system. Most leaders have become well-heeled in the control-manage dynamic but that is no excuse to stay there. When you know better, you do better. You can unlearn this dynamic through a developmental journey of learning in practice. As you unlearn, you create space for a deeper knowing inside yourself to be heard. Start to trust your natural inner capacities (non-rational intuitions, hunches, gut-feeling, heart flutterings, etc. as well as rational reasoning). These natural capacities help you to sense how dynamics play out across the living-organisation beyond what is obvious through sight and sound.
This mindset shift (from trying to externally fix the machine by repairing or operating on it from above) to sensing how the living system can begin to internally heal, renew and evolve is significant. Similar to oriental medicine, every system is understood as being able to heal itself and realise its innate purposefulness when there is the right balance and flow of energy in the system. Blockages, stuckness and imbalance limit and undermine evolutionary potential. Rather than trying to suppress or solve system challenges, conscious Leaders acknowledge, attend-to and attune with the relational dynamics at play in the organisation. This process of acknowledging and attending to involves deep listening, circles of sharing, and open honest feedback across the system. Only then may we shift its vitality from the survivalist-stressed machine into an emergent-evolutionary living system. Welcome to the wisdom that is as fresh as it is ancient, full of dynamism yet born of stillness. Welcome to the Wisdom of Regeneration!
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny
and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
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The False Dichotomy of Manipulation Tactics
The kind of lying that is most destructive is withholding, or not disclosing all the information to someone we think would be affected by it. Psychological illness of the severest kind is the result of this kind of lying. Psychological healing is possible only with the freedom that comes from not hiding anymore. Keeping secrets and hiding from other people is a trap. Teenagers spend most of their time playing this kind of hide-and-seek game. The better you are at getting by with playing hide-and-seek during adolescence, the harder it is to grow up and be your true authentic self. “Important” secrets and all the plotting, mental gymnastics, and cogitation that go with them are all simply bullshit. The mind is a jail built out of this bullshit. Conscious Leaders are initiated on how the bullshit prison of the mind is built and how to escape it. Withholding from other people, and not telling them about what you feel or think, keeps you locked in the jail. The longer you remain in that jail, the faster you decline. You either escape, or you die on the inside. The way out is to get really good at telling the truth.
Understanding cutting-edge business concepts like the Long Tail and the Tipping Point and Purple Cow and the rest is worthless drivel if you don’t commit to the long game of self-awareness. Conscious Leaders are forged in the fire. They commit to the frightening work of flying blind, of taking a stand, and of making something new, complex, and vital – because they know if they don’t, nothing much happens. Cutting-edge strategies and tactics seem to promise a pain-free, quick way to achieve your goals. You can read about a new strategy, find a guaranteed, impersonal way to achieve, point the industrial machine at a new market niche and, presto! Results without pain. Ideaviruses promise to be unleashed, points will be tipped, and tails will get longer. Here’s the thing: when it comes to success, there are no shortcuts to any place worth going. You can’t cheat the grind; it knows how much you have invested. It won’t give you anything you haven’t worked for. Ideas are not enough without commitment. They’re not enough because strategy is empty without change, hollow without passion, and meaningless without people willing to confront the void.
“We can’t complain about results we aren’t getting from things we’re not doing.”
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Straight Talk; No Chaser
We are so inundated with lies, half-truths, and twisted beliefs that many people don’t know what is real or true anymore. Some people may even give up and believe that nothing is real in a nihilistic sort of way. This giving up can occasionally lead someone to the real truth, but more often, it creates a constantly recycling state of depression, anxiety, or anger because deep down the person knows it’s not right, but they just can’t seem to put their finger on it. The goal is to wear you down, so you simply give in, which is why it is more important than ever before that you step up and be the leader we need to see. The new world paradigm demands complete authenticity and transparency from all of our leaders. Right now, you must start where you are with what you have and demonstrate the change you wish to see.
No one enjoys watching their house burn down. The revolution we now find ourselves in is here to disrupt the status quo, expose the cowards and liars and bring down the towers built on false foundations. Then, we will enable the impossible. New organisations and new ideas are poised to thrive. Someone is going to be leading us; someone is going to be exploring the edges; someone is going to be creating things of incalculable value… will it be you? What happened yesterday is over. Tomorrow’s door is wide open and this is your chance-in-a-lifetime to make a massive impact. We are the system; the system is not outside of us. It is our own broken relationships that need to be cured. Our relationship with ourselves, with life, with earth, with others, with our work, with the world. This is how systemic change happens. We are the system and we are the solution. Significant conversations and space for real learning cure our relationships which is why we must protect freedom of speech at all costs. In moving from disrespect to respect, from “I know better” to curiosity, from judging to understanding one another, from machine to living system, from fear to love. This is what we must now create with one another. This is the work of anyone who truly wants to build the New Earth.
“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
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The Only Certainty is Uncertainty.
It is becoming more obvious that we need to transform our ways of living and operating. It’s time for us to elevate above the dominant worldview and this requires YOU and all of your strength. The biggest inhibitor to our transformation is our dis-connection with life/nature. In nature everything transforms through cycles. Everything is continually transforming as one stage comes to an end another begins. Spirals of death and rebirth, of withdrawing and bursting forth – this is the way of life. Everything naturally transforms through the cycles of life – so too with human nature. We only prevent our natural, emergent transformation by dis-connecting ourselves from nature’s rhythms and wisdom. This artificial sense of separation is deeply sown within the Western scientific-philosophy of abstract rationalist reductionism.
So often we strategise, envision, innovate and explore new ways of operating in the hope that they help us transform towards a more sustainable future for society, the economy and the environment. These good intentions often originate from a disconnected perception of life, where humanity is seen as separate from nature, where object is seen as separate from subject, and where self is viewed as separate and in competition with other. In this way, we innovate our way to incomplete solutions based on incomplete understandings of life and its inherently dynamic and inclusive way.
“Success comes from the inside out. In order to change what is on the outside, you must first change what is on the inside.”
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Whole System Transformation
Transformation requires a reconnection; a reconnection with our true human nature and nature. It is that simple and yet we often grasp at ‘activity’ before undertaking this re-connection (at ‘doing’ before ‘being’). The more we see through the illusion of the world as a collection of things and see it as the inter-play of relationships and interconnecting networks it is, the easier it becomes for us to loosen the grip of our reductionist sense of scarcity and separated-ness and re-connect with the beautiful enchantment of the natural world around us and our true nature within us. The paradigm shift now upon us has to be radical – philosophically, scientifically and culturally. The system is broken. Therefore, it needs to go to the root of our corrupt engagement with reality: space-matter, content-context, human-nature, self-Self.
The first step for any authentic leader is personal integrity which comes from centering and attuning with your true Self: Self Mastery. If we are able to recognise and then tame our ego-consciousness then we can begin to untangle our true Self from our ego. Left unchecked, our ego-consciousness (hand-in-hand with our left-brain hemisphere’s rationalistic, grasping, defining, extracting and separating way of perceiving) attempts to usurp control of our way of engaging with reality… and we end up like the very tyrants attempting to control every aspect of our lives. Each moment offers us the chance to free ourselves from this self-imprisonment so we can, indeed, rise from the ashes of a world that was like a phoenix – and fly free! Together we rise.
“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.”
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