The Soul of Leadership

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This edition published 2011 by Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group company
First published in the United States of America by Harmony Books in 2010

Deepak Chopra has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: L-E-A-D-E-R-S

ONE: L = LOOK AND LISTEN

TWO: E = EMOTIONAL BONDING

THREE: A = AWARENESS

FOUR: D = DOING

FIVE: E = EMPOWERMENT

SIX: R = RESPONSIBILITY

SEVEN: S = SYNCHRONICITY

PART TWO: TWO WHO LEAD FROM THE SOUL

EIGHT: JEREMY MOON, Founder and CEO of Icebreaker

NINE: RENATA M. BLACK, Founding Director of Seven Bar Foundation

PART THREE: TEN PRINCIPLES OF LEADERSHIP

TEN: A TEMPLATE FOR AWARENESS

Acknowledgments

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Becoming a leader is the most crucial choice one can make—it is the decision to step out of darkness into the light.

We have never needed enlightened leadership as much as we do now. Surely this refrain has been heard throughout the ages, but in the second decade of the twenty-first century, humankind poses a terrible threat to its own existence as we blindly tear great holes in the life-sustaining fabric of our environment. We can no longer turn to government, however well meaning it may be, or to anyone beyond ourselves, to provide answers for the great problems of our time. And even in turning to ourselves we must go beyond the constant clamor of ego, beyond the tools of logic and reason, to the still, calm place within us: the realm of the soul.

Here we can begin by asking the basic questions that give our lives meaning. Who am I? Why am I here? How can I tune in the soft-spoken urgings of the soul to fulfill my life’s purpose and to make a difference? In answering these questions to the best of our ability, each of us must step into the role of leader, taking responsibility first for directing our own lives, and then for interacting with other people—at work, at home, and everywhere in between. As we continue to draw on the soul for direction, we will eventually find that other people are turning to us for guidance, drawn to us by our ability to treat them with dignity and to skillfully respond to their needs from a higher place.

My aim in this book is to give everyone the skills and insights to be a leader—not just any leader but an inspired one. At the deepest level, a leader is the symbolic soul of the group. His role is to fulfill the needs of others and, when each need is met, to lead the group on to fulfill ever higher needs, lifting the group’s potential at every step. The inspired leader’s power base comes not from other people but from her very being, and the path she walks is guided by her own soul. Its hallmarks are creativity, intelligence, organizing power, and love.

Everyone who has a soul, which by my definition includes us all, has the potential to be an inspired leader. When you change on the inside so that you draw on the unlimited wisdom of the soul, you become a leader without needing to seek followers. As you put your vision for a better world into tangible form, they will find you. It is my fondest hope that after reading these pages, countless readers like you will discover their greatness and act upon it. Of these leaders, untold numbers may become public figures, and even more will perform a leadership role at work, at home, and in the community. Wherever you do it, there is no doubt in my mind that leading from the soul is what the time demands.

As you’ll see in the pages that lie ahead, the leadership I’m talking about in this book is not leadership as we’ve traditionally defined it. According to that old definition, leadership belongs to the few. In a group the person selected to lead may stand out as the most popular, confident, or ruthless. By these measures, not everyone can lead. When the strong and ruthless rise on the world stage, we find ourselves led by kings and generals, autocrats and dictators, power-hungry premiers and presidents. History traffics in myth making, which is based on personal charisma and uses spin to evoke an aura of destiny. But these measures of leadership are flawed. None of the qualities mentioned here indicate that a leader will actually improve the lives of those who follow him. Chances are equally good that such leadership will bring misery, conflict, and oppression. The old definitions of leadership exalt power, and the use of power has always been directly linked to its abuse.

Because leaders have turned out to be so completely unpredictable, and because so few great leaders have emerged from the ranks of those who have seized power, we have been led to believe that perhaps there is some invisible hand at work, selecting which leader will be great. But this is only more spin. The criteria for inspired leadership don’t need to be shadowed in mystery. In fact, they are simple: great leaders are those who can respond to their own needs and the needs of others from the higher levels of spirit with vision, creativity, and a sense of unity with the people they lead.

You can be such a leader. The path is open to you. The only requirement is that you listen to your own inner guide. Once you step onto this path, you are on your way to becoming what I call a successful visionary. A successful visionary makes his or her vision manifest in the world. Invisible seeds planted in the silence of your deepest awareness become tangible, visible realities. As they unfold, you will manage their growth with passion and energy. Your purpose will be apparent to all. The results you achieve will benefit everyone—you, the group you lead, and the world at large. On a planet challenged on every side with ecological deterioration, everything you achieve must be sustainable, which means supported by awareness. This is an essential part of any vision of the future that draws on the soul.

When I talk about the soul, I’m not referring to the soul as defined by any particular religion, although all the great spiritual traditions acknowledge its existence. I believe the soul is an expression of an underlying universal field of consciousness. Your particular awareness, or soul, is like a wave in this boundless sea, unique for a brief moment in time before it falls back into the larger entity from which it emerged. At the soul level you are seamlessly connected with everything in the universe, to the silent domain from which all matter and energy spring.

In this context it is not surprising that the soul takes on qualities that are essential to creation: creativity, intelligence, organizing power, and love. If you find this notion difficult to accept, perhaps you’ll agree with me that the old way of living on this planet is reaching its limits, and that the time has come to try something new. If you find that, by turning to the soul for leadership in the ways I describe in this book, you are able to increase the creativity, intelligence, organizing power, and love in your life and in your larger world, you can choose to credit your soul or not. It won’t care, and those who share the world with you will be grateful, regardless of what terms you use to describe your new way of being.

A MAP FOR THE ROAD AHEAD

Leadership is an evolving journey. The twists and turns lying before you are unpredictable. But you can be provided with a map. The text that follows divides the map into three parts.

First, I have laid out the core of what it means to lead from the soul in a convenient acronym, L-E-A-D-E-R-S, with each letter outlining a key aspect of defining your vision and then bringing it to fruition.

L = Look and listen. Do this with your senses, as an unbiased observer who has not judged anything in advance. Do it with your heart, obeying your truest feelings. Finally, do it with your soul, responding to the vision and deep purpose it provides.

E = Emotional bonding. Leading from the soul means going beyond the melodrama of living in crisis mode. It requires recognizing and clearing away toxic emotions so you can clearly understand your own specific needs, and those of others.

A = Awareness. This means being aware of the questions that underlie every challenge: Who am I? What do I want? What does the situation demand? A leader must continually ask these questions of herself, and inspire her team to ask them for themselves.

D = Doing. A leader must be action-oriented. In whatever he does, he must serve as a role model, holding himself responsible for the promises he has made. This requires persistence and tenacity, but also the ability to view any situation with flexibility and humor.

E = Empowerment. The soul’s power comes from self-awareness that is responsive to feedback but independent of the good or bad opinion of others. Empowerment isn’t selfish. It raises the status of leader and team together.

R = Responsibility. Responsible leadership includes choosing considered risks rather than reckless ones, walking the talk, having integrity, and living up to your inner values. Seen from the level of the soul, a leader’s greatest responsibility is to lead the group on the path of higher consciousness.

S = Synchronicity. This is a mysterious element from the underlying universal field of consciousness that all great leaders harness. Synchronicity is the ability to create good luck and find invisible support that carries one beyond predicted outcomes to a higher plane. In spiritual terms, synchronicity is the ultimate ability to connect any need with an answer from the soul.

The map of leadership comes into more specific focus in the second part of this book, through the stories of ordinary people who have become successful visionaries. Here we’ll follow two such people—Jeremy Moon and Renata M. Black—who began with no material means and went on to lead successful multimillion-dollar enterprises that make a difference in the world. In both cases the vision that started their journey was fueled with passion and purpose. That’s not unusual in success stories, but here we also find deeper values, drawn from the realm of soul.

As we’ll see, Jeremy’s and Renata’s paths followed the steps described in the acronym L-E-A-D-E-R-S; everything from looking and listening to synchronicity played a crucial role. Besides being inspiring, this part of the book will give you more confidence that leading from the soul is a viable choice in the rough-and-tumble of the real world. In fact, by choosing visionary leadership as a path to success, the real world became a miraculous place for both leaders, a place where material success took a backseat to personal discovery.

The third part of the book is a brief summary of what you will have learned. I hope it is couched in such a way as to make it easier for you to recognize the landmarks of soulful leadership as they begin to make themselves known in your life.

WHY THE SOUL?

How do leaders emerge from ordinary lives? Every group naturally gives rise to leaders who guide it to a shared goal. Yet some leaders fail, while others succeed. Some are destroyed by a flawed strategy, or by the overwhelming stress of their role. And when crisis arises, leaving us crying out for great leaders, there is a constant threat that such a figure will not appear, leaving the infamous “leadership vacuum” that has become such a chronic problem in our modern society.

In the deeper reality of the soul, a family in disarray, a company without vision, or a nation struggling to adopt a new level of freedom needs to respond to hidden spiritual drives and needs. Once this is understood, countless leaders can rise to the highest levels of greatness. Inspired leadership is established in being, where there is no need to adopt a strategy for climbing to the top. As you unfold your potential for greatness, you unfold the same potential in others. They will naturally turn to you for guidance and leadership in the way forward, and one day they themselves will be able to provide enlightened leadership to others.

Our souls offer the highest inspiration at every moment. With our minds we may see chaos, but the soul knows there is an underlying order, and seeks to find it. Until we turn to the quiet wisdom of the soul, we will continue to fall back on old habits and stale answers in response to new challenges. We will stay mired in pointless struggles and confusion. But when we do understand the ways of the soul, and draw on them, someone will emerge to cut through the fog. Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Nelson Mandela undertook their journeys based on the soul’s awareness (however much we clothe them in mythic status). They used this awareness to tap into a source of wisdom that remains constant throughout history and is available to us all.

In any group the members are acting out two basic themes in life—need and response. If we could see ourselves clearly, each of us would realize every day that:

• There is something we need, ranging from the basic need for food and shelter to the higher needs of self-worth, love, and spiritual meaning;

• There is some response that will fill that need, ranging from struggle and competition to creative discovery and divine inspiration.

These two themes dominate our inner and outer lives. They override all other forces, and like the workings of the soul they are not random. Needs and responses can be organized in a natural order. Lower needs and responses are followed by higher ones. (As the German writer Bertolt Brecht declared, “Don’t talk to me of my soul until you’ve filled my stomach.”) This rising scale is known as the hierarchy of needs. As a leader, if you are aware of the hierarchy of needs and their responses, you will be able to continue to respond effectively as the group’s needs move up the scale from basic to increasingly spiritual. This is the most powerful thing a leader can do.

For example, extreme social movements (fascism, religious fundamentalism, ethnic nationalism, etc.) draw upon fear, the most primitive response of a group, which matches its most primitive need: survival. External pressures such as economic depression, social migration, and competitive forces also trigger this need. Vaclav Havel was a Czech poet who became president of the new republic after the fall of Communism because he fulfilled his countrymen’s basic need for safety, and then went on to address their higher needs for unity and self-worth, which had been suppressed for decades. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., offered an oppressed minority the opportunity to go beyond the need to survive in order to meet their higher needs for a sense of dignity and spiritual purpose. He offered transformation. Buddha and Christ offered their followers an opportunity to meet their needs at the highest level, the universal desire for unity.

Through the example of these great leaders, we see that leading from the soul is neither mysterious nor abstract. Inspired leadership matches real responses to real needs. This is a skill that can be learned. You can do it, and so can I. We can meet needs at every level of a group’s outer and inner life, applying the same awareness to a family, or a community, as to a corporation. In the deeper reality of the soul, leaders and followers co-create each other. They form an invisible spiritual bond. Leaders exist to embody the values that followers hunger for, while followers fuel the leader’s vision from inside themselves.

THE BASIC PRINCIPLES

The journey that a leader takes is one of expanding awareness. The soul itself has complete awareness; it perceives every aspect of a situation. Its perspective is available to you, but ordinarily you don’t access it because of your own inner obstacles. We see what we want to see—or what our biases and limitations encourage us to see. On your journey to inspired leadership you will learn how to remove these obstacles. When you do, what was once difficult will become effortless, as your soul clears the way for you. Your vision becomes clearer, and so does the path ahead, until it seems that the universe itself is conspiring to provide the creativity, intelligence, organizing power, and love that lie at the heart of visionary leadership.

PART ONE

L-E-A-D-E-R-S

One

L = LOOK AND LISTEN

Great leaders have a vision, and the ability to manifest it. Defining your own vision begins with looking and listening. You look and listen to the situation around you, but you also look and listen inside. Four steps are involved:

Impartial observation—Look and listen with your senses.

Analysis—Look and listen with your mind.

Feeling—Look and listen with your heart.

Incubation—Look and listen with your soul.

Once you have gone through these four steps, your personal vision can begin to express itself.

The best qualities you can have when starting your career are passion, core values, and dedication to a purpose. These are the elements from which a vision is forged. When you talk to the most inspiring leaders, the kind I call successful visionaries, it turns out that they all began with passion and a view of the big picture. They brought dedication to a deeply felt purpose. They held core values that they were not willing to surrender. In order to find greatness in yourself, these elements should be your primary focus.

Over the years, researchers have tried to find external reasons for the rise of successful leaders. Based on this research, it might seem that being born into wealth, going to the best schools, associating with other successful people, and scoring high on IQ tests would more or less guarantee that a person would turn into a leader. But as we all know, you can start with nothing and still emerge as a great leader, whereas you can start off in life with any number of advantages and achieve little or nothing of value. External advantages give anyone a head start, but they are not a guarantee of success.

So what if we reverse this approach and look instead at things that we all possess? Everyone knows how to look and listen—these are the basic tools of perception. But in a leader they grow into something more. A leader is responsible for having a vision, which must be clear enough to guide others and inspire them. Having articulated her vision, a leader must be able to manifest it. The greatest ideas are nothing more than daydreams until they are pushed to become reality. If you want to be a successful visionary, here is where the journey begins, with two crucial questions: What is my vision? How can I make it happen?

No vision is created in a vacuum. It emerges from the situation at hand. That situation can be a crisis or a routine project, a management problem or a financial emergency, anything that requires a leader to offer guidance, to assess the situation by looking and listening at the deepest level possible. This pertains to parents and sports coaches, mentors and counselors, managers and CEOs. Anytime you are called upon to guide, teach, command, motivate, inspire, or plan, opportunity is knocking.

Imagine three people seated on a couch in an outer office, all dressed in their best business attire. The office itself belongs to a venture capitalist who has agreed to give each of them a half hour to present a proposal for a start-up company. Success or failure depends upon this meeting. Who among the three will emerge as a leader, the one with the best chance of persuading the venture capitalist?

The first person feels so nervous his palms are sweaty. He tries to make casual conversation but realizes that he’s babbling, so he falls silent. He closes his eyes, reviewing one last time the speech he is going to make. He got very little sleep the night before, having spent hours going over every word of his presentation. He keeps thinking one thing: Now or never. It’s do or die.

The second person looks much calmer. He’s quite confident, in fact. He believes in his idea; he’s certain his new business will succeed once he finds a backer. Tall and clear-eyed, he’s used to being looked up to. In the back of his mind, he wonders if he can talk the venture capitalist into going out for a round of golf or a pickup basketball game. One-on-one has always been his best mode of persuasion.

The third person is scanning the room with open curiosity. She notices the rich Oriental rug and fresh flowers on the reception desk, but she’s more interested in the employees going in and out of the venture capitalist’s inner office. They’re dressed in jeans and skirts, not suits. They look focused and intent but not stressed. Checking inside herself, the third person feels much the same way. Whatever happens, she’s open to the outcome. Once she sets eyes on the venture capitalist, she’ll know what kind of personality she’s dealing with and respond accordingly.

Of these three people, the first one isn’t looking and listening to much beyond his own feelings, which are tense and closed off. The second man is more comfortable and is beginning to see from the heart. He assesses people and situations by how they feel. The third person goes a step further, however. She is entirely open to her surroundings, looking and listening intently. From the clues she picks up, she begins to build a scenario. She can envision herself in the scenario, and as it unfolds, she will adapt. If it turns out that she doesn’t fit in, she won’t make the mistake of taking the venture capitalist’s money; if the compatibility isn’t there, she’ll move on and find it elsewhere.

In this imaginary scenario we can see that the leader with the greatest potential in this moment is the one who can look and listen from the deepest level. Leadership requires a sound basis inside yourself. When you can arrive at the point where looking and listening comes from your entire being, you are setting the stage to be an inspiring leader.

FOUR LEVELS OF PERCEPTION

To be truly insightful, looking and listening must occur on four different levels. Seeing with our eyes is only the beginning. When we look and listen fully, we involve the body, the mind, the heart, and the soul.

Body: The stage of observing and information gathering

Mind: The stage of analysis and judgment

Heart: The stage of feeling

Soul: The stage of incubation

Once you are satisfied that you have gone through all these stages, your vision in any given moment will emerge as the true expression of who you are, and it will be founded on deep understanding.

Observation: Begin by being as open and impartial as possible. See as much as you can, and listen to whoever has something to say. In a sense you function like a video camera. Allow sights and sounds to come in freely and objectively.

Analysis: At the same time, your mind is also taking in the situation. It begins to weigh and analyze. Allow any and every idea to come to mind. Watch what arises, and notice wisps of answers, new interpretations, and novel combinations. Once again, steer clear of judgments and preconceptions. Be unbiased and clear-headed.

Feeling: At the level of your heart, notice what feels right. Feeling is subtler and truer than pure analysis. This is the level where sudden insight can strike you. You are bringing intuition into the picture, allowing for the “aha” moment that accompanies quantum leaps of creativity.

Incubation: Now let go and wait. When a vision is incubating, it goes into a deep, invisible place. A profound and infinite intelligence nurses your vision, adapting it to your needs and the needs of everyone around you. You have gained access to something greater than yourself, whether you call it the higher self, pure awareness, or your connection with God. If none of these terms work for you, you might want to think of the soul as “who I really am.”

A leader, therefore, emerges from within himself. He matches his inner perception with the outer situation. A twenty-four-year-old Indian arriving in South Africa in 1893 saw that he would be beaten if he refused to ride on the running board of a stagecoach to make room for white European passengers. If he insisted on riding in the first-class compartment of a train because he had a first-class ticket, he would be told that his place was in third class, no matter what his ticket said. Yet if that twenty-four-year-old happened to be Mohandas Gandhi, he could evaluate his situation using all four levels of perception. With his eyes he looked around and perceived discrimination. With his heart he felt that the situation was intolerable. With his mind he analyzed that a new tactic—civil disobedience— could change things. With his being he committed himself to a vision of freedom, whatever the price.

Current leadership training, almost anywhere you look for it, uses the word vision

Contents

INTRODUCTION

A MAP FOR THE ROAD AHEAD

WHY THE SOUL?

THE BASIC PRINCIPLES

PART ONE

L-E-A-D-E-R-S

One

L = LOOK AND LISTEN

FOUR LEVELS OF PERCEPTION