The Conscious Lifestyle: A Leader Must Look and Listen.
When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.
Originally published by Linekdin
In the first post of this series on leadership, I divided the topic into seven headings using the acronym L-E-A-D-E-R-S. In this post we'll discuss L = Look and Listen. In the past, when leaders were more authoritarian, the people who were expected to listen – and obey – were the followers. Leaders had a monopoly on giving orders, laying down plans, and making all the crucial decisions.
To some extent this imbalance is built into the system. But leadership has shifted dramatically, because leaders and followers create each other. Followers have needs that leaders fulfill. "Look and listen" comes first in the list of skills needed by a successful leader, since only by looking and listening can he keep with an ever-shifting situation.
The greatest leaders are visionaries, but no vision is created in a vacuum. It emerges from the situation at hand. The situation can be a crisis or a routine project, a management problem or a financial emergency – anything that requires a leader to offer guidance. The leader is someone who can assess the situation by looking and listening at the deepest level possible.
When you are a conscious leader, 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
As a potential leader, you must develop your awareness on all four levels long before you win your right to lead. Imagine three people, partners in a start-up company, seated on a couch in an outer office. The office belongs to a venture capitalist who has agreed to give them half an hour to present a proposal for a start-up company. Success or failure depends upon this meeting; their whole future might ride on it. Who among the three will emerge as the leader of the group, 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 grows quiet. He closes his eyes, repeating one last time the speech he is going to make. He got very little sleep the night before, because he spent hours perfecting every word of his speech. 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 their idea; he’s certain their new business will succeed once they find 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.
Read the full A Leader Must Look and Listen article!
The greatest leaders, in my opinion, are nothing. Their followers are everything.
so true.
in fact.....