Six Principles for 21st Century Leaders:

In my 15+ years of work with organizations and senior executives, I found the following six principles, derived from spiritual literature to be quite helpful in coaching executives to become successful in these times of great change. I discussed these principles about six years ago in a talk and this article came out of it. A brief commentary about each principle is described in this article, although the best way to learn more about them is to practice them regularly.

By Prasad Kaipa, Ph. D.

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The six principles are:

1) Clarity of intention
2) Awareness of self and what is going on around you
3) Empathy for one another
4) Appreciation of others and for what you received
5) Stretching beyond your own limits
6) Letting go of what does not work and old mindsets.

These six principles are interdependent and describe a cycle. When you follow this cycle, you develop new competencies and achieve higher levels of success. The essence of these principles is self-knowledge. The more you practice the six principles, the better you begin to know yourself.

1) Clarity of Intention: Many of us have an idea of what we are after and the direction we are heading when we take on a project. Most often though, we do not have clarity about our goal let alone knowledge of how to measure success if we achieve it.

Intention is critical to achieving success. When the intention is not clear, attention shifts from one thing (one desire) to another and leads to confusion. In such circumstances, we often end up compromising our own efforts and receive less than what we desired or even deserved. Without a crystal clear intention, we rarely experience a sense of accomplishment even if our more general intentions are fulfilled.

How do we increase the clarity of our own intention? Ask yourself the following questions:

What is it that I really want? What evokes passion and joy in my heart?
How passionately do I feel about it?

What am I willing to give up (sacrifice) to achieve the desired goal?
If I have more than one intention, which one should I first attempt?

These questions bring to the surface some of our assumptions and passion and help us to prioritize our intentions (and hence our actions). Finally, exploring your intention creates a pathway to discovering your unique purpose in life!

Will clear intention guarantee success? No, but it is a good beginning. When we are aligned with what we want at head, heart and gut level, chances are our actions are also aligned and, we have more likelihood of getting the result we are seeking. Practicing this step is not as easy as it may appear. Constant practice helps us to stay focused on what we want until we get it. That naturally leads to the second step: becoming aware of what is happening around us.

2) Awareness: The key message is stay awake and be aware while you are focusing on accomplishing something and not stop not until you reach your goal. Awareness is of two kinds: self-awareness and the awareness of the world around you. They go together and are like front of the hand and the back of the hand. We are conditioned by our families and our society and are continually being shaped by the environment in which we live. When we develop awareness of who we are, we also begin to develop awareness of what we are not. When we can develop a deeper awareness of where the other person is coming from and remember that we also are a player in creating the situation, we may be able to relax and become interested in the other and his/her point of view.

How does awareness help us become successful? Let us say that my dream is to start a software company and take it public in three years. While my success criterion is pretty sharply defined, there is a lot of work that I need to do such as understand the customer, the competitors, the market and world realities, and my personal realities. I need to assess my own key personal competencies and find others whose competencies compliment my own to create a strong management team. Of course, creating a successful product and a strategy to market it successfully requires hard work, and there is no substitute for that. If all goes well, my dream may come true. In that respect, my self awareness (of my competencies and weaknesses) and my awareness of the world around me (the possibilities in the market place and offerings from competition) help me to make what is possible to be real.

Awareness is dynamic. It is about continually being vigilant against our complacency. We need to continually and dynamically reassess where we are with respect to where we want to go and where we were yesterday.

What blocks our awareness? There are five mental processes that act as enemies to awareness. They are: our own expectations and standards, false/incorrect knowledge, our wild imagination (and attachment to it), sleepwalking through our life, and memory of past successes and failures. Let me elaborate.

Each of us have our own set of standards and internal expectations. We pick them up from people whom we respect and like the most. Whatever are their standards, we attempt to live up to them even though our competencies and passion might not allow us to reach those expectations and meet those standards we unconsciously picked up. Only by becoming aware of those standards we could do something about them.

We some times assume things about ourselves and others that are plainly not true. Because we did not face any challenges when we first assumed them, we some times take it for granted that they must be true. Especially if we get some proof that we might be right in one extreme condition, we may think that our assumptions are universally true. This is the source of our misidentified and
wrong knowledge. Once we have such knowledge, we rarely verify that in the real world and it becomes a block to awareness.

Imagination is certainly better than wrong knowledge except that imagination creates its own traps. There is time for dreaming and fantasizing and there is time for focusing and getting things done. Unfortunately, imagination, at times, can be so seductive that we are unwilling to accept that it is fantasy and reality does not match up with it and become a block to awareness.

While sleeping through life is an obvious block to awareness, faulty memory can also trap us in believing that our memory is right and the new data is wrong. I found that past successes are bigger blocks to awareness than past failures. Of course, failure is a stepping stone to success if we can learn from it but it is not commonly done. Summarizing, we have to pay special attention to what blocks our awareness. It is a challenge for many of us accept the fact that our own standards, our knowledge, and our imagination can take over our mind and make us either proud, sloppy or negligent. Laziness is the biggest enemy of success.

How do you develop and practice awareness? You can begin with becoming aware of what you eat and what you drink. Becoming mindful of what goes in your body can make you stop eating mindlessly and you can have choice about what you eat. You can also begin to pay attention to your own thoughts/feelings and body sensations. They give you early warning signals if you pay attention.

You can become aware of your own thought processes by using reflective or contemplative practices, writing a journal regularly and continual examination of your intentions. Most awareness is tacit, but you can learn to pay better attention to your body signals, pains and pleasures, and energy shifts. All these are key to developing a higher awareness and acute sensitivity to your own body and mind. Sometimes, you don't feel right. Other times, you feel tightness in the chest. Another time you may feel an unexplainable excitement. These are all signals you should pay attention to. They tell you to slow down your actions and reflect on the meaning of those body signals. The more aware you are of yourself, the sharper your senses become to observe your surroundings. To summarize, the more aware you are, the more you increase your capability (and capacity) as well as your intelligence.

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