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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