Most personal growth endeavors are like trying to optimize a mask.

By reading the books, hiring the coaches, and optimizing your routine, you might unknowingly treat your personality like a piece of software that needs constant patching.

This approach of trying to build a better ‘you’ has a ceiling.

Leadership beyond a point is not about adding more skills to your ego. It is about subtracting the interference of the ego.

When you are in a ‘flow state’, your most productive and powerful moments occur when you are not thinking about yourself.

You are not worrying about how you look, if you are smart enough, or what the stakeholders think about you.

In your best moments, this well-optimized ‘personal self’ disappears.

For leaders with significant responsibility and power, the obstruction to better leadership is not a simple lack of skill.

The obstructions are the intensity of self-concern, the anxiety, the defensiveness, and the need for validation which all come from trying to protect an identity that doesn’t actually exist upon inquiry.

This doesn’t mean you have no concern for how you come across. As I mention in Awakened Executive Presence, you wouldn’t have any problem with maintaining the hygiene of the system you are in.

Awakened Leadership invites you to direct your attention away from blindly improving the character you think you are playing, and get in touch with who you are beneath that character.

And unsurprisingly, this also gives you a lot more fulfilment, and feels effortless, while making you a better leader.

Whenever you feel ready to stop polishing the mask and start leading from your source, you can step into Awakened Leadership.