Articles
A library of reflections on leadership, consciousness, and the work of awakening to a more aligned way of being.
These essays are for leaders navigating the frontier between inner stillness and outer impact.
A library of reflections on leadership, consciousness, and the work of awakening to a more aligned way of being.
These essays are for leaders navigating the frontier between inner stillness and outer impact.
Everyone lives in an inside-out world. And everyone thinks they are living in an outside-in world.We all experience a world of circumstances, events where action moves things and effort produces results.Few look behind the curtain of their experience, to find that we only ever experience our thinking.In an outside-in world, we perceive circumstantial results, and action as the source of creating the results. This is similar to the naivety of a child thinking the faucet
Complexity is frequently met with an additive fallacy: providing a new piece of information for a leader to carry, such as a communication blueprint, a behavioral framework, or a prescriptive playbook.This additive model treats leadership as a series of performances to be memorized. Executives are taught how to look and speak. But when the stakes are highest, reliance on external tools is counter productive. The cognitive load required to maintain a persona inevitably causes friction,
To be an Awakened Leader is to face the unknown again and again. It is the endeavor to source from the unknown repeatedly - not just as a defensive reaction to circumstances, but as a pure creative act.It is an act of profound intellectual humility, the recognition that relying on what is previously known is a limitation, rather than a strength. It is the practice of holding the unknown without imposing familiar frameworks and insisting
The limitation one faces at the highest altitudes of human potential is rarely a lack of capability. It is the unconscious deployment of it. This is not about how one is using their capacities, but the unconsciousness of using them at all in the first place. The mind constantly authors a script about circumstances and our place in it. Often leaders come with stories about the boardroom, the friction across levels, and the stakes. Mistaking
Contextual observations often degrade into dogma when they are impressed upon people who do not have the lived context of the observations. The axiom “What got you here won’t get you there” is a prime casualty of this phenomenon.When a heuristic is applied indiscriminately, it descends into absurdity. But the intellect loves these repeatable phrases because they simulate strategy while bypassing the actual labor of direct perception.The mind hides behind heuristics to escape the isolation of
"I don't know what I want" is one of the most common defenses of a divided mind.The conflict inherent in it is rarely an absence of clarity. More often, it is a refusal to tolerate the presence of a desire.One might want opposing things. Or want something that they will not allow themselves to experience, or pursue what they believe they ought to want to satisfy an inherited template of security. To hide from this internal division,
I grew up in a tropical beach town on the east coast of India, watching coconut trees reaching up into the skies. Every time their branches moved, a pleasant breeze washed through the air. For a long time, I believed the trees produced the wind.It was a logical conclusion. We had hand-fans made of dried palm leaves that produced a current of air when waved. Therefore, it made sense that to cool the heavy, humid
Who we are is spirit. Who we are is also matter. In fact, these are two words to describe the same thing. But for most of us, these describe two different realities in which we live.Talking about these as two different aspects can help us in understanding them with precision. But talking about these as two different realms can be a pitfall.When I say who we are is spirit, most identify this as the realm of wisdom, of aliveness, of love,
Three decades of being in a corporate role is generally considered a long and substantial amount of experience to have.In a three decade working period, the amount of time spent being in a corporate role is about 25 percent of the amount of time spent being alive.This means three decades of being alive is structurally four times longer (and infinitely more substantial) than three decades of playing a corporate role.Still, three decades of being alive