WE BEGIN FROM HERE...

Leadership can be conceived of often, as a series of 'practices', by which we evolve, grow, flower and flourish.

One of the most powerful of these 'practices' is beginning with reality. It is launched fairly simply. We face 'what is' and are present not only to what we are facing in all its fullness -- if necessary it's seeming brutality OR even it's almost giddying potential -- but also to all our feelings about this reality. If we deny those feelings, we stifle the very passion that can be our fossil fuel as we seek to move on from and beyond this base-line reality.

This requirement above, of being present to all of our feelings about the way things are, is far from easy. In fact, to fully engage in this practice, we have to go still further. We have to not only be present to all our feelings, but we must do so without resistance. That means if we 'resist' our feelings, we miss the opportunity of exploring both their enabling power as well as their ability to fertilize our imagination and creativity.

So the aim is 'Presence without Resistance'. Otherwise our creativity and our emotional energy goes into self-deception and suppression, rather than innovation and creating pathways forward from where we find ourselves. The capacity to be present to everything that is happening without fighting the fact (if it is already in existence), liberates possibility. The struggle shifts from coming to terms with what has already happened and onto re-inventing the landscape of both reality and potentiality.

As a skier I've experienced what happens when I tense up and try to 'avoid' icy patches. Down I go! When I relax into those patches and let them carry me forward, I frequently find myself moving quite elegantly forward. A fellow skier once commented: 'Mistakes are like ice, we have to let them carry us forward.' Once we include mistakes in our definition of performance, we can admit them faster, not perpetuate them, and then at least 'stumble forward' if we must, rather than backward.

In fact, in our lust for acting as if we 'have it all together' we forget the uphill glory that attends all types of genuine leadership contribution. The great composer Stravinsky once turned down a bassoon player who was too good at rendering the opening to Stravinsky's Rites of Spring. That music is seeking to convey the 'first crack' in the icy grip of the Russian winter; it is constructed as a heart-stopping and perilous moment of expression. This player, while technically perfect, couldn't convey that exquisite yet aching moment. When hearing of a difficult moment in the violin concerto, Stravinsky said: 'I don't want the sound of someone playing this passage, I want the sound of someone trying to play it!"

Leadership is like that. Leadership is frequently the 'sound', and 'sight' and 'feeling' of someone trying to play it - seeking to live it, yearning to fulfill their potential for contribution. To have any chance to do so, we have to face what happens as we try, without resistance. Only then do we shift from 'defensiveness' into 'curiosity', forward into learning and onward to genuine growth.

Another compounding complication is that many times we forget that we treat our 'assumptions', our 'projections', and our 'conclusions' as reality. By doing so, we ignore the multi-faceted tapestry that 'reality' so often is. A persistent rain we face on a trip can sour our journey while being a God-send for the local crops. A forest fire may injure an ecosystem, only to later allow it to renew itself with vigor. A tempestuous argument with a spouse can create 'space' for fresh feelings that can both excite and empower our relationship. A flight delay can have us late for a meeting, while allowing us to find and spend time with a book that sparks a breakthrough for us and our team. It would be wise therefore, to avoid investing our rush to judgment with too much credence.

The student goes to his Rabbi. The Rabbi instructs him that when you get good news, thank God. When you get bad news, thank God. The student thanks the Rabbi. But then mulling over the instruction, he asks how he is to separate out 'good' news from 'bad' news. Smiling with delight, the Rabbi says, 'You are wise my son. So, just to be safe, always thank the Lord.'

We can state this in slightly less exalted language for today's leader, 'Look at everything with the eyes of possibility, grateful for the opportunity to do something with it.' But get to that moment FAST.

Roz Zander describes a therapeutic session with a family. The father continued to complain that his son had built a 'wall' around himself. The son said nothing. 'See?' the father said. And on he went to rant.

Facing reality means distinguishing between 'what is' and our own conclusions, beliefs and assumptions. This father had characterized his son's silence or diffidence as him having 'constructed a wall'. You can almost sense the wall being erected in the passage above! As the son didn't respond, the 'wall' was confirmed in the father's mind. The son's reality may have been that his father was an overbearing, domineering taskmaster. And the more the father rants, the more true this becomes in the young man's perception.

Imagine if the father had decided to 'dismantle' the wall in his perception, and had simply noted 'what is': 'My son is being silent and I'm frustrated that he won't communicate with me.' Imagine if the son not being viewed in a diminished way, simply observed: 'Dad wants to communicate, I'm not sure I know what to say, or how to say it.' Imagine the richness of a conversation that began with a real sharing of 'what is' for each of them, the emotional realities above. We can almost sense the importance of the 'bridges' that could be built.

When we treat our own manufactured abstractions as the primary reality, we are kept from seeing the very things we need to see to achieve what we really want. This is true both in terms of business results as well as team evolution, and of course the interplay between them.

The even greater leadership danger is that as we keep reconfirming our own conclusions about the 'obstacle', 'the problem', we then tend to pick those perceptions that are either easier on our ego or which conform to our prejudices. The mind being like a heat-seeking missile, the more we look at the world with this bias, the more 'evidence' we will locate for our perception of choice. This is also why we notice a flood of Honda Civics on the highway soon after we buy ours or a bumper crop of young infants the week after we've wheeled our own out of the hospital. 'Seek and ye shall find' is as perceptual a truth as it is purported to be a spiritual one.

If we fall into this trap, we run the risk of either creating strategies that DON'T address what is really needed, or else we begin to emotionally confirm a conclusion that the problem is insoluble. This is why rigorous, initially dispassionate analysis is SO important…abundant with curiosity not defensiveness.

Moreover as the evidence starts to come in and the tumblers of our mind and heart begin to turn, we need to change the frame from 'all or nothing', and begin to even rejoice in hitting all the 'runs' (including singles and doubles) we can, posting whatever 'quick wins' on the score-board that are meaningful, and thereby create fresh and momentum-mounting evidence that increasingly affirms faith, possibility and fresh design.

So you can join the crowd bemoaning the inevitable decline of audiences for serious theatre, or you can celebrate the sold-out performances of Bertold Brecht's LIFE OF GALILEO at the National Theatre in London and of Tom Stoppard's ROCK AND ROLL (an exquisite romp of ideas and cultures). You could park yourself at the exit of these shows, thank people for coming and hand out flyers for the NEXT event! While you're at it, you and your colleagues could even give them a 'special rate' for upcoming productions based on helping to bring a friend along! If demoralized by what you perceive as the decline in classical music interest, you could join the throng of thousands that converge upon Mozart's lovingly preserved Baroque home-town of Salzburg, and then re-enter the world fully revitalized by the alternate reality of classical music interest that this most prestigious of European musical festivals conveys. And then…create a club of friends who rejoice in life and friendship while attending symphonies.

So, once we accept reality, and our feelings, as leaders we then empower ourselves to CREATE fresh milestones that take us towards an enhanced, enriched and more spiriting reality. We realize that all real leaders work with their team as constructive co-conspirators to create the framework for life and reality to unfold.

Martin Luther King intoned for all of us for all time: 'I have a dream!' When we don't face and interrogate reality, we corrupt this to, 'I have a pipe-dream…a wishful fantasy at best.' On the other hand, when we don't accept our responsibility for co-creating what can be through engaging our own and other's perceptions and feelings and frameworks, we mutate this into, 'I have a nightmare.' It's our paintbrushes and canvas though. Whatever we help paint…that's the context we provide for our colleagues, our organization and ourselves to build performance from.

Great leaders have one thing in common with those visionary humanitarians whose contribution has led to their being revered as living saints. Both have the ability to be present to the way things are both in times of beauty and joy, and also during periods of challenge and frustration. Both understand that we have to face, embrace, and then transcend what we experience and find ourselves facing. To be alchemists, we may have to be 'chemists' first.

Such leaders and such visionaries can look at the full range of both our challenges and our potentials, and never position themselves in any way that presents a barrier to creativity or to hope.

On the other hand, when we keep carping on what 'should be' instead of seeking to transform 'what is', we show a true failure of courage. We also cannot then be truly creative, as we won't immerse ourselves enough to truly discern what ingredients we really have available, or what they might help us fashion anew.

Instead, when we pursue this central leadership practice of facing 'what is', we expand ourselves as we fully take in the larger landscape of potentiality and even make room within ourselves for it. In so doing, we see all that truly CAN be done and perhaps even MUST be done.

This is why we must allow our sadness, sorrow or anger to be expressed to some extent too. We may otherwise solve the problem, but duck the lesson, thereby setting ourselves up for a future repetition of the problem. M. Scott Peck once said: 'The truth will set you free, but first it will make you madder than hell.' So be it! As long as we then enable and generate, on the wings of that outburst, enough humility for true perception, enough courage for genuine willingness, enough audacity for true opportunity to open up. We are then free to fly.

Leadership is about transformation. But we cannot transform what we don't accept. When we decide to fulfill this leadership practice, not only can we transform the situation, but through what we learn from it, we can also transform ourselves. Because of these extraordinary prizes that await us if we have the will and vision and wisdom to reach for them, we have no other sane choice, but this. We learn to lead in an enlightened way then by first coming to not only 'accept' but even to imaginatively appreciate 'what is'. What 'can be' then shimmers all around us.

And so, we begin from here...

Omar Khan,
Senior Partner, Sensei International
Phone: 1 (212) 295 2191, Fax: 1 (212) 295 2121
e mail: omar@sensei-international.com

Omar Khan is a globally acknowledged leadership development innovator and success coach. He is a sought after change catalyst and a pioneer in transformational learning. He is the author of the acclaimed book SYNERGY as well as the newly released and much awaited, TIMELESS LEADERSHIP.