Leadership is an inside job: We must know ourselves first before we lead others
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about." – Rumi –
“Leadership in its essence is the capacity to shift the inner place from which we operate.” – Otto Scharmer –
Yesterday I cried twice before breakfast. The first tears of the day started welling in my eyes and then streaming down my cheeks in twin tracks as I spoke with my coach. It was just after 7 am and I was walking on the cobbled streets of my neighbourhood. I reached out to my coach for some wisdom and support to make it through the day. Like many, if not all, of you, I have been grappling with some challenges that are inviting me to step into greater leadership. But to do so, I need to face some long-held insecurities. And that process is, at times, intensely painful. To look back and see how I’ve treated myself in the rear-view mirror, which I have no choice but to do when my coach mirrors those realities back to me, is not easy. But it is the work I am being called to do in this moment. So, I show up and do the work. However, challenging it might be. Because I know that without this work, I cannot be a good, let alone great, leader nor can I make change in the world effectively.
“I wish you could see yourself like I do”, my coach tells me as I walk along the canal near my home. However, gently those words are delivered, they land like a bucket of freezing cold water to the face. Panic washes over me as I fight to regain the cadence of my breath. After I’ve taken a few deep breaths, I can see that she’s right. I’m not seeing myself clearly. I’m letting ugly voices in my head tell me lies. And they are all lies. Yet, I’m internalising those lies and making them my reality. They are not my reality, but an illusion I’ve been conditioned to believe. But I can’t see that. I’m stuck in the fog. My coach’s voice pulls me to the other side of the fog where I can see clearly again. My shoulders release, the tears stop flowing and I feel calm again. And then I begin the process of berating myself for believing the lies in the first place. And down the rabbit hole I go . . .
After ending the call with my coach, I hold the remaining tears in for the rest of my walk by the sheer force of will. Once inside my flat, the door barely closed behind me, I take a long pull of air; a big, nourishing breath. As soon as I feel safe to let go, fat tears begin to flow down my face in waves and I allow myself to feel the sadness. Once anchored in that feeling, I find anger there too. Anger that the insecurities I’ve worked so hard to shed, still cling to me like gum on a shoe. As I sit in stillness, I let those twin feelings of sadness and anger intertwine and grow inside my body, following them with my attention.
And then the most beautiful thing happens. As I allow myself to just be and make the space to feel, truly feel what was true in that moment, that profound sadness, soaked in anger and seeped in frustration, slowly turns to peace. Beneath where those uncomfortable feelings sit in the bottom of my stomach, there emerges a feeling of infinite beauty. A sense of limitlessness. Peace.
Later that same day a friend, not knowing how my day had begun, sends me a quote from The Way of Integrity by author, coach and thought leader Martha Beck, in which the ever wise Beck writes of her own journey to peace:
As the internal shift occurred, life seemed to deliver more and more things I’d longed for during my life. I began to imagine that the universe works like this: whenever we humans long for something, the Power That Be immediately sends it. But everything we’ve ordered is always delivered to our real home address: pace. Go back to the resonance of that statement: “I am meant to live in peace”. Can you feel yourself relaxing as your whole self aligns with that idea? That is why, when we struggle with things in a state of desperation, they don’t come to us – nothing works after it’s misaligned. But when we return to a state of peace, the things we’ve “ordered” can finally reach it.
Beck has three degrees from Harvard, including a PhD in sociology. Now, that’s not to say that formal education makes someone wiser. Rather, the point is that she’s done time in the Ivory Tower and has come to the conclusion that the truest thing in life is the peace that lives within us. If only we could all clear the way to see that it’s always there. And that’s where the inside job of leadership both begins and ends: with peace. Making peace with this moment and seeing it as an opportunity to bring us home where peace lies waiting for us always.
During my own PhD journey, I discovered two books that changed the way I look at leadership and, in many ways, life. The first is called Presence, written by four academics – Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers – working at the intersection of leadership and transformation, to better understand how change happens. The theories introduced by Presence are interspersed with and explained through recollections of conversations amongst the authors as they reflect on what it takes to cultivate change within ourselves, the organisations we lead and work with and through and the societies we live in.
One premise of the book – among its many insights - is that for transformation to occur, we must stop our habitual ways of thinking and doing to “see the way we are seeing”. Seeing how we are seeing is looking under the hood at how our minds are programmed. Doing so requires getting quiet and looking at the beliefs and assumptions that we, in many cases, follow blindly.
Once we see how we’ve been programmed, we can find new ways of seeing the world in a fresh, new way. Meditation and mindfulness are tools that can help us suspend our thinking and dissolve boundaries between the “seer” and the “seen”. As we do that more and more, we start to see from the whole, which involves deep listening to both ourselves and to others. As we do so, we ultimately connect with deeper ways of both knowing and seeing the world.
Though the connection between inner and outer work was found to be pivotal to changemaking by the authors of Presence, it is rarely talked about. In one conversation recalled in Presence, the authors spoke about the many scientists they have collectively interviewed for their work on transformation who have a serious spiritual practice. These scientists consider their spiritual life not as separate from, but critical to their research. Many argued that their contributions to science and knowledge would not have been possible without their spiritual work. Yet, most of those same scientists did not feel comfortable talking about the connection between their inner and outer work openly; instead choosing to hide their spiritual beliefs from their colleagues. Perhaps they did so because they feared their work would be seen as less legitimate. Something I navigate in my everyday too.
One of the authors, a poet and academic focused on organisational change, Betty Sue Flowers, lamented that, “In our present culture we rarely give ourselves permission to talk about connections between the spiritual and the professional. It’s tragic.” Co-author, another academic with a background in complexity thinking and systems change, Peter Senge, responded:
Doesn’t this also tell us why suspending is so hard, individually and collectively? . . . When we truly suspend taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world, what we start to see can be disorienting and disturbing and strong emotions like fear and anger arise, which are hard to separate from what we see. To the extent we’re trying to avoid these emotions, we’ll start to avoid suspending. To the extent we can’t talk about any of this, it limits all of us.
Today, 20 years after Presence was initially published, the words of Senge still ring so true. Many of us continue to be afraid to go inside. Leadership as an inside job is still a concept that sits on the fringes of leadership theory.
Two weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend many inspiring conversations bringing thought leaders and change makers together on the margins of Skoll Week in Oxford. One out of the box session provided space for participants to make one ask of the collective; something that everyone could do as a next step to move towards the kind of world we all want to live in. I put my hand up and joined the panel. Once there, facing the audience, I argued that the next thing we must do to create a better future at a time when there is no other choice but to put one step in front of the other, is to look at our shadows and stop numbing to the pain of being human. To look at how we’ve gotten to where we are today and to grapple with racism, colonial continuity, patriarchy and other forces of inequality that have underpinned our societies for centuries. We must feel the pain of that, both for ourselves and for our ancestors - be they the victims or perpetrators, they were all in pain (though that does not make any of it okay) - and then move forward to create a different framework to guide us. A framework that can take us to a world in which all humans, all species and all ecosystems are thriving on a healthy planet.
My remarks didn’t seem to land as well as I would have liked. Some folks did come up to me afterwards, but it was to talk about Loss and Damage. I’m very used to that and it’s honestly okay. I’m always happy to have conversations about Loss and Damage. But those deeper conversations are what I yearn for; one heart speaking to another. If history is an indication of the very near future, dozens of you will tell me in private that you enjoyed this blog. Some of you will tell me about your own struggles. But very few of you will likely forward this blog or engage with the posts. And that’s okay. I am happy to meet you where you’re at.
That said, I would ask you, what are you so afraid of? Why do you not feel comfortable speaking aloud about your own inner journeys - your inside work - to your colleagues? Is there a real danger there? Or are you too listening to ugly voices inside your head, conditioned by society? Do you have limiting beliefs and assumptions that are keeping you stuck in ways of being and working that are not working? Most of our ancestors had the connection to their bodies and to nature, their spiritual lives, severed and if they dared to cling onto them, they often did so at their peril. Are you carrying ancestral trauma from that loss of connection, to both the natural world and to your own bodies and hearts? I’d also ask you to contemplate that the thing you’re most afraid to do – speak your truth aloud and open your heart – is the very thing that will set both you and others free. Something to ponder . . .
In the meantime, I’m willing to be brave for you. What I can tell you, in case it provides the encouragement you need, is that the more authentic you are with those around you, the more connections you are likely to inspire. I also know for sure that vulnerability is not weakness, it’s a strength. For more on that, I highly recommend engaging with the work of another author, researcher and academic, Brené Brown who shares stories from her own life on why vulnerability transforms the way she leads and loves. For thought leadership closer to home, I’d highly recommend engaging with the wisdom, knowledge and insights of Karen O’Brien, an academic and researcher whose work on transformation in the context of environmental change is (for lack of a better term), simply game changing. She’s one of the academics in our space I most respect, and someone whose extensive work I have drawn on extensively in my own research. In 2021 O’Brien launched a book called You Matter More Than You Think and has recently started a newsletter, Quantum Social Change, that I’m a subscriber to and avid reader of. The fact that giants in the academe like her are talking about love, connection and imagination is not a small thing. So please do support this work.
The upshot of all of this is that you don’t need to wear a mask. You don’t need to hide who you are at your essence. In fact, your superpower might just be something you’re hiding. My superpower is not well hidden, although it’s not always easily expressed. It is widely known that I have a big, open heart. But even as I try to lean more into love in my work, I still have many difficult conversations with folks about why love is important. The role of love in changing the world is recognised in theory, albeit not typically in the mainstream literature, but in practice things get a little wobbly. I believe that’s because we are ultimately afraid to come back home to ourselves. But we need not be. What lies there waiting for us is peace and presence. Infinite beauty. Limitlessness. It’s a place where anything is possible. And if we operate from that place, then anything truly is possible.
Luckily, we have many giants to stand on; brave people who have cut a path for the rest of us to follow. One of those leaders is academic and action researcher, Otto Scharmer, one of the authors of Presence. In Theory U Scharmer builds on Presence, arguing that the self is the most important leadership tool. He posits that there are two selves to work with in our journeys to leadership. The first is who we are now: the self. The self is the person who has been moulded by past experiences and conditioning. The second is the person we can become: the Self. The Self of our future can guide the self of our present to a brighter future. To do so, we must have an open mind, an open heart and an open will. From there we can ask ourselves two fundamental questions: The first is, who is my Self and the second is what is my Work to?
For me, what I discovered when I asked myself those questions (the Self not the self), is that my Work is to do the inner work, however awkwardly, inelegantly and clumsily it might look like or feel like, bring insights into my day to day and tell you about those experiences. I’m so grateful that so many others are out there modelling what that looks like for me. People like Beck, Brown, O’Brien, Senge and Scharmer. Without them, I’m not sure if I’d have the courage to write about my experiences.
Like Presence, I cannot do justice to Theory U as it is dense with paradigm-shifting insights. I can only recommend that you read both books yourself. If you are a human being on planet Earth today, you are already leading in some capacity or will shortly be doing so. A note on that: You most certainly do not have to be an “adult” to lead. Some of our wisest, most courageous leaders on planet Earth today have not yet reached voting age in their respective countries. Yet, they are already embodying the type of leadership that most heads of state and government have only fragments of, if at all.
Doing the inner work, the inside job of leadership is the only way forward. We must go inside first, to see all the ways we are keeping ourselves stuck, both as individuals and as a collective. The only way through is through Dear Reader. That’s the bad news, if you want to see it that way. But there’s so much good news. We are in this together. In this moment we have an opportunity to do things differently. To come together in new ways. Just as political leaders can draw lines and retreat into nationalism, we can step across those lines to connect with each other. To look into each other’s eyes and say: I see you. I hear you. With open minds, open hearts and open wills - the premise of Theory U - we can do anything. Because, as my colleague Hyacinthe Niyitegeka, an alumna of the New Generation program, recently wrote: love is the only way we will create the kind of world we all want to live in.
This clarion call back to Love is becoming louder. In a recent edition of Quantum Social Change called Vital Roles for Fire Souls, O’Brien writes:
What’s going on today is not okay. Instead of burning out, we need to burn strongly and brightly for what we care about. Taking care of ourselves means taking care of others, and taking care of others means taking care of ourselves. Quantum coherence means that fire souls never work alone. Instead, we are part of an entangled movement
Though each of us has to do our own inner work, we don’t do so in isolation. What I take from this, is that the more inner work we do, the more we can connect to, see and hear each other and the better we’re able to lead both ourselves and each other. In that sense, true leadership is mutually reinforcing, allowing us to collectively spiral upwards towards the world we want by bringing out the best in each other.
I’m still very much on this journey, as you’ve gotten a sense of from this blog. But I am on the path and that’s what counts. I’ve realised that the destination is always there, in every moment. I hope you’ll join me there, if you’re not already, so we can all come home to peace, both inside our human bodies and in the world around us.
Erin Roberts is the founder of the Climate Leadership Initiative and has the honour of being one of the advisors to the amazing team delivering the New Generation program. She is passionate about doing the inner work to allow herself to evolve as a leader and empowering young climate leaders from the Global South in their own journeys to leadership.
Resources:
Beck, M. (2021). The Way of Integrity: Finding the path to your true self. London: Little, Brown Book Group. Find it here.
Beck, M. (2016). Diana, Herself: An Allegory of Awakening. Arroyo Grande, CA: Cynosure Publishing. Find it here.
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. London: Ebury Publishing. Find it here.
Brown, B. (2017). Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone. London: Ebury Publishing. Find it here.
Brown, B. (2015). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Parent, and Lead. London: Penguin Book Ltd. Find it here.
Brown, B. (2015). Rising Strong. London: Ebury Publishing. Find it here.
Hanh, T.N. (2021). Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. London: Ebury Publishing. Find it here.
Hanh, T.N. (2016). How to Love. London: Ebury Publishing. Find it here.
Haupt, L.L. (2023). Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit. London: Little, Brown & Company. Find it here.
Holtaus, E. (2020). The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming. London: HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Find it here.
Hooks, B. (2016). All About Love: New Visions. London: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2004). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life. London: Little, Brown Book Group. Find it here.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Full Catastrophe Living, Revised Edition: How to cope with stress, pain and illness using mindfulness meditation. London: Little, Brown Book Group. Find it here.
Krawec, P. (2022). Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Find it here.
Lingo, K.L. (2021). We Were Made for These Times: Skillfully Moving through Change, Loss, and Disruption. Berkley, CA : Parallax Press. Find it here.
O’Brien, K. (2021). You Matter More Than You Think. Oslo: Cchange Press. Find it here.
Ruiz, D.M and J. Mills. (1999). The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship, a Toltec Wisdom Book. San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing. Find it here.
Salzberg, S. and J. Kabat-Zinn (2020). Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications. Find it here.
Senge, P. et al. (2005). Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society. London: John Murray Press. Find it here.
Scharmer, C. O. Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Find it here.
