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Awareness Is the Missing Link in Leadership
Awareness Is the Missing Link in LeadershipHello This morning, I discovered the profound quote from Dr. Helena Lass in my LinkedIn feed: "Awareness is the primal quality in the life of all living beings. This is the only instrument that enables us to establish an intimate contact with everything; being a bridge it is used to discover all objects. Although everyone possesses this potent instrument, its intentional and smart use is still largely unknown to the majority." I first became aware of the true nature and power of awareness when I interviewed Dr. Helena Lass and Kaur Lass in their office in Tallinn in 2017. I was so struck by what I caught a glimpse of that it significantly deepened and expanded by inner leader journey. Helena's point about its 'intentional and smart use' being 'largely unknown' touches on a predicament. We are all conditioned to live in our minds and identify with a mind-made sense of self. This is an illusion and limits us. We are using awareness unconsciously and letting it be constantly absorbed by our thinking rather than resting in pure awareness itself. We are lost in our thinking. We are really being unconscious and don't know it. And you really won't get this unless you do the inner work to uncover it. The key insight here is that awareness is our primary tool for understanding reality. When we learn to rest in awareness rather than being continually absorbed in our thinking, we discover what Dr. Lass calls this 'intimate contact with everything.' This is the doorway to the infinite. Perhaps most significantly, this insight reveals a new frontier for leadership – one that transcends our focus on knowledge and skills. What the Lasses helped me understand is that true leadership emerges not from adding new strategies and skills, but from accessing a dimension that has always been present yet untapped. When leaders learn to rest in pure awareness, they participate in a larger field of possibility. As we face so many challenges that can't be solved through conventional thinking, this capacity to operate from awareness will become essential. The possibility that through this intimate contact with everything, we might access not just better leadership, but an entirely new way of being in service to a better future and world. What might become possible in our organizations and our world if more leaders learned to operate from this ground of pure awareness rather than from the conditioned mind? — Bill Bill Fox, Founder, LeaderONE |
Bill Fox
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