I’m sitting with a guy today over breakfast and we are discussing some of the 360 degree feedback from his work associates. I can hear the inner struggle of owning the condition of what we are when we are conscious of our wholeness - our being both good and bad. Eastern thought uses the word “co-emergence” to explain the idea that at any one time both good and bad is present. . .the question is how unconditionally present are we with our saintly AND sordid ways? Augustine’s Soliloquies suggests that true recollection (the re-collecting of) leads us always to confession. It is only when we embrace not just the wholeness of our historic experience, but also when we see what we have done with this experience, do we truly choose ourselves and engage life with a threefold presence of repentance, renewal, and offering.

To accept ourselves seems to require that we look beyond the light we so freely offer others and forage into the shadows, guilt, and sins and thus to the truth of “Who?” and “What?” we have been. To be with another in ways that are transformational to each, asks that the relationship emerges from the truth of our personal and collective stories where an honest rendering of both light and dark is accepted with repentance. . .a repentance that opens to the inner life of things that link us all. From my experience, this place that moves us well beyond being transactional, is in itself neither religious nor redemptive but an honesty that takes us to something even beyond ourselves.

Worthy leaders of great impact do not have the self, or its betterment as the ultimate goal, but rather, what is revealed in and through the experiences of our lives. There is a consciousness that can be experienced with others that expands beyond our self-interest. The way to leading well within corporations, schools, churches or homes necessitates a personal and shared repentance that tunes us into the collective truths of what we have in common. This presence opens us to renewal and to offering what is good as it relates to both the situation and to others.

My early morning leader has a choice. . .as do each of us. . . .

As Americans, we are absolutely addicted to break through anything. The notion of kaizen or 2% improvement is something that we just as soon let someone else be managed by. Flat out, what we’re looking for, is leap frog transformation. But as I work with leaders, increasingly what I’m seeing is a fierce commitment to acting small, starting small, breaking into small teams of four to seven people, to embrace and practice rapid fire iterative revolution. Now don’t get me wrong, they are not calling it that, but regardless, what they’re doing is revolutionary.

This is counter to the typical approach of “ready,” “aim,” “aim!” You know what I mean, we are always getting ready, we are always seeming to be aiming, and my experience is break through innovation (some call it disruptive change) demands the marketization of our generative ideas. Put it out on the table! Get it into the hands of end users! Let the customer/client handle the product, play with the beta, become a collaborative partner in building the next best mousetrap, see what those closest to us think. . .I mean real transparent honesty.

What I’m hearing in the trenches…places where we spend the majority of our days/can we say “life…” is that we need to face it, we’ve been guessing wrong about the future most of the time. Whether it’s Harry Warner, founder of Warner Bros. studio, saying “who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” commenting on talking movies or, Thomas Watson, former chairman of IBM, state “I think there is a world market for about five computers,” and present-day versions that pushback against the 80’s notion of high tech, high touch (you know. . .the more high tech the greater the demand will be for high human touch) when we look at the effect of Face Book in kids spending hours interacting with other individuals from anywhere in the world building what they call community…and trying to guess about what will be in the future, it’s just that, a GUESS. So what are we to do but embrace the brilliance of multiple small starts. Experiment! Target small victories! Orient toward small markets! Unleash unbridled passion to systematically knockoff present profitable products and services to purposefully create the demand for “next.” Hey! Let’s not forget to contextualize this in our personal lives. We don’t have to shave off 40 pounds today, finish the degree next week, or “save” the relationship in one conversation. Rapid fire/iterative progression! Just get it out and begin to practice multiple small starts. The opportunity is CONSTANT!

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die for the roar which lies on the other side of silence.” George Eliot

Ken Wilber states that the average person between ages 25 and 55 only grows .5 stages. This is to say that people largely show very little real growth that would get them to the next stage or level of growth, maturity, or performance. He goes on to suggest that those who spend about an hour per day for four years in disciplined silence seem to achieve about a 2 stage jump in their development. Wow! What would it look like for that kind of performance improvement to emerge within the key areas of our public and private lives?

The notion and practice of silence, solitude, prayer, or meditation seems ridiculous against the pressures, demands and common pace of life. For most, I think the idea of entering into these alien practices feels like giving up something that is impossible to relinquish. What is too often missed is that this experience of stilling and resting in our gravitational center is about a presence gained with ourselves, others and the larger world, more than it is a matter of absence. We don’t necessarily need to go somewhere, close off, shut down, as much as learn to attend, hold, experience life as subject versus the sterile norm of making it a thing. This quieting helps us see, hear, be and do with increased purity and potency. When that happens, we hear the roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Today I was reminded that listening for something may never help someone ever hear more, or potentially any better. The question of “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?” must be understood in part about having someone there to begin with, but also about whether that someone has the ability to hear the sounds that can occur from trees that fall. Hearing is not necessarily about willfulness to hear, but a developed competency to receive specific messages that occur in a particular situation, or relationship.

Each of us hear the sound of things sometimes long after the event, or for the first time even though it has occurred many times. In our relationships of love, we have received the petition for us to hear a need or a want that can seem for the other that things largely go “unheard.” Sometimes things aren’t heard even when the cry is loud. Therefore, I believe that listening ALONE is not enough to hear those things that are most important to hear. We need others to find the patience and skill to not speak louder or more often necessarily, but to teach us a new vocabulary, or use symbols that open our ideas and beliefs to the new . . . or sometimes the old that has never been heard. We need a quality of presence that isn’t screaming at us, but loves us as we need to be loved, so that we expand ourselves to attending and responding to what is before us.

The price for greater consciousness and personal responsibility is never cheap and never a solitary act. Meeting ourselves, a deeper truth, or another has less to do with intent and values clarification as it has to do with what we do with our power, and how we manage our pain. Listening, understanding, meeting, leading, sustainable impact is about letting go of a lesser form to allow a greater one to emerge. It is about shared grace that offers peace, charity and service in replace of want, certainty, and the illusion of safety.

“When lost in the woods what do you do? When lost in the woods what do you do? Listen to the trees, they know the way.”

“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” It is never easy to think differently in order to perceive and then act differently. My thought constellation gets stuck in just that, my thoughts. Thoughts are past tense, thinking is generative. “Felt” is past tense, “feeling” is present tense and also generative. They say we have between 75,000 and 125,000 thoughts every day and that 90% of them are merely a recycling of what we already believe and think. The way out of some of our difficulties is to get into them through fresh thinking.

My thoughts adjust how I look and feel about the world. These adjustments change the way I then behave. My different behaviors are likely to stimulate different reactions from people and situations I face. These changes effect my interpretation and process of making meaning, and ultimately my core beliefs, and once my core beliefs change, I am different, and likely for the better.

What are we doing to think differently in the key situations and relationships we face today?

We are bombarded with tens of thousands of messages in multiple forms throughout each day. Each of us use filters to block, or sort through the messages in order to expedite understanding and the overall management of data within our lives. How well are we listening? What do we use to assure that we are paying attention and then acting on the important matters of our lives? There have been far too many times that I thought I was awake and aware only to find how I failed in both. The cost of this form of blindness is immense . . . the truth of this matter is that generally what we call blindness is not some cute area that we should get to when we can, but rather a killer that will destroy us and others if left unchecked. It is partial blindness, not sightlessness that we must address . . . each of us must clean away the obstructions that keep us from being empty, open and able to see what often is right before us.

A leaders first task is to acknowledge reality. Shall we begin?