Conscious Leadership

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© 2015 Rebecca Watson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/04/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-3614-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-3613-2 (e)

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Contents

Introduction Why You Should Read this Book

Chapter 1 What Are Levels of Consciousness?

Chapter 2 What Level Am I As a Leader? How To Fast Track Through the Stages.

Chapter 3 What Traits Do We Want In Our Leaders?

Chapter 4 How We Basically Work

Chapter 5 How To Build Good Relationships

Chapter 6 How to Gain Control Over Your Emotional Responses

Chapter 7 How To Reprogram Your Operating Systems

Chapter 8 Experience Higher Levels of Consciousness

Chapter 9 Understand What You Need To Do To Get Results

Chapter 10 Consciously Influence The Energetic Field

Chapter 11 The Five Big Benefits for An Organization

Chapter 12 Solve All Problems Through Change of Thought

Chapter 13 Facilitate Group To Make Good Decisions

Chapter 14 Raise Levels of Consciousness In Others

Chapter 15 The Map For Your Journey

Chapter 16 The Historical and Global Context For This Book

Acknowledgements

Don’t Just Put This Book On The Shelf! – Take Action

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Why You Should Read this Book

How I came to write this book

I have studied the question What makes a person a great Leader? for over 10 years. In that time, I have coached hundreds of leaders from private and public organisations, from entrepreneurs to artists. I have experimented with various different coaching techniques – some worked well, some didn’t work at all! I have read many books across a multitude of disciplines too, all in the pursuit of What makes a person a great leader?

On this journey, I have also developed myself. I started off with all my fears about giving up a career in law to become a Leadership Coach. I worked on my own unconscious beliefs, experienced therapy, yoga and meditation. I travelled to explore other cultures and simply spoke to lots of people about their experience of leaders and what they thought made a good leader. For some reason I was drawn towards this path, and it has brought me challenge, immense joy and life-long friendships.

This book bridges two worlds. The world of traditional business (revenue, products, structure, and processes that can be measured) and the unseen world (thoughts, emotional responses, and energetic fields) that has a real effect on how successful a leader will be, but is unseen and cannot easily be measured. The unseen world is one that quantum physics has understood from a scientific perspective and consciously evolved people like the Dalai Lama have understood from a spiritual perspective.

I believe that my own purpose is to support leaders to raise their levels of conscious.

In short, I followed my intuition with my work and it has led me to understanding one of the great secrets of leadership. I aim to share that secret with you in this book.

Why you need to read this book

There are so many books on leadership, aiming to teach you how to improve – so why read this one?

In the past, we have misunderstood what makes someone a great leader. We have thought that it is about WHAT YOU DO. This is the focus of many books on leadership, but they are missing the core differentiator.

In this book, I explain the SECRET that most of the world does not seem to know yet.

It is the single differentiating factor between poor/average leaders and great leaders.

Once you know this SECRET, you will start to THINK, FEEL and BEHAVE differently as a Leader. You will become a more CONSCIOUS LEADER, and therefore, be able to work in a completely different way to create the results you want – for yourself, for your team and for your organisation.

What will I gain once I’m a Conscious Leader?

• You will have less anxiety/frustration at work

• You will be able to turn around those relationships that currently make you annoyed/upset/uncomfortable (including personal relationships)

• You will be more energy efficient, so leaving work less tired and able to have more energy for yourself/your family outside of work

• You will have tapped into a higher purpose for your work and the contribution your organisation makes to society, so you will see your career in a new light

• You will be able to tap into your creativity and be more innovative at work

• You will be able to get to the heart of a problem so long as that problem involves people because you will have a way of discovering how the problem has been created in the first place

• YOU WILL BE A GREAT LEADER AND CONTINUE TO DEVELOP ON THIS PATH FOR THE REST OF YOUR CAREER

What will my TEAM gain once I’m a Conscious Leader?

• Your team will be more aware of their purpose, their value and their contribution, and therefore, their work will feel more meaningful to them.

• Your team will become more productive because they will be absolutely clear on their direction and then have you to support them in the most effective way as a leader.

• You will be able to consciously shift groups of people who have become tired/frustrated/detached from difficult projects by refocusing their minds and energy

• You will know how to create a high performing culture within your organisation and will automatically create a higher performing culture within the entire section of the organisation you lead.

What will my ORGANISATION gain once I’m a Conscious Leader?

• If you are the CEO or responsible for attracting investors, you will know how to create a buzz in the market around your organisation and attract investors automatically.

• If you are the CEO or responsible or attracting customers/clients, you will know how to pitch your organisation and manage your customers/clients in such a way that you automatically attract more.

• Once your organisation has the benefit of Conscious Leaders, it will automatically attract the best talent in the market because everyone wants to work for an organisation that has a high performing culture with happy, empowered employees.

CHAPTER 1

What Are Levels of Consciousness?

Introduction

In this Chapter I will do the following:

• Explain what Consciousness is and why it is the first necessary step toward Great Leadership.

• Set out the things that Conscious Leaders know and do, so that you can compare where you are currently with where you will be when you have read this book.

• Introduce the concept of Levels of Consciousness, what this means and what criteria is used to determine your level of consciousness.

• Show how it is not so much WHAT YOU DO as a leader but WHO YOU ARE (or at what level of consciousness you are operating from) that determines your skill and results as a leader.

What is Consciousness?

Consciousness is simply being aware.

If you are conscious of something, you are now aware of it. You may not have been aware of it 10 minutes ago, but now you are. A fire alarm allows us to become consciously aware that we may be in in danger. Before the alarm went off, we may not have had any other way of knowing that there was a fire in the room below.

An easy way to show different levels of consciousness is to compare children of different ages. As we grow from small children to teenagers, we shift our view of the world, or ourselves, and we start to control our emotional responses to our environment.

When we were children, we had a worldview that was much smaller than the view we hold now. We were naïve, inexperienced and unable to understand that other people held different views from us. We used childish tactics to try to get what we wanted and were less able to compromise or put others first. We were leading our lives from a child-like operating system – a child’s level of consciousness.

As adults, we have developed a more sophisticated operating system – an adult level of consciousness. As we continue to develop throughout our adult lives we can also move into higher, or more developed levels of adult consciousness. It is the different levels of operating systems that I call levels of consciousness.

In all of my experience working with different leaders and researching the question What makes a good Leader? I have come to the conclusion that it is the level of consciousness that the leader is operating from in any given moment that makes the difference. Leaders who have developed their mindsets to a high level of consciousness will automatically be far better leaders than those who have not. This is what I set out to explain in this book.

We can only operate from the highest level of consciousness that we have experienced. We cannot operate from a level of consciousness that we have not yet experienced. However, under stress, we may regress momentarily and operate from a younger (and lower) level of consciousness.

The purpose of this book is to help you as leaders raise your level of consciousness. This means taking you, my reader, on a thought journey – a sequence of understandings, where you need to understand the first concept in order to understand the second concept and so on. This is how I have laid out this book, so to get the most out of this book, you should read each chapter in order.

To even begin to help people raise their levels of consciousness, I need to help them become consciously aware. It is like asking someone to give up their current day job and become a Formula One car mechanic. Firstly, they need to be aware that these cars exist and fully understand what they are! Secondly they need to understand how the engines work. Thirdly, they use this knowledge to improve the engine’s efficiency and level of performance. Throughout, I need to keep persuading them that putting in the effort to learn to be a Formula One car mechanic is going to bring them greater benefits than staying in their day job. I need to motivate them to put in the effort.

So with leadership development, firstly, you need to be aware that you have a level of consciousness and fully understand what it is! Secondly, you need to understand how you work. Thirdly, you can use this knowledge to fine tune yourself as a Leader to gain efficiency and higher performance. Throughout this book, I also attempt to give you explanations of the benefits of putting in the effort to raise your level of consciousness as a leader. The ramifications are so vast that I have had to dedicate Chapters 8-14 to the benefits for yourself, your team, your organization and your society!

Why is becoming conscious important?

In order to develop as a leader, you need to first become as conscious as you can. This is just self-awareness. If I am aware of myself, I am consciously aware of the thoughts that I am having and the feelings I am having in my body. The thoughts that you have in your mind have a direct effect on the emotions you feel in your body, including any body tension and internal chemical reactions like releasing adrenalin. I explain this more fully in Chapter 4.

As a leader, you have a huge influence on the people around you, how those people feel, what they then do, and therefore, the overall state that the organisation is working in. You can therefore have either a positive or negative effect on these people and the output of your organisation. This also applies to your family and any social occasions you experience. We all know that if we are in a bad mood, then our family or friends will find it hard not to be affected by this. Our mood affects the mood of others and potentially our entire social experience! Yes, we’ve all been there as either the culprit or the observer of this social phenomena.

Most leaders are operating from an unconscious automatic self. They are not consciously aware of their own thoughts and how these thoughts affect their own emotional states and the fact that they bring this emotional state into the workplace!

They are only aware that of end results: an exhausted body; an unhappy PA; an under-performing team that doesn’t take ownership; the common complaint if I don’t do it myself then nothing gets done; and the feeling that they are dragging people through mud!

Your own thoughts, and therefore the emotional state that your body is in, will affect everyone around you. The role of leader doesn’t always mean Good Leader, but it always means Powerful Influencer. Do you want to use this power for good or bad effect?

Being a Conscious Leader, in this book’s definition, is also being consciously aware of the fact that you can develop yourself as an adult. You can shift your own level of consciousness from that of a low level (survival level) consciousness to a high levels. That is why I explain the models of Levels of Consciousness in Chapter 15. These models can be used as a guiding map for your own personal development as a leader throughout your career.

What do Conscious Leaders know and do?

1. They have an overview of the top three things that they