Self Leadership Series – Part 1 #8
“What if we could put down our iPhones, our gadgets, our laptops and spend a little time just settling in?… Settling in to paying attention to what lies inside us. To see our troubles as a knock on the door to an invitation” – David Whyte The Door Beneath Everything July 2022
This blog series began close in – sharing the personal circumstances that I found myself in my mid-thirties. This was at its core, a deeply internal experience that would fuel my own self-leadership journey. So, for this final post I wanted to touch briefly on how I came to be aware of and begin to cultivate connection with my ‘inner experience’.
First a little bit of background……
When we moved house seven years ago, I stumbled across an assignment from my teaching degree back in the early nineties – complete in its original Atari computer format. Looking at the assignment took me by surprise at some level, while at another level I thought ‘of course I was interested in that’. The assignment was about student wellbeing practices, a topic less heard of at that time. It was built around The Inner Game by Timothy Gallwey. I recall it being a lightbulb moment for me at the time – this idea that there was an inner experience open to all of us that, if we were open to it, could greatly improve the way we showed up in our lives and help us achieve higher levels of performance.
I didn’t understand ‘inner experience’ beyond this conceptual notion at the time but looking back, I could see that a seed had been planted (as knowledge often does). It would take me another decade or more for this enquiry into the ‘inner game’ to come back onto my radar.
Roll forward …
So, until my mid-late thirties, beyond this idea of an ‘inner experience’ that had been planted years before, I had no way of understanding or accessing this ‘inner experience’. Sounds bizarre now but that was my reality. I was disconnected from myself – from who I was, from what mattered to me, from the life and love that was all around me. All my time and energy was spent reacting to the outside world and simply trying to keep afloat in day to day.
The invitation into my inner experience presented as a little voice inside of myself that was telling me that ‘something needs to change’. I decided to listen to this little voice. Through guidance and direction from trusted others and commitment to a daily reflective journaling practice, I slowly learned how to observe my thoughts and feelings and how to connect with my body to notice sensations.
Over time, and with the discipline (on and off as is most often the case) to keep practising the skill of self-observation, I learned a lot about myself and my reactions and responses in life; I learned how to rebalance my previously very stressed nervous system with obvious flow-on benefits to my wellbeing; I became better equipped to make decisions and choices in life from this place of a clear head; I cultivated clearer access to the wisdom of my heart and my internal knowing; I learned how to acknowledge and make space for all feelings so that they can move through me rather than to ‘fuse’ with them which allows both of us ( the feelings and I) to more far more freely. Most importantly, I have been able to come into a more conscious relationship with myself. This is continuous – changing and evolving as my relationship to self continues to unfold.
Cultivating a conscious connection with our internal experience is a pathway through which we can begin to peel away the layers of conditioning of our socialised selves and rediscover our true nature. Over time it can become the source from which we show up and operate in our lives, from the inside -out. Some of what I now understand about cultivating this relationship with self (our internal experience) is that:
- Discovering and nurturing this connection to self is a lifelong process.
- There is no ‘end point’ as the more you learn about yourself, the more you realise there is to learn.
- It takes practice and discipline (choosing to focus Key # 1 – Attention on this)
- If we choose to attend to it many benefits can follow. The greatest of these is that this is a pathway to re-discovering our true nature.
So, if this notion of’ inner experience’ is new to you, as it was for me, I just wanted to let you know that that is a perfect place to begin. Set yourself with a clear intention to nurture this beautiful opportunity to develop a more conscious relationship with yourself; and open your journal and leverage the discovery questions in the Three Keys to Practising Self Leadership to get started:
- What’s alive in me now?
- Body Sensations
- Thoughts
- Feelings
Enjoy the process of nourishing and cultivating this connection with yourself.
This is the final post in this Self Leadership Series. Thanks for your company.
This post is an excerpt from my draft book Activating Self Leadership.
Photo Credit: Bree Hughes 2022 (Taken on a trip to Mt Field National Park with Bree to see the Turning of the Fagus)
Self Leadership Series – Part 1 #7
This post introduces Three Keys to Practicing Self-Leadership to provide a practical way of attending to self-leadership.
At the heart of self-leadership is making a choice to live life and leader others more consciously, or simply put, with greater awareness. Self-leadership invites us to celebrate and acknowledge what is working well and to embrace the experiences from our daily lives – the good, the bad and the truly ugly – as opportunities to learn about ourselves and to grow.
This requires us to pause. When we give ourselves permission to pause, we can start to see more clearly what is happening within us and around us and can make better choices. We have the space to acknowledge our efforts and successes and to identify specific situations or experiences that we would like to attend to.
The Three Keys to Practicing Self-Leadership are designed to support this quest. The process begins with a scan of your internal experience and external environment to acknowledge what is working well and surfacing of a situation or experience (focus area) you would like to attend to. Focus area in hand, a series of structured questions are woven through the three-step process to support personal enquiry from observation through to action. Let’s take a look at the three keys:
Key # 1 – ATTENTION – “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” ― Mary Oliver
Scanning current internal and external realities to acknowledge what is working well and to surface a specific situation or experience (focus area) to attend to.
Key # 2 – OBSERVATION – “In the silence within, you will find relief, truth and the instructions you’ve been seeking. Go there. And listen.” – Brendon Burchard
Pausing to enquire and reflect on self and situation (as it relates to chosen focus area) to gain new insight and perspective.
Key # 3 – ACTION – “The future depends on what you do today” – Mahatma Gandhi
Undertaking planning and preparation to move from insight to action.
So how do we bring this to life? Each of the keys has a series of questions, that together help us to attend to self-leadership. If you would like to get started right away – grab yourself a journal or notebook and you can practice applying the questions as you read on.
Key # 1 – ATTENTION
Scanning current internal and external realities to acknowledge what is working well and to surface a specific situation or experience (focus area) to attend to.
Taking time to slow down enough to notice what is happening within us and around us is always the starting point for attending to self-leadership. It is in this process of slowing down that we can acknowledge what is working well for us and surface what needs our attention.
This first key to practicing self-leadership – Attention – invites us to listen, acknowledge and intend.
We begin with a scan of our internal experience and external environment. These questions help us to pay attention, slow down and to make conscious choices. We don’t ask them just once and forget – they are the foundation questions that we need to revisit often!
- What am I noticing in my external environment?
- What’s alive within me right now – thoughts, feelings, body sensations?
- What am I most proud of? What’s working well?
- Does something need to change?
If you identify a specific situation or experience that you would like to attend to, then ask yourself:
- What’s the reality I want that I don’t have now?
- What can I do to improve this situation?
- What is my intention ?
Let’s look at the second key – Observation.
Key #2 – OBSERVATION
Pausing to enquire and reflect on self and situation (as it relates to chosen focus area) to gain new insight and perspective.
Developing our capacity to pause, observe and reflect is a key self-leadership skill. Just like the first key – it begins with us making a choice – in this case a choice to undertake some exploration and observation of the focus area at hand. The pause part of this acts as a mechanism to challenge our pre-programmed reaction that might otherwise drive our reaction and behaviour – to enable different perspectives and insights to emerge.
This second key to practicing self- leadership – Observation- requires us to pause, inquire and reflect.
Ask yourself the following questions to draw your attention to the broader context and to observe your thoughts, feelings and body sensations as they relate to your focus area:
- Situation
- What do I need to understand in relation to the broader context/environment in which this situation is occurring?
- How do I choose to be in relation to this situation?
- Self
- What’s alive in me now in relation to this situation?
- Body Sensations.
- Thoughts
- Feelings
- What is making me feel that way?
- What’s alive in me now in relation to this situation?
Grounding the observation
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- What really matters most to me and how does that apply to this situation?
- What do I now know?
Let’s now look at the third key – Action.
Key #3 – ACTION
Undertaking planning and preparation to move from insight to action.
Taking the new awareness or insight it is now time to move into action to ensure that the change that is possible from this new awareness comes to life.
Taking action isn’t just about making major decisions. Small and simple steps and a short and sharp list of actions can be very effective, impactful and a great way to start. For example, and dependent of course on what it is you want to change, consciously starting your day with five minutes of mindful breathing, drinking two litres of water a day, turning your phone off at a set time each evening … and of course giving yourself permission for some down time are all example of small simple steps. Alternatively, your required action might take the shape of specific goals and leverage a goal-setting process that identifies the goal and what a successful outcome will look like, defines the behaviour required to achieve each goal, the action steps needed, and any support you will need to stay on track.
Sometimes our actions just apply to us and in other times they may extend to interactions with others – for example having a difficult conversation, communicating a boundary, or applying a new skill to a challenging situation. And sometimes the insight that we get means that the action we need to take is on a grander scale – an example of this might be finally deciding to make that long-yearned-for career change a reality or discontinuing an unhealthy friendship.
The third key to practicing self- leadership – Action- requires us to prepare, plan and act.
Identify the specific actions that you will take to move towards a positive outcome:
- What would be a helpful outcome for this situation?
- What action do I need to take to enable this outcome?
- What support do I need?
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There are so many things we are already doing well in leading our lives to have arrived at this moment. Let’s never lose focus of that and …..stuff comes up in life. There are conversations that we know we need to have, situations that we know we can and should positively influence, changes we know we need to make in our lives and times when we how we behave and the decisions that we make result in less than satisfactory outcomes. These situations/experiences, if left unattended and ignored can leave us feeling a misalignment between ‘who we are’ and ‘how we want to be’ and the actuality of what is.
As we travel the self-leadership path, we bring greater awareness to all of this. We begin to unpeel the layers of our socialised selves and get a little closer to the truth of who we. Choosing this path not only ignites change in ourselves, but naturally a source of inspiration for others.
Through applying the Three Keys to Practicing Self Leadership we can attend consciously to our lives and leadership. That includes celebrating and acknowledging what we are doing well and making a shift from reacting to life as it is thrown at us to noticing and attending to what matters.
The final post in this series will look at Self Leadership – An Inner Experience.
This post is an excerpt from my draft book Activating Self Leadership.