My friend Quanita Roberson reminds me, “there has to be an ‘I’ in team.” She’s pointing to the importance of a healthy and whole self, differentiated and present.
Another friend has recently pointed me to www.innerengineering.com, which offers practices from the yogic sciences on inner well-being.
Another colleague reminds me in our group facilitation and strategy work that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Plans may be brilliant. And necessary. Without a culture of support, or imagination, or connection — even brilliant plans wilt like water and sun deprived plants.
Beneath each of these reminders is an important teaching. The inner world has massive impact on the outer world. It’s way to easy, and seductive, and common to given 99% of our attention to things “out there”. And 99% of the time, it feels that attention to the “in here” is deemed wasteful, soft, or indulging.
It is my learning that people everywhere are ultimately hungry for the healthy internal (whether as a person or as a team or as a community) to be at the foundation of what is applied out there in our varied contexts of work and community.
My friend Kinde Nebeker and I continue to explore these teachings. Our medium together is The Inner and Outer of Evolutionary Leadership. Our next gathering is May 11, 2018 in Snowbird, Utah. I love the language we’ve created to find others that want to be in both the inner and the outer.
Please, peek your head up with us.
It’s the Story Under the Story That Changes Everything
Many of us, as formal and informal leaders, are learning that many of our most needed solutions do not exist in current systems of thought and practice. We work tenaciously in isolation, yet it is connection that brings creativity. We obsessively attribute causality to external circumstance, when it is internal awareness that holds greater promise for evolutionary contribution. Many of us know that we live in a time when we need further metamorphosis of our story of mechanical fidgeting with things and parts. We need awareness and alchemy to replace anxiety and authority that is ungrounded.
IOEL IV is for a different kind of leader and a different kind of story.
• for those irrepressibly compelled to burst into new understandings of reality and to share with their respective teams and organizations
• for those wishing to partner with life’s inherent organizing capacity in more organic, simple and life- enhancing ways
• for those willing to embody matured courage and presence to support real change
• for those hungry to wade further upstream to release us from the torrent of habits, individual and collective, that offer at best convenience and illusion of accomplishment
• for those who realize that the primary practice is consciousness, in which is embedded leadership in organizational system, not the other way around.
IOEL is not a therapy group. It is not a fix. It is a gentle, yet fierce commitment to get real (serious and playful) about exploring paradigmatic edges together and to call bullshit on antiquated yet still rewarded general practice. It is for those of daring to peek our heads above the fray to see who peeks with us. We are not alone.