Want To Expand Your Ability To Lead More Consciously? You Must Have This
- Brainz Magazine
- Feb 23, 2022
- 6 min read
Written by: Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Ready to elevate your leadership to the next level of conscious awareness? Curious about how to increase your CQ (Centeredness Quotient)? Well then, I’m glad to connect with you because that’s been my challenge for a long time too.
But I couldn’t reach the goals I’d set for myself until I switched around my understanding of what I was trying to do. The amount of stress and overwhelm being stirred up for me and the world at large had gotten to be too much. I needed something more because I was losing my center far more often.
Life felt like an unending flow of uncontrollable change, uncertainty, chaos, and that niggling sense of some impending volatility exploding. I needed to expand my capacity for mindfulness and presence. I wanted to deepen my understanding of practical wisdom as a skill so I could make it my instinctive way of responding to the world.
Leading Is Only Half Of The Game
Before I go any further here, please embrace the notion that to be a leader does not require you to have a sanctioned leadership position. Everyone is both a leader and a follower. So regardless of your position moment to moment, all of this applies to both me and you, at home and at work.
As a Behavior Change Specialist, I lead my coaching clients to show me the obstacles they’re encountering on the way to their goals. Then I follow their lead to help craft their unique way to achieve that goal.
As an NLP trainer, I lead my students to embody the tenets of NLP, coaching, and paradox management. Then I follow how they’re leading others to their own resources and power so I can lead them back to theirs.
When I’m a podcast guest, I lead listeners to think from fresh angles of vision. Then I follow the feedback and change my talks accordingly.
Never underestimate how your level of skill at any moment affects those around you. It matters. You can lead others to new ideas and unexplored possibilities for expanded meaning and purpose. Or you can inadvertently imprison them in a silo of individual performance indicators, or the challenge of being seen as either a good, likeable person or an uncoachable, difficult one.
When I first started teaching and training some 4 decades ago, I fell into this trap again and again. I wasn’t yet aware of my arrogance and unreasonable demand for immediate perfectionism among my students.
It wasn’t a pretty picture. And their feedback (which I asked for) was devastating. But I was determined to follow my students’ lead. After all, it was based on their experience of me as the trainer whose lead they were looking to follow.
The Next Skill Fundamental To 21st Century Conscious Leadership
Back in the 70s, I was a bit of a free spirit. That being the case, I naturally began my quest for understanding and self-awareness by exploring meditation.
Many years later, reading an article Forbes published in 2018, 5 Ways To Be A Conscious Leader, I found the first item on the list delightful, and arguably the most important and challenging. It was self-awareness.
I immediately felt vindicated for all my traveling around the globe, trying to scope out the secret of being happy. I was grateful for spending those thousands of hours and thousands of dollars exploring myself via trips to India, meditation retreats, ashram living, and daily contemplative exercises. My goal was to develop the knack for going inward first, and then outward.
In The Meaning Revolution: The Power Of Transcendent Leadership by Fred Kofman, he identifies some of the inherent challenges today’s leaders are called to manage. As I’d also discovered, to manage conflict, confrontation, and disagreement, you must first be able to manage your own emotional and reactive self.
But what interested me most about this book was what Mr. Kofman calls insoluble dilemmas.
“You have to choose between things like accountability or cooperation, excellence
or alignment, autonomy or coordination. Unfortunately, collaboration conflicts
with accountability, and collective performance conflicts with individual
excellence.”
He explains with a great example of trying to get warm when you have a blanket that is too short. You can get your feet warm, but then your upper body gets cold. Or you can keep your chest warm and get cold feet.
Either way, you want to be comfortable. But you can only choose one or the other. The problem is you need both a warm chest and warm feet to achieve your goal. Such are the dilemmas of both business and daily life. And these pesky predicaments are what I’ve been working to solve for many years now.
Managing Paradoxical Dilemmas Expands Your CQ (Centeredness Quotient)
I discovered an efficient solution was learning how to manage these kinds of unresolvable dilemmas. This requires knowing how to navigate this specific type of quandary. This skill grants equanimity a fast and repeatable way to appear on the scene.
Unresolvable predicaments, or insoluble dilemmas, are everywhere. Whether you work for a corporation, are a small business owner, or a sole proprietor.
Skillfully relating to these dilemmas gives you the way to stay calm and peaceful, no matter what kind of decision is demanding your immediate action. Nor does it matter how much emotional turmoil is being stirred up around you, or inside of you.
When you master the skill of managing dilemmas or paradox, you automatically increase what I call your CQ or centeredness quotient.
This happens by re-arranging your organization of two different things:
1) a specific neurological coding in your brain, and 2) how you approach objections from your unconscious mind (that one resting
outside of your awareness).
Your CQ is the ability to stay centered and calm, no matter what is unfolding. This produces equanimity. But don’t equate real equanimity with the absence of feeling upset.
Paradoxically, equanimity is most useful
in the presence of emotional turmoil, not in its absence.
Equanimity Increases Your CQ (Centeredness Quotient)
Emotional calm grants you the freedom to stay mindful and present longer and more often. It rests in the hands of your awareness. And the degree to which awareness becomes your sidekick throughout the day.
This freedom to stay mindful and present arrives when you realize what idea, notion, or concept has been holding you prisoner.
You can feel the imprisonment happening when your body contracts. If you listen carefully, you can hear the prison door clanging shut when you hold tight to your notion’s ‘rightness’ or ‘truth’. If you look closely, you can see there is no opening available to welcome new information in.
Imprisonment means you can’t let go–even for a moment. You end up ignoring the quiet whisper of wisdom inside of you that knows letting go is truly the better, the more loving and intelligent option.
But how do you get this emotional calm?
You get it by discovering how equanimity naturally arises out of perceiving the seamless unity of opposing forces.
And this includes the two things we all want to find ‒ a deeper sense of self-awareness (which is all about us). And an expanded grasp of our life’s purpose and meaning (which is all about serving others).
Here’s The Thing
You have already discovered the power and freedom inherent in embracing mindfulness and presence. This is no small thing. Turning inward to stillness and silence for guidance and direction requires courage and a frequently exhausting commitment to stay the course.
Are you ready to expand the application of your mindfulness and presence to the even deeper challenges within? Expanding your CQ (Centeredness Quotient) means learning to work with two major arenas of challenge arising from within yourself: the neurological coding in your brain, and the objections of your own unconscious process (meaning ego, mind, and personality).
If so, you just need to stir up your curiosity, recognize how much more there is to discover, and honor how far you’ve come. And then deepen that faith in your essential freedom to continue the never-ending adventure of growing into who you truly are, body, mind, and soul.
Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, founder of her international training company in 1988, Facticity Trainings Inc. is an internationally acclaimed trainer of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), Ericksonian Hypnosis, and Paradox Management, her original contribution to speeding up personal transformation. Having run a successful private practice specializing in Behavior Change for over 4 decades, paralleled by her deep dive into meditation and spiritual inquiry, Ragini began focusing her expertise on the question of how to live daily life with greater conscious awareness. Driven by her desire to understand how to be happy, she traveled around the globe in search of answers. Unraveling the mysteries of the personality via the Enneagram, and the challenges of transformation through mindfulness and reflection, Ragini was called to combine her expertise in Behavioral Change, physiological psychology, and the insights granted through her spiritual journey to create Centered No Matter What. This is an empowering online program offering her 6-step consciousness-expanding process to find greater happiness and peace of mind while meeting the challenges of living in a complex, uncertain, and dualistic world. Ragini is an Amazon.com best-selling author with 5 books on the psychology of paradox, including 'Unflappable – 6 Steps To Staying Happy, Centered, Peaceful No Matter What'; 'The Jewels Of Here & Now: Awe, Reverence And Ever Deepening Gratitude'; and 'The Wildly Quiet Presence Of God: Musings Of A Modern Marketplace Mystic'
