UNLEASHING SELF-ACTUALIZING LEADERS

Yesterday I completed the 12 Unleashing Leadership workshop. This time in Auckland New Zealand, where along with Colin Cox and Lena Gray, members of the Neuro-Semantic Leadership Team, we had 5 other Neuro-Semantic Trainers and a whole lot of people really passionately committed to their own development as leaders. And that made the experience really an enjoyable one. What’s in that training?

Two key things: first unleashing leadership potential through the use of the Matrix Model and second, then utilizing that leadership to create a self-actualizing company (or family, community, organization).

And if you don’t know it, this is a world of incredible potential —the potential to identify, develop, and unleash the leadership potential in people. Why? How is this? It is because we need leaders at every level in life, home, school, business, government. And more than that, we need good leaders. If we had good leaders, leaders skilled and competent, this world would be tremendously better.

And what if we had great leaders! Imagine that. And while we’re on this line of imagination, what if we had truly enlightened leaders! Leaders enlightened about human nature— the best in human nature, what the hearts of human beings everywhere really want and hunger for. What if we had leaders enlightened about self-actualization psychology and competent to lead self- actualizing individuals, families, companies, communities, and countries!?

Leaders — are they born or made? Once upon a time that was the big argument in the field of leadership. Back then people queried, “Is leadership genetic or can it be nurtured and developed?” But no longer. That argument and controversy occurred when leadership was considered a matter of traits— innate traits that a person was born with. Today we know better. Today we can do so much better.

Today we know that because there are so many kinds of leaders, dimensions of leadership, and levels of leadership, there are no single set of traits that define “a leader.” Leaders come in all shapes and sizes, traits and qualities, styles and attributes. And at different levels and in different dimensions, a leader needs different qualities. He or she will need to demonstrate different skills and different styles. And that’s partly also because leadership is functional to a situation.

As a leader, what leadership function are you needing to perform? The function in a given situation will define what will be effective and what will be ineffective leadership for you. Do you know that? The function in that situation will call forth a certain set of skills that will be

required of you if you are to be effective.

Now at the heart of true leadership is leading and leading (as an unspecified verb) has to be contextualized. Who are you leading? To where? In what area or dimension? For what purpose? Then, after you have contextualize the situation in which you will lead and the skill-set required for that function, you have to do an evaluation of the quality of your leadership competencies.

Are you competent to do that function? To what degree? Do you have that potential? How much has been identified, developed, and unleashed? How much more could be unleashed?

And when you answer those questions— you are at the door labeled, “Unleashing Your Leadership Potentials.” Enter there and you enter into the journey, the adventure of becoming more and more the leader you can become. And it is a journey, a journey of learning, growing, and developing. It is a self-actualization journey.

Using Self-Actualization Psychology, leadership bringing out the best in people. It is that simple. And it is that unique and scarce. Too much leadership is money driven, greed-driven, ego-driven, status-driven —driven by everything but the true heart and passion of leadership: bringing out the best in people. profound!

And, of course, if a leadership isn’t properly driven by this as their authentic intention and meaning, then their leadership will be a joke. It will be ineffective and at best, only in name. In fact, I would guess that 90% of all leaders do not really have a clue about leadership. And maybe the percentage is higher than that. I was recently with a group of senior managers / leaders (at least that’s what they called themselves) but they were not executive or operational leaders at all; they were bureaucrats pure and simple and their primary mission as far as I could detect was to protect the status quo. And I told them, “I don’t think you have a clue about true authentic leadership.”

True leadership is radical— to be an authentic leader you have to believe in people’s potentials and that typically means believing in them much more than they believe in themselves. It means challenging them to be more than they are now, stretching them to be all that they can be.

Post Note: I only have one more public training of Unleashing Leadership this year. So if you’d like to experience Leadership in a whole new and higher dimension— contact Gilles Roy for the training in Southern France this October. Hope to see you there!