New Leadership and Interiority. How Evoking Happiness and Shifting Your Internal State Transforms Your Leadership
Hello. I’m going to make a film about a very important part of the new leadership that’s needed in our time. The new style of leadership that will bring us forward into a better time in the future, as humans. And this aspect of leadership is about our internal state. How is our mood, our consciousness? Because our internal state evokes the whole atmosphere in the people and beings around us.
To illustrate this, I’m going to start with a story. Many years ago, I was living in a place with my son, young son, and I used to walk him to school every morning, and we would walk down between some houses. It was out in the countryside. It was a cobbled street. There were thatched cottages on one side and gardens that went down to a little stream on the other. And in one of these houses, there was a guy who lived there, and we often passed him, both going to the school and coming back in the afternoon. And he was always in a gruff mood. We’d come past and say, “Good morning”, and he’d grunt in response. We’d come back in the afternoon, say “Good afternoon” and he’d grunt.
So for years, this went on. He used to smoke a pipe, and what was interesting was that in his garden he had a railway line, a model railway line that he’d constructed. But we didn’t find out anything about it for years.
Now, what happened was, I was training, and my teacher taught me this amazing technique for evoking happiness from within, not taking it from outside. (I’ll make another video about this another time.) But I was working with this a lot, and working with my inner state of happiness, and without really changing anything in the external I just said, ‘Good afternoon’, he suddenly responded in a much more friendly way, and he actually told us a lot about the railway line and how he was working on it.
He was an engineer, and it was his interest was to make the rails and everything. Now that came partly from changing the atmosphere within me, and it changed the atmosphere of what came back.
Yesterday a woman asked me, what is ‘evocative leadership’? And I told her, one of the principles of evocative leadership is that we’re evoking from within.
So we’re working on our inner state first, and knowing that that affects the field around us, the people that we’re leading. Sometimes we need to evoke more trust; sometimes we need to evoke more rest and caring. Sometimes we need to evoke more courage, or sometimes we need to evoke more innovative creativity.
If we start by shifting our internal state – and it takes practice – then influence the field of people around us. As Bill O’Brien, the Chief Executive of Hannover Insurance said, “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.”
So we can shift in many ways, with our breath, breath practice, or with our thinking, You can change your interior condition by changing your thoughts, including your image thoughts. When you image something that makes you feel happy, that can begin to generate happiness within you. You can also shift with music, with song, with your body posture. Just shifting your posture actually changes your energy state of consciousness.
So learning to lead the self first is part of the new leadership, and it’s really important. All of us need to learn more about how to lead from within, because when we’re in, for example, a state of oneness with the universe, then almost everything that we do, everything that we say, and do and even think brings that vibration, that energy, into the world.
If we’re in a state of separation and battle and fighting, then we’re going to be touching the world with that energy. So this is so important that we recognise that how we affect the exterior world depends on our interior state of consciousness. Thanks for watching.
