The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership book summary
Key concepts
When leaders are below the line, their primary commitment is to being right, and when they are above the line, their primary commitment is to learning.
Above the line leadership is open, curious, and committed to learning.
Below the line leadership is closed, defensive, and committed to being right.
Leading from below the line is not wrong—it is a common state.
The first mark of conscious leaders is self-awareness and the ability to tell themselves the truth.
Commitment is a statement of what is. From our perspective, you can know your commitments by your results, not by what you say your commitments are. We are all committed. We are all producing results. Conscious leaders own their commitments by owning their results.
The Four Ways of Leading model shows the states of consciousness leaders operate in: To Me, By Me, Through Me, and As Me. Leaders are well served by focusing first on the shift from To Me to By Me leadership.
If I am in the To Me consciousness, I see myself “at the effect of,” meaning that the cause of my condition is outside me. It is happening To Me.
When leaders shift from below the line to above it, they move from the To Me to the By Me state—from living in victim consciousness to living in creator consciousness and from being “at the effect of” to “consciously creating with.” Instead of believing that the cause of their experience is outside themselves, they believe that they are the cause of their experience.
In the Through Me state of leadership, the “me” starts to open to another. Curiosity begins to guide this leader to a different set of questions, such as, “Am I the centre of the universe?” “Is there something going on in addition to me?” “What is the nature of this other?” “Is it possible to be in relationship to this other?”
Just as responsibility is the gateway to move from To Me to By Me, surrender, or letting go, is the gateway to move from By Me to Through Me. For most leaders, this means letting go of control. When we first meet leaders, almost all have a strong control plan, where their ego is invested in the appearance of control. In truth, very little is under our control, but the To Me and By Me leaders believe the contrary.
The second aspect of As Me is the absence of a personal “me.” Not only is everyone and everything one—there is no separation—and also no personal centre.
COMMITMENT 1: Taking Radical Responsibility
Toxic fear drives the victim-villain-hero triangle. Blame, shame, and guilt keep it going. As we said at the beginning, blame and its root cause—toxic fear—are powerful motivators. But they also leave a negative residue: resentment and bitterness, along with low learning states, demotivation, and eventual demoralization.
Leaders typically use five levels of motivation: Toxic fear: blame, shame, and guilt
Extrinsic motivation: money, title, the corner office, and other perks
Intrinsic motivation: learning, fulfilling purpose, and autonomy
Most people believe that there is a way the world should be and a way the world shouldn’t be.
As long as we believe that there is a way the world should be (e.g. we should meet our quarterly targets) and a way the world shouldn’t be (e.g. milk shouldn’t be spilled), life won’t work according to our beliefs. Simply put, life won’t always turn out the way we think it should. And when that happens, we typically react by becoming anxious, resentful, or controlling and try to force the world to fit our beliefs.
We want to be very clear: self-blame is equally as toxic as blaming others, or circumstances, and it is NOT taking responsibility.
So the first step in taking responsibility is to shift from believing that the world should be a particular way to believing that the world just shows up. Second, we need to shift from rigidity, close-mindedness, and self-righteousness to curiosity, learning, and wonder (which naturally occurs once our beliefs change). All drama in leadership and life is caused by the need to be right. Letting go of that need is a radical shift all great leaders make.
Taking full responsibility for one’s circumstances (physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually) is the foundation of true personal and relational transformation.
Blame, shame, and guilt all come from toxic fear. Toxic fear drives the victim-villain-hero triangle, which keeps leaders and teams below the line. This leads to high employee turnover and low innovation, creativity, and collaboration.
Conscious leaders and teams take full responsibility—radical responsibility—instead of placing blame. Radical responsibility means locating the cause and control of our lives in ourselves, not in external events.
Instead of asking “Who’s to blame?”, conscious leaders ask, “What can we learn and how can we grow from this?” Conscious leaders are open to the possibility that instead of controlling and changing the world, perhaps the world is just right the way it is. This creates huge growth opportunities on a personal and organizational level.
COMMITMENT 2: Learning Through Curiosity
Self-awareness and learning agility are known to create sustained success in leaders—they form the foundation of conscious leadership.
Conscious leaders are passionately committed to knowing themselves, which is the basis of their willingness to live in a state of curiosity.
At any point, leaders are either above the line (open, curious, and committed to learning) or below the line (defensive, closed and committed to being right).
Being “right” doesn’t cause drama, but wanting, proving, and fighting to be “right” does. Even though conscious leaders get defensive like everyone else, they regularly interrupt this natural reactivity by pausing to breathe, accept, and shift.
The issue is not whether we will drift but how long we stay in a drift before we shift. There are two kinds of shift moves: those that change our blood and body chemistry (such as conscious breathing and changing our posture) and those that change our consciousness (such as speaking unarguably and appreciation).
COMMITMENT 3: Feeling All Feelings
If an emotion is merely energy, or a sensation, moving in the body, then it is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong—it just is. That means we are not our feelings any more than we are our hunger pangs or the discomfort associated with a sprained ankle. Feelings just occur.
We suggest that there are five primary emotions—anger, fear, sadness, joy, and sexual feelings—each with a unique energy pattern or set of sensations in and on the body.
This matching of experience (what is the sensation) with expression (move and vocalize) is important for releasing feelings.
In her book My Stroke of Insight, Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte-Taylor says that emotions last at most ninety seconds. We agree. Most emotions—sensations occurring in and on the body—move through the body in a minute and a half or less (usually far less) if we match our expression with our experience. If you repress or recycle emotion, it can harden into a mood: Anger becomes bitterness. Fear becomes anxiety. Sadness becomes apathy.
Feeling a feeling all the way through (the main objective of Commitment 3) means letting that feeling have its full life cycle (less than ninety seconds) by breathing, moving and vocalizing, resting in calmness, and riding the next wave through to completion.
Anger tells a leader that something is not, or is no longer, of service. Or, that something is not aligned, and must be changed or destroyed so that something more beneficial can replace it.
Fear tells a leader that something important needs to be known.
Sadness tells a leader that something needs to be let go of, said goodbye to, moved on from. Sadness is the energy of loss.
Joy tells a leader that something needs to be celebrated, appreciated, or laughed at, or someone needs to be patted on the back.
Sexual feelings are the energy of creativity and creation. They tell the leader that something new wants to be birthed, to be created, to come into the world.
Great leaders learn to access all three centres of intelligence: the head, the heart, and the gut.
Resisting and repressing feelings is standard operating procedure in most organizations. Feelings are viewed as negative and a distraction to good decision-making and leadership.
Conscious leaders know that feelings are natural and that expressing them is healthy. They know that emotion is energy in motion; feelings are simply physical sensations.
The five primary emotions are anger, fear, sadness, joy, and sexual feelings. Knowing how to express them all of the way through to completion helps us develop emotional intelligence.
Each primary emotion has a unique energy pattern and set of sensations in and on the body. Every feeling we experience invites us in a specific way to grow in awareness and knowing. Repressing, denying, or recycling emotions creates physical, psychological, and relationship problems.
To release emotion, first locate the sensation in the body (“What are the bits doing?”), allow or accept the sensation (“Can I allow or even welcome these sensations?”), and then match your experience with your expression (“What sound or movement does this sensation want?”). Conscious leaders learn to locate, name, and release their feelings. They know that feelings not only add richness and color to life but are also an essential ally to successful leadership.
COMMITMENT 4: Speaking Candidly
Leaders who lead from above the line take another approach. They reveal their thoughts, opinions, judgments and feelings. These leaders realize that the mind generates all kinds of judgments about people, circumstances, situations and conditions. Again, this is just what a mind does. The conscious leader doesn’t see his judgments as RIGHT. Rather, he simply sees that judgments are arising. He also notices that the judgments that arise are more about him than they are about the other person. Our judgments about the world tell us a great deal about ourselves and very little about the world. They reveal something about our reactions, beliefs, listening filters, unconscious habits or expectations.
Great leaders learn to reveal what is true for them by revealing what is unarguable. Based on the work of The Hendricks Institute, three types of reveals are unarguable: a thought, a feeling, or a sensation. By unarguable, we simply mean that people can’t argue with it. For example, if you say, “We have to get a new head of our department of surgery,” that statement is arguable.
Here are three forms of unarguable communication: I’m having the thought that… I feel… [sad, scared, angry, joyful, or sexual]. I’m having a body sensation of… [pinching in my shoulder blades, swirling in my belly, throbbing in my temples].
Leaders and teams have found that seeing reality clearly is essential to being successful. In order to see reality clearly, leaders and organizations need everyone to be truthful and not lie about, or withhold, information. They need candor.
Candor is the revealing of all thoughts, feelings, and sensations in an honest, open, and aware way. Speaking candidly increases the probability that leaders and teams can collectively see reality more clearly.
Withholding is refraining from revealing everything to all relevant parties. Withholding also decreases energy in leaders, which often shows up as boredom or lethargy in them and relational disconnection in the team.
Rather than withholding, conscious leaders practice revealing. They reveal not because they are right, but because they wish to be known.
Through this transparency, they create connection and open learning.
Conscious listening is one of the most important skills for effective leadership: by identifying our listening “filters,” we can let go of them and become fully present to the expression of the other person. Conscious listening takes courage: we must listen for the content (head centre), the emotions (heart centre), and base desire (gut centre) being expressed by the other person.
It is best to start with candour in relationships only when you have a shared commitment to it, along with the necessary skills, including being able to speak unarguably.
COMMITMENT 5: Eliminating Gossip
Conscious leaders know that facts are not the cause of upset or drama. Facts don’t cause stress. Drama and stress are caused by stories, and stories are made up. We are the story maker.
The shift move is to choose to hold your story lightly. Holding your story lightly means acknowledging that your story is YOUR story. It is not fact; it is not true; and you don’t need to be right. It is simply the way you see the world. This facilitates sharing your stories and welcoming others to reveal their stories about the world.
Even though gossip has long been a part of office culture, it is a key indicator of an unhealthy organization and one of the fastest ways to derail motivation and creativity.
Gossip is a statement about another made by someone with negative intent or a statement the speaker would be unwilling to share in exactly the same way if that person were in the room.
Gossip is an attempt to validate the righteousness of a person’s thinking and is below the line; it is not a comment designed to serve the person being discussed.
People gossip to gain validation, control others and outcomes, avoid conflict, get attention, feel included, and make themselves right by making others wrong. In short, people usually gossip out of fear.
If you gossip, clean it up by revealing your participation in the gossip to everyone involved. Use the issue-clearing model as a tool to separate fact from story and to learn to speak directly to one another.
When leaders and teams learn to speak candidly with each other, they benefit from the direct feedback about issues within the organization that otherwise could derail creative energy and productive collaboration.
COMMITMENT 6: Practicing Integrity
Integrity, then, is wholeness, and wholeness is… The unbroken flow of energy and life force Congruence between what is experienced and what is expressed Alignment with life purpose
To be impeccable concerning agreements, this model asks us to master four practices: Making clear agreements Keeping agreements Renegotiating agreements Cleaning up broken agreements
Integrity is the practice of keeping agreements, taking responsibility, revealing authentic feelings, and expressing unarguable truths. It is essential to thriving leaders and organizations.
Integrity is not defined here as conforming to a moral or ethical code, but rather as facilitating wholeness and congruence.
Integrity is an unbroken flow of energy and life force, congruence between what is experienced and expressed, and alignment with life purpose.
Organizations have a natural flow of energy, but when it is interrupted by integrity breaches, leadership is dampened and employee engagement decreases.
Conscious leaders are masters at managing energy, which leads to an organizational culture that is alive, engaged, passionate, on purpose, creative, innovative, intuitive, clear, visionary, playful, relaxed, and refreshed. There are four pillars of integrity: taking radical responsibility (Commitment 1), speaking candidly (Commitment 4), feeling all feelings (Commitment 3), and keeping agreements (Commitment 6).
Conscious leaders are impeccable with their agreements. They make clear agreements, keep them, renegotiate them when needed, and clean them up when broken.
Integrity is fundamental to conscious leadership and successful thriving organizations.
COMMITMENT 7: Generating Appreciation
Committing to appreciation, along with avoiding entitlement, helps leaders and organizations grow value and connection in the workplace.
Appreciation is comprised of two parts: sensitive awareness and an increase in value.
Entitlement arises when rewards and benefits become an expectation instead of a preference.
Living in appreciation has two branches: being open to fully receiving appreciation and being able to fully give appreciation. For most, it is more difficult, and people are more afraid, to receive appreciation than to give it.
To avoid receiving appreciation, people strategically deflect it. Masterful appreciation is sincere, unarguable, specific, and succinct. Appreciation allows the unique gifts in the community to be recognized.
COMMITMENT 8: Excelling in your Zone of Genius
Conscious leaders build an organization that allows all team members to realize their full potential—and they support and inspire others to do the same.
People tend to work and live in four zones: incompetence, competence, excellence, and genius.
Conscious leaders are committed to maximizing their zone of genius, where their full magnificence and creativity can be expressed without hesitation. Unconscious leaders get stuck in the zones of excellence, competence, and incompetence, never living up to and expressing their extraordinary brilliance.
The Upper Limits Problem, named by Gay Hendricks, identifies the fears and beliefs that keep people from stepping into their zone of genius.
We can program our nervous systems to allow for greater happiness, fulfillment, and relational connectedness. Becoming aware of our unique giftedness, as well as the environments where that is most valued, (the Best Stuff Exercise) helps us spend more and more of our time thriving.
Conscious leaders who spend time with team members to assess, understand, and appreciate their own unique genius qualities and talents create organizations that excel on all levels.
COMMITMENT 9: Living a Life of Play and Rest
Energy management is more important than time management or money management or any other kind of management when in it comes to effective leadership. There are many keys to effective energy management but the one addressed in this commitment is the honoring of natural rhythms.
Creating a life of play, improvisation, and laughter allows life to unfold easily and energy to be maximized. Play is an absorbing, apparently purposeless activity that provides enjoyment and suspends self-consciousness and a sense of time. It is also self-motivating and makes you want to do it again.
An imposed nose-to-the-grindstone culture will lead to higher levels of stress, guilt, employee burnout and turnover. Energy exerted with this type of “hard work” is wrought with effort and struggle, whereas energy exerted through play is energizing.
Most leaders resist play because they think they will fall behind if they aren’t seriously working hard. Organizations that take breaks to rest and play are actually more productive and creative. Energy is maximized when rest, renewal, and personal rhythms are honoured.
Conscious leaders who value and encourage an atmosphere of play and joy within themselves and in their organizations create high-functioning, high-achieving cultures. Workaholism is just like any other addiction, and it is an epidemic in the corporate world.
COMMITMENT 10: Exploring the Opposite
Do you see that having to be right is making you suffer? To call it suffering may seem dramatic but in our experience those who look closely at the experience of believing their thoughts find some form of suffering. Whenever we don’t allow reality to be what it is, we are in opposition to life. This opposition is the cause of all suffering.
Exploring the opposite means being open to the notion that the opposite of your story (thoughts, beliefs, opinions) could be as true as or truer than your story.
It is not the issue itself that causes pain, but your interpretation of it.
Conscious leaders take responsibility for being the labeller of their experiences and their life, and they learn to question all their labels. The Work of Byron Katie (www.thework.com) is a powerful tool in learning how to question beliefs that could likely be holding us back.
Conscious leaders practice simple ways to question the beliefs that cause suffering, starting with “Is it true?” and “Can I absolutely know it is true?”
The turnaround exercise allows leaders to practice shifting their beliefs from knowing to curiosity.
When conscious leaders let go of the righteousness of their beliefs, they open to curiosity and align with their deepest desires.
COMMITMENT 11: Sourcing Approval, Control and Security
Humans have three core wants: approval, control, and security. All other “wants” stem from these basic desires.
The wanting of security is the most basic of the core desires. At its root, wanting security is wanting to survive. Another word for security is safety. Most of us believe we are a separate self that has a beginning and an end (birth and death), and therefore we do everything we can to make sure this separate self survives.
The second core want is approval. Approval is the desire to be loved, liked, wanted, valued, appreciated, respected, to belong, and to be part of something. The desire for approval comes from the desire to survive.
The third core want is control. If I can’t gain security through approval then I’ll get it through control. If I can’t earn your approval, then I’ll try to control you and life.
The issue is “wanting” approval, control and security. As soon as we want something, anything, it implies that we don’t have it. Wanting comes from a belief in lack. I can only want what I believe I don’t already have.
Humans have core wants of approval, control, and security. All other wants are versions of these three basic desires, which show up in a multitude of ways.
Security is about survival, approval is about belonging and being part of something, and control is the ego’s last resort if it cannot achieve security through approval. The challenge is not in having approval, control, and security, but in believing that they are missing. This causes people to seek these core desires outside themselves—somewhere “out there.” The “If Only . . . I Would” exercise can help leaders wake up from the trance that their happiness is located outside themselves.
It’s not the wants but the “wanting” of something different that leads to an unsatisfying life. The Sedona Method (www.sedona.com) offers questions and practices to source security, approval, and control from within.
All leaders at any moment are operating from one of two experiences: either they think they lack something and seek to get it from somewhere or someone, or they believe they are already whole, perfect, and complete and move in the world from love and creativity.
COMMITMENT 12: Having Enough of Everything
We have found that whenever people experience life from the perspective of “not enough,” what immediately follows is competition. When there is not enough for everyone, we need to make sure that we don’t end up with the short end of the stick. This cascades such that resources seem personal. We believe that time is “ours” to control and that energy is something we are allocated. We accuse others of wasting “our” time and draining “our” energy. Because these resources are precious, each of us must fight for our share.
Conscious leaders experience their lives as having enough of everything: time, money, love, energy, space, and resources. The scarcity belief that there is “not enough” causes leaders to focus on making sure they get what is “theirs.” The myths that feed scarcity are that there is never enough, more is better, and it will always be this way. Conscious leaders notice this focus on the toxic myth of insufficiency and shift from a mentality of scarcity to one of sufficiency.
To unwind scarcity, conscious leaders notice their reference point and check in with themselves, actively challenging their beliefs. Conscious leaders can practice checking in with their experience in the present moment, bringing attention to the physical body, and noticing the abundance of each moment.
To those committed to conscious leadership, the belief and experience of sufficiency creates a profound shift in their relationship with others, work, and life.
COMMITMENT 13: Experiencing the World as an Ally
Consider that all people support the discovery of an aspect of yourself that you could not have seen without them. Even the most adversarial—in fact, especially adversarial—individuals can help you grow or become aligned with what you most want to create. Every circumstance helps you uncover something new about your beliefs, behaviours, or desires. Every person or situation is “for you” in serving your learning and growth, nudging you to become more conscious.
Conscious leaders commit to seeing all people and circumstances as allies in their growth. Unconscious reactive leaders view other people and circumstances as obstacles to getting what they want. Most leaders start with this reactive mindset: they are convinced they will feel happy once they get what they want and if they can’t get what they want, it’s because others are standing in their way.
Rather than seeing all people as allies, unconscious leaders think either/or: “people are either with me or against me.” This does not mean that competition is nonexistent, but that even competitors are supportive catalysts for growth and that adversaries can be extremely beneficial.
Challenges create the positive pressure often needed for conscious leaders to expand beyond the comfort zone and into their full magnificence.
Conscious leaders are able to shift out of the state of comparison to see everyone and everything as equally valuable. This perspective recognizes that all people and circumstances are allies in learning and growth.
COMMITMENT 14: Creating Win for all Solutions
From the To Me mindset, the only options available are competing and compromising. From the By Me mindset, a third option becomes available: collaboration. In our experience, collaboration opens all kinds of possibilities that are not available from competition and compromise.
Win-for-all solutions are a goal of conscious leaders and organizations. Conscious leaders commit to moving beyond the zero-sum game into a creative solution that serves all. Unconscious leaders see situations as win/lose and create a culture that promotes competition and compromise.
Win-for-all solutions require the building blocks of the other conscious leadership commitments, providing a concrete example of how conscious leaders integrate all the commitments into a way of being in the world.
Within an organization, win-for-all coaching questions help create a culture that supports and encourages everyone. The energy resulting from win-for-all collaboration allows solutions to be implemented quickly. A win-for-all culture allows an organization to thrive as creativity, collaboration, vision, and achievement are optimized.
COMMITMENT 15: Being the Resolution
Being the resolution means that conscious leaders recognize what is missing in the world and view that as an invitation to become what is needed. When unconscious leaders grow weary of an intense version of the victim-villain-hero triangle, they often shift to an “indifferent” experience of drama, characterized by apathy and resentment.
Many unconscious leaders, who have spent their entire careers problem-solving, delivering results, and pulling people along, often feel drained and want to disconnect. Team members who don’t feel heard by unconscious leaders stop caring about making changes and give up on creating solutions that could benefit the organization.
Conscious leaders see what is missing, not from a perspective of lack, but of opportunity. They then follow a calling to respond to the perceived need. Being the resolution takes place only from a conscious leader’s whole body YES! Being the resolution incorporates the mastery of living from several of the other commitments and, once mastered, allows conscious leaders to move the world to greater beauty, alignment, productivity, efficiency, and grace.
