The Qualities Of An Enlightened Leader
An enlightened leader is a person who has deeply looked into, understood and integrated their blind spots and their shadow elements. They are enlightened because they managed to free themselves from the need of pleasing others, which enables them to truly actualize their potential from an attitudinal perspective. They don’t have the belief structures, the value structures, and the identity structures holding them.
They’re not subject to cultures or to the way persons do things, to the unspoken rules and belief structures that operate around them. They are self-oriented and have intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations, their actions reflect the freedom of their thinking and emotional capacity.
Those are persons who have a high emotional intelligence, which enables them to understand their fellow human being. Their actions and behaviors are about facilitating others to become more developed leaders, so most of their time is spent creating leaders around them.
One special thing about them is that they don’t fear that other persons will be better leaders than them, because they realize a leader is only as good as the leaders around them. Most of their efforts, energy, actions and behaviors are about facilitating that in others.
They do their best to bring persons together and facilitate how teams operate, because they have long ago realized that the group is more powerful than individuals. They don’t want persons around them to need them, since they will be fully functional leaders on their own. They are aware of what needs to be done and they are doing it.
In essence, an enlightened leader is someone who facilitates other persons’ enlightenment.
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How To Spot Them
Look for leaders who are self-actualizing. This means that they have satisfied the lower levels in Maslow’s pyramid of needs.
They have transcended the surviving needs and the belonging needs. They don’t feel the need to belong; and they don’t feel the need to be seen as an enlightened leader, because they already are. They don’t care about how they could be perceived by others. And the result, which is quite a paradox, is that other persons start seeing them as these powerful, self-motivated, magnanimous, generous, facilitative, open, and transparent leaders. All of that is because they’re not holding anything back.
They don’t feel the need to fit in, so they aren’t subject to the culture. As we know it, in order to lead the culture, a leader needs to be objective to it, and this is exactly what an enlightened leader manages to do.
Enlightened leaders are able to see the fabric of the culture and actively call it out, not just passively suffer it or undergo it. They are comfortable with pointing out the faults in a culture and persons disliking them for that, because they can see what needs to occur in order to change things.
Enlightened leaders know that they need to allow persons to struggle on their own sometimes in order to grow and develop as human beings, because it is the fabric of development.
But most of all, enlightened leaders are comfortable with others’ discomfort.
Freedom: The Key Word In The Internal Experience Of The Enlightened Leader
Enlightened leaders are free from the need to be free from anything, and this enables spaciousness. They don’t need to be free of anything, and thus, there are no unfulfilled needs driving them. The result of this is them being intrinsically motivated to move, do and be whatever they want.
Enlightened leaders, unlike other persons, are not pulled down by lower level needs. They don’t want to know more or have more, and they don’t feel the need to have exact answers. They can release themselves from these lower level needs and awake themselves to the being drives, such as truth, love, simplicity, beauty, connection, and intimacy. They have spaciousness in them, and this enables them to fully express themselves in the moment.
They’re not bound by other persons’ perspectives, understanding and lower level needs.
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How To Develop Towards Becoming An Enlightened Leader
In order to become an enlightened leader, you need to look at the blind spots of your own development, step back and try to have an objective view about your self-belief structures and early level drives that are not part of who you are now.
When you look at them clearly, you will be able to put them down and see just how ridiculous these blind spots are.
Try to view it as if values, beliefs and identity structures were a greenhouse that was at first necessary to provide the environment for you, an oak tree, to grow into basic conformity and become part of society, and to become a “good person”.
But, as you, the oak tree, grow inside the greenhouse, you will eventually hit its roof because you have a massive potential. If we don’t remove the greenhouse, the oak tree will ultimately die.
So, in the end, it’s all about identifying what is the greenhouse that is now holding you back after growing you into what you are. This is where coaching can help, because it will enable you to identify the structure of the greenhouse, and eventually, tear it down.
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