Seeing and Being

You know and change the world from your values and beliefs. They gives coherence and meaning to your life and leadership.

You are a unique observer. The way you experience the world is unique. You choose your actions based on how you see things and this defines the result you get. How you interpret the value of what you see is how you make sense of your being in the world. This assessment is influenced by the distinctions you make from your innate human capacities, your Way of Being. You are aligning the language your use, the emotions you display, the moods you adopt and your body postures.  If not aligned and consistent, you are perceived to be “fake”, inauthentic, insincere and not to be trusted.

Your observer listens and interprets your physical actions and choice of language. This determines your mood and how effective you are at getting what you want in different situations and relationships. 

You can’t really know what you don’t see. As Humberto Maturana observed, “All knowing is doing and all doing is knowing.”  Most of your existence takes place around you yet outside your awareness. These are your blind spots. To improve your “seeing” try paying attention to what you notice and consider if it serves your intentions. When each aspect of your way of being compliments that of others your behaviour is perceived by them to be authentic and coherent.  This is because your language cannot be separated from your emotional life or body posture. When you are in a mood state of depression your emotions are dulled, your posture is closed and your language is negative. You need an energised and optimistic mood state to deal with a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) context.

Being a Life Leader provides you with a Way of Being to cope with the psychological demands of a VUCA World.  It will help you navigate your way through life experiences so that they have meaning and deliver more satisfaction. You may have all the material signs of fulfilment or success, but you could also be feeling a profound sense of emptiness. Understanding what you are doing that is creating your Way of Being you can see what practical steps you can take to get the results that make your life work better for you.

Seeing the whole picture

Life Leadership involves allowing all aspects of your Way of Being to work together to achieve a declared intention.  This is true of organisations, teams and individuals.  If the behaviour of the individual is not congruent with that of peers and a shared vision, credibility and trust will suffer.  Peoples language, mood and body energy have to fit together in a coherent way to achieve what they all care about.

But, does what you are doing fit with who you are and what you care about? If your life situation, an important relationship or your job does not answer these key questions – Do you really want them? There has to be congruence between working with what is and is your desired outcome.  Often it’s a matter of how you see the “thing” than what the “thing” is. It may be the way your boss spoke to you, not respecting who you are and what matters to you that causes the incongruence. When you are a Life Leader you look to your own behaviour first and look for changes you could make in your own way of being to connect with your boss and get agreement on what you both care about. 

Seeing from the Inside-out and Outside-in

If you live your life from the outside-in your thoughts will be dominated by feelings of unfairness, disconnection, resentment, uncertainty and concerns about your status.  You are allowing an imposed worldview that delivers a fake promise of power and wealth, neither of which can deliver true happiness or peace of mind. 

Money may deliver comforts, but it rarely brings satisfaction or meaning into the inner lives of human beings.  When you live from an inside-out perspective you allow your own sense-making abilities, or inner wisdom to reveal a world that offers deeper insights, an appreciation of love, relationships with meaning and infinite possibilities. Being popular and looking attractive is helpful, but it won’t give you access to a life with meaning and deep satisfaction. 

You may feel a sense of unease as you wrestle with your daily concerns, but your mind can fix them because it created them. If you can see your feelings as pass events, they will not dominate your thoughts, leaving you stuck in a negative mood state. Negative moods limit your capacity to see alternatives, to gain insights or exchange resentment for ambition or anxiety for curiosity. Mindfulness and Centring practices can be helpful if you want to achieve a state of calm and clarify your best intentions. A Life Leadership Course can show you the way. 

Seeing from the Bottom-up and Top-down

There is no denying the profound impact that personal history and culture have on shaping your habitual way of thinking. You will benefit from seeing your concerns and problems from different perspectives. As Stephen Covey reminds us “seek first to understand.” Only when you see the benefits from what could be different can you commit to making change happen. So what questions should you be asking?

The diagram below summarises what goes into you seeing your life as a whole and live it from the top-down or bottom-up.  You can start from knowing who you are to give your life meaning, or you can start at the bottom and clarify what you want to do with your life and who you need to help make it happen. At the core is understanding your Way of Being as this shapes what you want to do and how you will do it.

Seen from an organisational context there is meaning and purpose that gets handed down from above and is not open for discussion. But the promises and priorities that will deliver the vision come from the bottom-up as they rely on the context and relationship s that make things work. The resulting culture is the organisation’s Way of Being, its language, mood and level of engagement.

You don’t live in this world by yourself, so you have to consider where new sources of energy could come from.  They are found in the relationships you have with others (bottom-up energy), within society and community (outside-in energy) and influential sources of power (top-down energy).  How these sources of energy impact on you can be either liberating or constraining.  How you use these sources will help you engage with the ‘bigger picture’. It will have a profound impact on your capacity to lead a life of our own choosing, but not if you allow life to lead you.

In a VUCA World, individuals, organisations and nations look for things that will help them tap into these different sources of energy. They serve a mutual interest. Being clear about your what you can offer, what you care about and what you can commit to, become more important success factors than protectionisms or isolation. Reality is what we think it is, so we can look for the benefits of closer connection and shared interests.

Seeing yourself more clearly

Understanding the different components of your identity will reveal a bigger picture of who we are. Ask yourself.  How do we identify with your many roles, achievements, mistakes and values? Which is generating concern for you? What and who can help you move forward to resolve them? Answers tend to come from exploring past assertions and current assessments with the future in mind. But whatever you consider has to pass through the filters of relationships, beliefs, reputation and personality.

The capacity to see yourself more clearly requires you to be a more powerful observer of your Way of Being. Is your language positive? Does it have a purpose? What are you seeking from your conversations? Is the way you are seeing things working for you? Is it producing the results you want?

In the majority of situations, we have a choice. We are where we are now because of the choices made in the past. There are no wins and losses, no right or wrong, good or bad luck, they are just choices that reflect how we see ourselves and talk to ourselves. We need to learn how to be better observers of our emotions, moods, postures and relationships. It all starts with noticing ourselves in the bigger picture. A Life Leadership Course addresses these issues and provides useful skills to practice.

Seeing the Power of Your Mood

Unlike other mammals, human beings have an innate capacity to care and show empathy. This involves imaging what life is like for others, but accepting that only they can decide to manage their own emotions. Some emotions stay in the background of your mind and become a mood state that influences your whole Way of Being, even when you are “being rational”.  The feelings generated by moods help you make decisions.

Four Basic Mood States

There are four basic moods that shape your life in very fundamental ways. You can learn more about your “Mood Managers” which shape the approach adopted on this website. There will be ‘facts’ that you believe cannot be changed. If you cannot accept the possibility that they can be interpreted differently you are stuck in your habitual way of thinking and feeling.  To change your mood you have to accept that alternative ways of being are possible if you are to change. 

Shifting your Mood

If you actively oppose the possibility of seeing things differently you cannot reframe your interpretation of the facts and you get stuck in a mood of resentment or resignation. If you oppose the possibility of change, you believe that things can never be different. If you can accept that alternatives exist and can be found, you become more optimistic and ambitious for your future. You are then more open to learning and new practices.

The way to stimulate your imagination is to challenge your assumptions about facts that you believe will not change. Conversations can reveal the absence of logic, common sense or coherence in stories you are telling yourself. Until you notice that the way you see things aren’t working for you the mind cannot make sense of the need to change. You need to feel compassion for yourself to let go and reveal your blind spots to feel that you no longer want to be a victim of your assumptions.

Making Moods Happen.

Mood states can “take you over” if you hold on to false assertions from the past or ungrounded worries about the future. You can only address past and future concerns if you can observe them and assess them using these thoughts and their emotions in the present moment. To move from anxiety or worry into a state of peacefulness requires you to declare your acceptance of your emotions, but not be controlled by them. You are accepting that uncomfortable facts have to be faced, possibilities explored and uncertainties embraced. Only then can you seek growth and imagine a better future and take action to achieve it.

Metaphors that Drive your Mood State

The values, attitudes and practices which underpin Life Leadership approaches are largely based on our innate capacities as human beings. For example, we do most of our thinking using metaphors. To understand our thinking we need to question ourselves and listen to our insights that appear as metaphors.

Jonathan Haidt’s uses the metaphor of “a rider on an elephant” to explain how the rider mind is the conscious part of its thoughts, which is a small fraction of our being that we are aware of. The elephant mind does everything else in the background. Consequently, it’s the elephant that selects the metaphors that are revealed through the rider’s actions. The metaphor turns a concept into a thing to give it clarity.

The words you use will say a lot about “what” you think about and “why” is important to you. Interestingly, the metaphors you use say a lot more about your unconscious concerns that shape “how” you think and choose to act.  If you say that you “have a mountain to climb,” it provides an insight into how you see the difficulties in practical and emotional terms.  If you are “on the warpath” you have an enemy you will not surrender to. If you want “a well-oiled machine” you are seeking an impersonal and ordered resolution so the “parts” that are not moving quickly enough can be replaced. Metaphors reflect how you see reality or want to perceive a preferred future. 

Words are just symbols, a description of “What?” you experience.  The meaning-making comes from listening for what emerges from “So What?” questions that delve into the logic in your unconscious mind. Your mood presents you with metaphors that give structure to your experience in the form of stories, mental pictures, mini-movies and anecdotes. To impact the physical world you have to decide “Now What?”. Your mood chooses the metaphors you pay attention to that determine your preferred actions from which you will get your desired result. 

Seeing Your Intentions

When you act impulsively, you lose the ability to align your intentions with your actions. It’s easy to get triggered by criticism and then react emotionally and then say something you might later regret.  If you can pause momentarily to consider what the impact of your unthinking behaviour might be, you might reflect on your intention. If you are aware of the interpretation you are making of your intention at the time, you are more likely to act in a way that best serves your intentions. 

This interpretation of events that you make in a split second will depend on your level of consciousness.  If you were just trying to explain your actions to someone and it had a negative impact, how do you revisit the event to learn why you received a negative or positive response. Was the language you used aggressive or your mood state impatient? What mood were you in and did you care about what the impact might be

If your intention is to connect and communicate trust then your whole Way of Being (language, mood and body movements) must reflect this, otherwise, your intention will be read as threatening.  Conversations get confusing when you are having negative thoughts yet trying to come across a positive. Your real intentions can be read in the impact you are having on the Way of Being observed in the reactions of others.

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