We are all called to be leaders every day, no matter what our professional status. That’s because we are all in charge of our own lives. Every moment we spend, be it at work, at home, or somewhere in between, we have the opportunity to be enlightened leaders.
We may not have ever considered that it is possible for us to be an enlightened leader. Yet every time we make a choice with intention to do or say what we consider to be the right thing, we have added to our cache of enlightenment. The tricky part of approaching all aspects of our life consistently from that perspective is that it may not always be efficient, cost-effective or the path of least resistance It may not be the way we have always done it in the past either. In fact, in this new era of light speed technological and communication advances, the most enlightened position is pretty likely to be something different than it was even a few years ago.
The modern enlightened leadership movement started in the business world in the mid-1990s with Ed Oakley and Doug Krug. Dr. Deepak Chopra taught a course on enlightened leadership at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management as well as consulting with top tier leaders in large organizations. The core principles of this style of leadership are to offer effective, nurturing leadership that unlocks the potential for greatness in the leader and those that follow the leader. Dr. Chopra says;
Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality; not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love, and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight, and focused attention. These are the ingredients of success, really.
In business or any aspect of your life, these ingredients are key to living a life rich in meaning.
Think about how all aspects of our lives would be if we approached it as an enlightened leader. We would nurture ourselves with the elements that unlock our potential for greatness. Those elements may be different for each individual. In our business world, it could mean additional education, public speaking and networking opportunities, a professional mentor, or effective time management tools that really work for us. As the enlightened leader of our lives, we have the responsibility and freedom to choose what we need to unlock your potential. The tricky part is taking the time to find out enough about ourselves to know what we need.
Enlightened leadership means staying aware and alert that how you do what you do is important People are looking to you as an example. Make sure that example reflects your core values.
The keystone of true leadership is the ability to cultivate and enrich spirituality. Cultivate their own spirituality allows to enrich life force and to adopt creative impulse. Today, the fact of cultivating the spirituality is not a luxury hedonistic, or distance itself from the material life, but it is a requirement for those who want to evolve in their personal and professional dimension. Leadership today is the ability to be and remain innovative, to be a high performance engines in an increasingly complex, stressful world, sometimes hostile and, at the same time, capable of ensuring a positive atmosphere, challenging for themselves, for their employees, family and, more generally, for all other people.
Commit to better understand the complexity of one’s spirit and then to enrich this knowledge allows to better understand the many nuances and subtleties of a situation in which we live, the people, with their reactions and their moods, as if they were the mirror of ourselves. Our ability to grow our mind and our life force becomes the key to success. Spirituality becomes a key component of our balance that allows us at the same time to call us into question and to accept ourselves and others to act in a more relevant and comprehensive way.
This is truly a brilliant read! “Enlightened leadership means staying aware and alert that how you do what you do is important People are looking to you as an example. Make sure that example reflects your core values.” And this says it all. I think we are just growing into this definition of Enlightened Leadership.
This is beautiful, Darity. I love the idea of infusing spirituality into our approach to leadership as it anchors us in our values. I’ve never heard it framed in quite the same way.