As leaders, charged with confronting and transcending conflict, it is essential that we understand how conflict arises in how we see the world, more than the how the world really is. We must accept responsibility for the conflict in our own consciousness before we can begin to address it effectively in the world. In doing so, we become a clearer vehicle to integrate and transcend our deepest challenges and to bring about a positive future. The conflict between the present and the future is really a conflict of imagination. Resolve that, and the future can begin, now.

Uncertainty, embraced without resistance, opens the mind. When we let go of our limited assumptions and patterns of thinking, the world opens to an expanse of unbounded choice. Uncertainty, embraced without resistance, also opens the heart. Only in the straightjacket of our safe convictions can we avoid truly encountering the poignancy of the world in which we live and of our limited part in it. 

Does leadership have a spiritual core? According to a new research study of developing ethical leaders, the answer is yes. If fact this evolutionary spiritual core may have everything to do with leadership.

As we engage in our own development and the edge of conscious evolution carries us into unconventional territory, we might find ourselves wondering: Is there anyone else out there? How do I carry what I now sense and understand into a world that still sees it self in conventional terms? How does the leading edge of consciousness meet others and find its expression in the world? An answer? Through community and leadership.

As we grow, we consider a greater and greater scope in our care, from our self, to our family, community, all humans, all sentient beings, and so on. But this doesn’t necessarily imply an active, engaged service orientation. We know from our research and experience supporting individuals in their development, that as we develop through stages, we progressively take on wider and wider perspectives. As we do that we tend to go through cycles, first integrating a new perspective, then acting on it. In other words, we go through alternating stages that have an orientation to either being or doing.