At first, we might go to the past, to review situations, to observe them and learn from. But if you sit in silence again and again, there are chances that you can travel to the future.

I have sat in silence, staying present long enough to reflect on leadership, to perceive, some may call it “to imagine” the future of it.

In this space, I called Conscious Leadership seeds, I will share some of my time travel adventures. Sometimes I will travel to the past to learn from my own leadership experiences, some other times I might share some observations from the present moment, but the most interesting ones might be in the future.

It’s a sunny day of winter, I am in my new home closed by the beach (I will share that story later on, for those who are thinking, How did Lau end up living by the beach?). The sun was low in the winter sky, but still good enough to sit in front of it.

I was reflecting about the ego and leadership and I wonder: How will ego and leadership relationship look like in the future? I asked to myself, or the part of me, who can travel in time.

As a time traveler observer, I saw a conversation of two, a woman and a man. They seemed to be having a deep conversation, speaking and making pauses, but most importantly listening to each other profoundly. It seemed a very deep conversation from outside. So I got deeper into it and I started to listen to their conversation.

She started the conversation saying: “We were in the meeting with the group of people who decided to participate in solving the issue with the distribution of tasks for the month. I sat outside the table to observe them. My ego mind wanted me to step out, as I listened the first ideas that they were bringing up to solve the issue. I knew how to do it, I have done it before thousand of times. But I sat still, only moving my feet, but not saying a word. It was hard to let them doing it, even though I knew how to do it.”

She made a pause. He didn’t jump into an answer immediately, like he was digesting what she said deeply and letting her do it too.

After a long pause he said: “Not so long ago, you would have been in front of the table, everybody would have been listening to you, as a leader, speaking or probably asking them some questions to make the final decision. The group would have relied on you to come up with the decision. Even though, if you were a good leader, to ask for ideas, they would still waited for you to make the last call. Now, you were not in the center, they even don’t care if you were there or not, they were not waiting for someone to solve the issue at hand for them, they were just doing it by themselves.”

“You’re right, sometimes I forgot how much leadership has changed in such a short period of time. Leaders had to have all the answers, making the final decisions. There was a lot of responsibility over them.” she added.

“But the ego was stronger back then. It took a lot of effort to get leaders identifying their ego and working it out. That was a silence process, and sometimes a painful one, because we had seen big egos leading big ideas, companies, countries and societies. But there was a group of new leaders, around The World, quietly building a new leadership paradigm.” he continued.

“Did you finally stay quiet for all the gathering?” he finally asked her.

“After they brainstormed all the possible scenarios and ideas, after moments of speaking and pausing to think each idea, they got stuck. The robot that was taking notes of the scenarios and ideas made a diagram in a big screen we had in the room. Everyone was watching the diagram and there was a big pause and silence. Neither the robot, nor the group could continue, they all were stuck.”

Sometimes a lot of ideas and a lot of minds could get into a dead end road, even for IA.

She continued “Someone looked at me, and said, “we are stuck, did you observe anything else?”. When my ego finally went quiet after a few minutes, I was able to follow the train of thoughts and ideas. So I was ready. I started asking simple questions to make them realized that they have solved half of the issue, although they seemed stuck. I proposed them to go for a break & walk for a few minutes. We regrouped again, this time outside in the park. I just sat with them this time, but I still observed and listened. They finally came up with a new way of distributing tasks for the upcoming month.”

They both made a pause.

I came back to my winter sunny day at home, it’s clear I have travelled back to the present, because you can’t see something like it these days.

Two people deeply listen to each other and making a pause to reflect.

A self-managed group of people solving an issue without a leader in front commanding and controlling the “meeting”.

And a leader observing her/his ego before intervening in the issue at hand, waiting for the team to call her/him to action, while usually it’s viceversa, it’s always a “leader calling a team to action”.

🌱 Time travel reflection: In your next team meeting, observe yourself and your team. Observe how long you can wait to jump into directiveness, and how quickly your ego mind wants to intervene. 🌱

Those were the first lessons from the future of leadership.

Hoping some seeds 🌱 stays with you, as emerging new leaders are creating the new paradigm that Humanity is… at this point, crying for.

Laus

Conscious Leadership Seed 🌱

Storyteller & Time Traveler 😊