Practices for Leading in Complexity

Social Innovation Learning Program



Deepening wisdom in action

• Commit to growth and self-awareness• Contemplative/mindfulness practices• Psychotherapeutic process and healing• Authentic relationships with others and the world

• Owning our shadow• State-shifting in response to triggers • Drop addiction to urgency and stress

If we attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, our own freedom, integrity and capacity to love, we will not have anything to give to others. We will communicate nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressiveness, and our own ego-centered ambitions.

- Thomas Merton

What do you do to deepen your self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love?

Appreciative Inquiry 3-2-1

• Share a story in threes: talk about a time when you feel you were acting with your fullest potential/deepest wisdom as a leader. – How did it feel? – What were you doing? – What was the context? – Were others involved?

• Each person rotates taking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspective: “subject”, “deep listener”, and “system-watcher”

3 Core Perspectives of Self, Relationships & System

1st Person: ISubjective Experience

2nd Person: WeInter-subjective Relationship

3rd Person: It/Its “Objective” Behaviour & System

Appreciative Inquiry 3-2-1

• What were the key qualities of leadership you identified?

• Anchoring your inner leader: Find a word, pose, gesture to anchor this deeper quality of wisdom and action

Shadow Work

Working with Triggers and Strong Emotion

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. – Carl Jung

“Transmutation practice is specifically one of remaining open and receptive to your own energy when you are triggered. It has three steps. Step one. Acknowledge that you’re hooked. Step two. Pause, take three conscious breaths. Step three, lean in. Lean in to the energy. Abide with it. Experience it fully. Taste it. Touch it. Smell it. Get curious about it. ” - Pema Chodron

Recognizing TriggersFrom Robert Gass, Social Transformation Project, Tools for Transformation

http://stproject.org/resources/tools-for-transformation/

• Physical sensations• Judging thoughts• Difficulty paying attention/dissociation, escape,

exhaustion• Defensiveness• Obsessive repeating thoughts• Emotional outbursts• Sudden intensive engagement in addictive

behaviours

Confronting your personal nemesis• Divide a sheet in four columns.• Column 1: List all the bad qualities of a person

who pushes your “hot button” (your nemesis)• Column 2: List the opposite of these qualities. • Column 3: Reframe each word from column 1:

what would your nemesis call each of the bad qualities?

• Column 4: What is the potential value of each “shadow trait”? Can you think of situations where each trait or quality could be used to achieve ends you value?

4-Step Practice of State-Shifting

• Name it: Identify to yourself you are triggered• Take space appropriately• Shift your state• Deal with the situation

State Shifting

• Breathe• Move energy (dance,

work out, walk)• Feel your feelings• Self-soothing (cup of

tea, self-care)• Meditation or prayer• Mind-body practices• Connect to purpose

• Self-humour• Change your

environment• Deep relaxation• Self-reflection/inquiry• Anchoring• Drop it

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence: Activity and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence…

The frenzy of activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. - Thomas Merton

LIMIT

FOCUS

AVOID

MANAGE