The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

Tell us about the 15 commitments. The 15 commitments map the territory of conscious leadership. Now, before you can understand the place that they play in a conscious leader's life, you need to understand one simple construct. We believe that at any moment, every leader and in fact every person is either above the line or below the line. Real. Simply stated, when I'm above the line, I'm open. I'm curious, and I'm deeply interested in learning. When I'm below the line, I'm closed, defensive. And proving that I'm right becomes most important to me. Now, this is a simple construct, and it's one that leaders get very quickly. It's a field in which they can begin to play and discover what leadership real conscious leadership is all about. The 15 commitments further map that territory. So for each of the 15 commitments, we have what it looks like to be above the line and what it looks like to be below the line. So, for example, the cornerstone commitments are commitments one and two. In commitment one, we discover that when a leader is above the line, they are living in a state of responsibility. We call it radical responsibility. When a leader is below the line, they're living in blame. They're blaming themselves, they're blaming others, they're blaming circumstances or conditions. And they're in this state of blame, which limits their effectiveness as a leader. So the territory. When I'm above the line, I'm in radical responsibility. When I'm below the line, I'm blaming. Commitment number two says that when I'm above the line, I'm in a high state of curiosity or wonder. When I'm below the line, what I'm passionate about is being right and proving that I'm right. Commitment number three, when I'm above the line, I have an authentic relationship to my feelings, to my emotions, and to the emotions of others. I'm able to feel my feelings all the way through to completion and then get from each feeling the wisdom that it is here to offer me and the team and the organization. When I'm below the line, what I'm committed to is repressing or suppressing or denying my feelings and the feelings of others. I believe feelings are dangerous. I believe feelings are a problem, and I want to cut them out of my life, of my relationship, and out of the organization. Of course, the catch there is feelings just don't go away. So what they do is they submerge and come out sideways. They become toxic, they color and affect the entire organization, but not in a conscious way, in an unconscious way. Commitment number four says that when I'm above the line, I'm committed to candor. What this means is that I reveal, I don't conceal, I openly reveal to everyone what are my thoughts, what are my feelings, what are my wants and desires, what are my instinctual knowings. When I'm below the line, I conceal, I withhold, I withhold relevant information, I withhold relevant facts, and I don't deal straight up and straight on with my truth in a given moment. Commitment number five says that when I'm below the line, I gossip. You see, if. If you repress your feelings and you don't speak candidly, it's going to come out someplace, and the place it comes out is gossip. Gossip is simply talking about somebody in a way you wouldn't talk if they were there, or talking about them in a way that you haven't talked directly to them. When I'm above the line with commitment number five, I talk directly to people with a powerful tool called the clearing model. It is a simple, efficient, lasting way of resolving trust issues in relationships and in organizations. Commitment number six says that when I'm above the line, I'm in a state of integrity. I'm in a state of wholeness. Energetic wholeness, we call it. See, energy is the real game. Now, Energy management trumps time management, money management, all other forms of management, because energy is that renewable life force that keeps me fully focused and in the game. Integrity is having unblocked energy flowing through my system all the time. The thing that we point at in commitment number six is that a key to having unblocked energy is to be impeccable around your agreements. When I'm below the line, I dissipate my energy. And I do it because I'm sloppy with agreements. I either don't make clean agreements or I don't renegotiate agreements that need to change. And I don't clean up broken agreements. So these six commitments are the foundation of the conscious leadership group. And this set of commitments is all about mapping the territory of conscious leadership. Sam.