Leading from the soul means taking responsibility for more than the group’s needs. It means having concern for everyone’s personal growth. This responsibility begins with your own evolution. In eight areas of your life you have the power to be guided by your soul: thoughts, emotions, perception, personal relationships, social role, environment, speech, and the body. In all of these areas your behavior affects the people you lead. If you evolve, so will they.
Leading from the soul means that evolution is your top priority. You never act in such a way as to lower the self-esteem of others. You examine your underlying beliefs and modify them as new opportunities for growth reveal themselves. Because evolution is an unstoppable force in the universe, you draw upon invisible powers. Therefore being responsible is no longer a burden. It rests lightly on you as long as you continue to grow.
Every leader takes on responsibilities, but if you lead from the soul, you have a different perspective. You take responsibility for your evolution and the evolution of those around you. You’ve chosen to start out with a vision. In order to fulfill it, you walk a path that is about much more than external success. The inner person is growing every step of the way. The group is having higher needs fulfilled. So how do you equip yourself to keep evolving? Personal commitment plays a part, but to what do you commit? Once this question is answered, you’ll know what your responsibilities actually are from day to day.
Your soul doesn’t make any demands, because it isn’t involved in activity. It functions as your source, the silent ground of your existence. Therefore your responsibility arises only when you have to act, think, and feel. Seeds are forever sprouting in silence. Each seed is a possibility arising from the field of infinite possibilities. A seed may sprout as your next thought. Your responsibility, then, is to make your next thought evolutionary—it should promote growth and progress. But a possibility doesn’t always manifest as a thought. It could be a sensation, an action, or a word. Possibilities encompass every aspect of life. Your soul is capable of giving you anything you want, but the other side of the bargain is that you are responsible for what you ask for.
Knowing what to ask for can be quite subtle. However beautiful and inspiring your overall vision, there are thousands of details that must be worked out on a daily basis. A leader may be dedicated to building world peace or to working for a sustainable economy or to finding an alternative to fossil fuels. In comparison to such lofty goals, it seems petty to consider the next word you are about to say, or the next sensation you will feel in your body. But these are part of the fabric of life, and if they don’t evolve, your vision won’t evolve, either. The fabric of life is incredibly complex and interwoven, but we can find eight main strands, each with its own set of responsibilities. The joy of looking at the subject from this perspective is that you will be taking on responsibility not as a burden but as a way of nurturing yourself. Ask yourself one question—“Will I evolve by doing this?”—and if the answer is yes, accept the responsibility for your choice.
A leader’s responsibilities can be divided into the following eight areas: I am responsible for what I think; I am responsible for how I feel; I am responsible for how I perceive the world; I am responsible for my relationships; I am responsible for my role in society; I am responsible for my immediate environment; I am responsible for my speech; I am responsible for my body. Now let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.
This is the field of cognition, which is much broader than rational thoughts: it also covers insight, intuition, “gut feelings,” and creative impulses. Because they come to us spontaneously, we tend to accept that thoughts roam the mind at will. If that’s true, how can we be responsible for mental impulses as they come and go? After all, you don’t know what your next idea or hunch will be. But thoughts come in patterns; you have habits of thinking. These you can take responsibility for. Promote the good habits and avoid the bad ones. Successful leaders have learned to do both, often without knowing it (although a good percentage had to train their minds to meet the demands of being a leader).
Think clearly and concisely.
Weed out prejudices and personal biases.
Examine your assumptions to make sure they aren’t secondhand or unproved.
Explore every thought in depth.
Pay attention to subtle impulses, focusing on them until they expand and unfold.
See each thought without judging or dismissing it prematurely.
Walk around and see your thought from several angles.
Be sure you aren’t influenced too much by stress, emotion, or the heat of the moment.
Be above the drama of the situation.
Each of these points is something you can take responsibility for. Left to itself, the untended mind is neither clear nor concise. It needs to be trained to prune away repetition. In place of fuzzy, vague thinking, you shape your thoughts clearly, wording them concisely. The same attention is needed for all the other points. Unless we pay attention, prejudice creeps into our thinking automatically—that’s the nature of habit, to reappear on its own. Time and again you have to pull up and say, “This isn’t what I want to think. It’s just old conditioning from the past, a stale repetition of what I used to think.”
With cognition, your overall responsibility is to be self-aware. Only you can spot the effect that emotions and stress are having. No outside perspective can substitute for yours, even though trusted advisers can bring you to your senses by pointing out where you’ve lost clarity. Notice that two things are not on the list: organization and discipline. Some leaders owe their success to having a highly organized and disciplined mind. Examined closely, the need to force your mind into a discipline is like training a wild animal whose behavior you don’t trust and whose wildness is undesirable. But as restless as the mind can be, it is also the source of spontaneous answers and solutions. Spontaneity requires freedom, and it’s difficult for something to be free and disciplined at the same time.
Of course, your mind can’t be left ragged and wild. Even the pure artist who cannot tolerate rules or boundaries will accept the discipline of learning his craft. You can take your cue from that: discipline your mind as a means of mastering your craft, but then let it be free. Otherwise you will dismiss too many “stray” thoughts that in fact have something to tell you. In the same vein, allow every subtle impulse of the mind—the vaguest hunch or intimation—to expand. This is particularly true when you feel a slight uh-oh. Under the pressure to agree with others, to find quick solutions, to be rid of a problem, we all jump to faulty conclusions. But the soul can’t be fooled by externals, and when you feel, however subtly, that something isn’t quite right, you must trust yourself. In fact, the subtler the uh-oh, the more it can be trusted.
Even more than thoughts, feelings seem to come and go at will. Being spontaneous, emotions are often feared and distrusted. Nothing is more unwelcome to the mind than anxiety, and many a promising career has been undone by a bad temper. But we aren’t talking about trying to control fear, anger, or any other emotion. (For one thing, programs for anger management and curing phobias have had mixed results at best; even the promising field of positive psychology, which sets out to reframe negativity in a positive way, remains largely unsupported by research.) But like thoughts, feelings fall into patterns, and by being aware of those patterns, you can take responsibility for changing them.
A feeling is a response that seems to happen suddenly and automatically. If you are afraid of spiders, the sight of one causes you to recoil in fear. If dirty dishes in the sink make you angry, you can’t help being irritated when you walk into the kitchen after a meal and see that someone has neglected to wash up. But this apparent lack of choice is deceptive. Think of what happens when somebody throws a ball or a set of car keys at you. Even if you are caught off guard, either you will automatically put up your hand to catch it or you will move out of the way, mumbling “I can’t catch things.” These responses are opposites; somewhere in your life you either trained yourself to catch things or did not. Once trained, your response became ingrained, but you can always retrain it. You never lose freedom of choice, and fortunately the most advanced brain research indicates that new skills can be added to the brain over an entire lifetime.
You have trained yourself to feel a certain way and to avoid feeling another way. The trick, if you truly take responsibility, is to replace a trained feeling with openness. We all value positive feelings over negative ones, but if you train yourself never to be negative, you miss the fact that “negativity” is actually a judgment against the self. It’s a label for “I am bad if I feel this way.” We’ve all experienced the strain of being around people whose fixed smile and ever-present sunniness are unreal. Untraining your feelings means, first of all, noticing patterns. If you automatically respond by doubting, for example, or by pushing away new things, if you cringe in the face of change or of new people suddenly appearing in your life, step back and notice your feelings.
Having stepped back, wait and see. Quite often a first response will fade on its own. When it does, an open space appears, and in that space you can guide yourself to the feeling you want to have. Don’t judge yourself. Let any feeling be what it is, but at the same time don’t act on your fear, anger, resentment, envy, suspicion, or any other feeling that will promote stress in those around you. Feelings are yours until you project them into the world. It’s your responsibility not to project what is harmful.
When you have learned to experience an open space where once you filled it with automatic reactions, something new appears. The soul begins to unfold its own feelings, which are always evolutionary. These aren’t passing emotional events but a steady state of feeling. Silence, peace, and a calm sense of the self don’t come and go. Once you contact them, they give rise to what Buddhism calls the four divine feelings: loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, and joy at the success of others. But it’s not necessary to have a name for higher feelings. (Labeling them might even tempt you to train your mind to be “good.”)
All the higher emotions take us out of our separate selves. It’s the separate self that is trained to choose A over B, usually because the ego has decided that A contains a self-promoting benefit. Beyond the separate self there is a natural flow of feeling, and whatever reaction is appropriate will arise on its own. The soul always aims to give you the most evolutionary response possible, and that goes for feelings, too.
Perception, like thinking and feeling, seems to be automatic. If I perceive that the sky is blue, this doesn’t seem like a choice, and you can only be responsible for what you choose. But once again, the absence of choice is deceptive. The one thing we do know is that possibility is never limited, so choice must always be present. By definition, a leader is someone who can see more possibilities than other people do. No matter what the hardship or setback seems to be, evolution is at play. You can adopt a style of seeing the world based on this principle: higher evolution is unstoppable.
The pioneering physicist Max Planck said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at will change.” In a sense, this is how relativity works at the soul level. As you shift your perception, reality shifts to match. Therefore inner perception, which is your sense of self, is where reality begins. The more expanded your sense of self, the more possibilities are released from the level of the soul. You will never run out of possibilities unless you limit them yourself. The cause of limitation is belief. Negative beliefs act like censors. When faced with a set of possibilities, they say no to the first appearance of things that they judge too dangerous, wrong, bad, impossible, not worth having, or “not me.” Your soul, on the other hand, wants to deny you nothing, but you will never know that if your beliefs are blocking all but a few possibilities. Every possibility that cannot see the light of day diminishes your future, doing its work invisibly and outside your awareness. What you need to do is become aware of these beliefs and then reverse them so that you hold evolutionary beliefs instead.
I’m not good enough. I deserve less than other people.
Reversal: The more I evolve, the more I deserve. Since evolution is unlimited, so is my deserving.
Avoidance is a good way to postpone difficult decisions.
Reversal: Postponement is never a solution. It simply freezes the problem in place. If I solve the problem now, I have my whole future to enjoy the solution.
It doesn’t help to focus on things that are wrong about me.
Reversal: Problems aren’t bad. They are indications of where I need to grow. Beneath the difficulty lies a hidden ally. If I don’t focus on my problems, I will miss the path of my own evolution.
The world is full of problems. What can just one person do?
Reversal: Evolution carries humanity forward one person at a time. I can become the change I want to see. When that happens, I contribute to the collective consciousness, and then everyone takes a step toward the critical mass required for change on the global level.
Reversal: Life is nothing but change. Every cell in my body changes constantly, as do my thoughts, feelings, and the events around me. The real point is that change can be conscious or unconscious. Simply by becoming more aware, I have become a powerful agent of change. There is no need to force anything, only to expand my awareness.
We are prisoners of random events and accidents outside our control.
Reversal: To be controlled by anything, including randomness, is to be a victim. Accidents are unknowable in advance. I have a choice to make the unknown either my friend or my enemy. As a friend, the unknown brings new life, new ideas, and new possibilities. I will focus on that and let go of the rest.
Everyone has enemies. I’d rather stay out of the fray and have as few enemies as possible.
Reversal: Enemy is just another word for obstacle. Whenever I meet an obstacle, my soul has put it there for a purpose and has provided a solution at the same time. I don’t need to focus on what another person feels about me; my aim isn’t to make friends with everyone. Instead, I am here to evolve and follow the path my soul is unfolding day by day.
Since relationships are two-sided, you can be responsible only for your part. But relating to someone else also brings a merging, so it isn’t easy to separate out what your part is. A leader follows one general rule: when things are going well, praise the other person; when things aren’t going well, be responsible for changing them. If you wait for another person to change things, or themselves, you may wait forever. You must arrive at self-sufficiency, which is the realization that you are enough. You never need another person to complete you. Once this truly sinks in, you will stop asking others to change in order for you to feel better. It’s not their responsibility; it doesn’t show how much they care; and no matter how hard they try, you might wind up feeling bad anyway.
We’ve already discussed a more basic point. As a leader, you must commit yourself to building relationships. That’s a necessary starting point but one that many don’t reach. The undermining belief here is that relationships are too hard. You can reverse this belief by realizing that relationships, hard or easy, amount to everything in life. If you convince yourself that you can be completely alone, you are deluded. Even if you escaped to a cabin at the North Pole surrounded by vast emptiness, you would carry all your past relationships with you in your memories, habits, personality, and expectations.
Every person is the sum total of relationships past and present. To take responsibility, a few guidelines apply:
Clearly see the difference between past and present. Don’t inflict past relationships on present ones.
Relate on the basis of shared positive values. Avoid relating on the basis of prejudices and shared bias.
As a leader, try to relate equally and impartially.
Avoid making the other person wrong.
Follow the Golden Rule: other people will sense when you are treating them the way you would want to be treated.
Increase the other person’s self-esteem.
In a way, the last point has become a kind of psychological Golden Rule. We’ve covered how a leader fulfills specific needs in the hierarchy of need. But you will interact with others many times, and not every encounter is about need. What is common to every encounter is that one self makes contact with another self. Make sure that when you part, the other self feels nurtured, enhanced, validated, encouraged, or appreciated. This is the closest we come in everyday life to one soul touching another. Relationship is a vast subject, but this is its spiritual essence.
So far your responsibilities have been intimate and personal, but when we consider society, many thousands of people are involved. Our connections become more invisible, too. You create an impact on society by casting a vote, choosing where to live, volunteering for certain causes, and giving to certain charities. But there has been a lot of recent research on connections that sociologists never anticipated. As a leader, you need to realize the power of “social contagion,” a term invented by researchers to describe how influence spreads from one person to another.
At the level of common sense, we all know that gossip and rumor have lives of their own, as do urban legends. Yesterday’s conspiracy theories give way to today’s paranoid focus. But social contagion reaches deeper than common sense ever indicated. Moods, attitudes, and habits are involved. If you are around a depressed family member, for example, you are more likely than average to become depressed yourself. But that’s also true if you know someone who has a depressed friend, even when the person you know isn’t depressed.
This is a very strange finding, but the data support it. You run a higher risk of being overweight or taking up smoking if a friend of a friend is overweight or smokes cigarettes. No one can account for these third-hand and even fourth-hand influences. Yet these “degrees of separation” are actually degrees of bonding. Social contagion is real but invisible. It also cuts both ways. Positive influences have their own infectiousness, so if a friend of a friend has good lifestyle habits or an optimistic outlook, you are more likely to develop them, too. This means that if you want to be part of an invisible social network, it’s good to choose the one with the most positive and far-reaching effects. You are having an influence even when you don’t sign up as an official participant.
Various catchphrases have cropped up to describe the power of influence. “Tipping point” and “critical mass” are among the most popular. They both refer to a kind of chain reaction. At a certain moment enough people believe something that its spread cannot be stopped. Innovators, politicians, advertisers, and movie studios are in the business of creating tipping points, but in any field the effect of critical mass is important. It takes a village to do anything, or rather it takes the social equivalent of cell division; ideas catch on by increasing exponentially. (It’s no accident that popular videos on the Web “go viral,” indicating their infectious spread.)
Social networking has become a necessity in the modern world, and the networks you join or create should reflect your level of awareness:
Join networks that specifically address your main purpose.
Make positive, detailed contributions.
Treat each message the way you would treat a personal encounter, with openness and respect.
Share your highest ideals and keep those ideals in mind every time you send a message. Each transmission should reflect your core values, or at least not run counter to them.
Resist the temptation to amplify destructive gossip, rumors, and paranoid theories.
Keep in close, regular touch with the members of the network that matter most to you. Don’t take up more personal networking than you are able to deal with.
Although many types of messages are brief and fleeting, when you make extended contact, follow the golden rule of relationships: enhance the other person’s self-esteem.
We project ourselves into our surroundings, so every situation has its own atmosphere. As soon as a new person enters a room, the atmosphere changes, if only a little. Leaders create big changes: their tone sets the kind of environment that others experience. It doesn’t matter if you sit quietly and say nothing, your influence will still be powerful. But it can be difficult to read the effect you are having. After all, the only way that you’ve seen people interact all your life is with your being present. How they behave when you are subtracted from the equation is an unknown.
Spiritually, the projection that a person creates is total. You are the whole situation that you find yourself in, creator of a continual mirroring effect. You can choose to accept or reject this principle, but it’s not very difficult to prove it to yourself. To do that, get into the habit of comparing “in here” and “out there.” To be self-aware, you must ask questions that reconnect inside and outside. The two domains are never separate, but we keep them that way through lack of awareness. Let’s take a look at four ways we shape our experience: mood, memory, expectation, and perception.
Mood: Is the situation connected to my mood? At one level we all see the world through glasses of different tints. The sunset doesn’t look the same to someone who’s depressed and someone who’s in love. At a deeper level, the fact that you are outside looking at a sunset means that it is part of you; therefore, your mood not only colors the sunset, it creates it. That is, when you are depressed, you aren’t looking at something beautiful and glorious without the ability to appreciate it: the sunset is depressing; for you, in this moment, it has no other way of being. Or think of someone you dearly love or heartily despise. When that person walks into the room, your feeling is part of her. As long as you are the observer, she takes on the quality of your mood.
Memory: Is the situation connected to something from my past? Your experience of the past creates the present. This, too, works at several levels. Obviously, when you see someone you recognize, you draw on memory; otherwise, the world would be full of strangers. It would also be full of strange objects. Indeed, it would be a strange world. Memory also tells you that a car isn’t a painted lump of metal but a machine that you know how to drive. All recognition is memory. At a deeper level, you cannot undo memory: you can only see it for what it is. A book is something you know how to read. You can’t make yourself turn the book back into a collection of meaningless marks on a page the way it was when you were two months old.
Expectation: Is the situation what I expected it to be? Except in rare instances, the answer is yes. Expectations precede involvement. As you get involved, your expectations guide what you think is happening. Imagine that you are about to meet a stranger. You hear that he is charming and witty. The moment before he walks into the room, however, someone whispers in our ear, “He’s a well-known con man.” The situation suddenly changes because your expectation has been altered. At a deeper level, your expectations actually shape what others are doing and saying. We subtly tune in to the expectations of others. We can sense whether they are going to be easy or difficult, open or self-involved, friendly or aloof. Silent signals shape all encounters. As for situations that defy expectation, usually the expectation was false or a projection: we are covering up fear, apprehension, suspicion, or doubts. The “surprise” fulfills these more real but hidden expectations; it should be no surprise that all at once you are aware of feelings you have denied and pushed out of sight.
Perception: Am I seeing the situation through tinted glasses? Here the rule is “Seeing it so makes it so.” We’re talking about the subtlest level of experience, because perception is creative. Our belief that we passively observe the world is mistaken. As neurologists are quick to point out, every quality in the world is created in the brain. Your visual cortex creates sunlight. By itself, the sun’s radiation is a blank. It’s just a band of frequencies in the electromagnetic field. With a different kind of brain, you might see the world lit up by magnetism, or temperature, or even gravity. Raw data must be translated into color, light, sound, texture, shapes, smells—indeed, everything you can possibly perceive.
Taken to its deepest spiritual conclusion, you are perceiving nothing but your creation. If that sounds unbelievable, reverse the proposition. Can you participate in anything you don’t perceive? Neutrinos and gamma rays are passing through your body; hormone levels rise and fall; your metabolism regulates itself according to how warm the room is and what you ate for breakfast. You aren’t participating in these events because you can’t perceive them. The spiritual aspect of this is that your soul perceives everything; therefore it participates in everything. There is no difference between regulating your liver enzymes and regulating the events that will happen to you today and the people you’ll meet. At the soul level, perception creates everything. You may protest that you cannot possibly be the creator of a rock and its hardness or a stranger on the bus and the words he will speak. Yet you control both in your dreams.
Dreams are a domain of perception. They can have sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. But those sensations aren’t separate from us; we are the source of our dreams and all that happens inside them. In the world’s wisdom traditions, the same is true of reality “out there.” The same brain that creates every detail of the dream environment is responsible for every detail of the waking environment. If you don’t feel ready to make this spiritual leap, there’s no need to do so. Just keep testing whether or not the situation is you. The deeper you go, the more you will be convinced that it is.
The words you utter are events in their own right. They have an effect on other people, which should never be forgotten. The reason I’ve saved this responsibility for next to last is that your words unfold thought, emotion, perception, relationships, and social role. Everything that came before is involved. Linguists tell us that speech does not serve only to communicate ideas. A simple phrase is multidimensional. Think of everything we discover through tone of voice, for example. In a moment you can assess fairly accurately whether the speaker is happy or sad, engaged or aloof, warm or cold, friend or stranger, open or closed, available or unavailable—and that barely scratches the surface. (One prominent psychiatrist who had a long-running radio program claimed that he could diagnose callers’ personality problems simply by hearing them give their names.)
When you take responsibility for your speech, you are going beyond just its content. This can be difficult. We all resist such comments as “I don’t like your tone,” “What are you trying to say?” “I know what this is really about,” and “You’re saying one thing and meaning another.” What bothers us is the reminder that we are revealing more than we want to, and yet we all know that this is going on. It’s natural for speech to be revealing on the level of how we feel, what we want, what we’d like to hide, and what we expect the other person to understand. A leader takes responsibility for these additional dimensions.
Once you take on this responsibility, two options are open to you. You can discipline and control your speech, letting others receive only what you want them to. Or you can accept that being open is better, in which case you let people read into you what they want to read into you. The second option makes you more vulnerable, but it’s the best choice, because people are going to read into you all kinds of things that are beyond your control. The impression that anybody has of you is his own creation. Since this is inescapable, shine your light as fully as you can. Keep as little as possible in the shadows. Don’t create ambivalent or inscrutable feelings on purpose. Be consistent in how you speak. Observe the amenities of courtesy and respect for others. These are the necessaries of owning your words and the effect they have on others. Speech is a window on the soul. You will succeed far more by opening the window than by keeping it shut.
You might think that taking care of your body is so basic that it should come first on the list. I’ve placed it last for a reason. Your body isn’t a machine made of flesh and blood. Seen from the soul level, it is the projection of your consciousness. In fact, it is the most complete projection of who you are, more so than your thoughts, feelings, and words, which come and go. Your body is a constant projection of you in the world. Every cell eavesdrops on your thoughts. You cannot respond to the world without affecting your tissues and organs. Without a body you cannot connect to the universe; therefore your body is the vehicle of your evolution.
Every leader wants to be tuned in. You can’t tune in without a body—that much is self-evident—but the quality of how you tune in is quite subtle. The loss of an hour’s sleep, for example, distorts reflexes and blurs perception almost as much as losing half a night’s sleep. A heavy, fatty meal with a glass of wine dulls the mind and makes decisions less reliable. Depleted biological energy, whether from disease, fatigue, or stress, can’t help but deplete mental energy. The mind-body connection isn’t like a lamp plugged into a wall socket. It’s a hundred billion neurons all plugged into one another and then into trillions of cells throughout the body. The same is true of our interactions with the world. All feedback loops begin and end with the body.
Once you see your body as a projection of all that you are, taking responsibility for it is no longer the choice to sign up for the gym or ordering fish instead of steak. Think of your body as metabolizing the world, taking in more than just food, water, and air; your body is metabolizing every experience. This is because every experience uses energy supplied by food, air, and water. Chemical reactions transform raw data into “my” experience; you take possession by literally internalizing every sight and sound. What was once “out there” is now “in here,” and thanks to cellular memory, it is likely to remain with you for a long time.
This perspective doesn’t change the basics of a healthy lifestyle, which are familiar: a balanced diet low in fat, regular exercise with a focus on cardiovascular impact, good sleep, meditation, and stress management. However, it brings you closer to a simple truth: your body exists to serve you. But it can only give what it has to give, no more. If you see your body as consciousness that has taken material form, it’s clear that it has much more to give you through its awareness. The physical gift of awareness is present when the body is light, bright, flexible, energized, balanced, and quick to respond. Since these are all qualities you want as a leader, one way to have them is by taking responsibility for your body.
We’ve covered eight areas of life that you are responsible for, but please note that they don’t add to your burden as a leader. Each can be mastered effortlessly once you are committed to being guided by your soul. As you evolve, divisions disappear. Mind, body, behavior, and speech begin to flow together. Then you begin to master not just the art of leadership but the art of living. Your soul starts to influence you in everything you do, and as it does, the gap between you and your soul closes. Wholeness starts to dominate. In the next section we’ll see how life is transformed in wholeness. The miraculous becomes normal; the field of possibilities loses every limitation. Before that can happen, however, you must be responsible for all that you are and want to be.
• Leading from the soul means taking responsibility for your evolution and the evolution of others. Evolution is an unstoppable force. By aligning with it, you will benefit yourself and everyone around you.
• In every area of life, from mind and body to personal relationships and the social role that you play, your soul can bring continual progress. No aspect of the situation is ever left out.
• In spiritual terms, the situation is you. Every experience reflects your level of consciousness. The inner and outer world merge at the level of the soul. Being responsible ultimately comes down to accepting the wholeness of life.
This chapter outlines a plan for encouraging your own evolution and the evolution of others. But this involves the reverse as well—not discouraging the force of evolution. You are the soul of the group. Your behavior acts like a magnet, attracting similar behavior. In spiritual terms the impulse to grow and expand is an unstoppable force, yet we can resist it and make choices that undermine our growth. When a leader stands against evolution, the whole group will be affected.
Today take some time to look closely at yourself and ask if you are displaying any of the following behaviors that serve to undermine evolution.
I obsess over risks. I keep worrying about what can go wrong.
I don’t face a problem, even when it is staring me in the face.
I secretly want the group to do what I want.
I haven’t taken responsibility for my last bad decision and its consequences.
I blame people around me; I make excuses for myself.
I crave approval and reassurance.
I don’t delegate authority, or I delegate it but keep a tight grip on all decisions.
I look out for myself more than for the group.
I only listen to the same few voices in my inner circle.
I find myself lying or covering up the truth.
You must be vigilant about these traps because in mild or severe form, they lower the group’s consciousness. Physics uses the term entropy to describe how energy dissipates in the universe. Wrong behavior has its own quiet way of sapping energy. But eventually there will be a price to pay, as the group falters and stagnates, or becomes unfocused and divisive.
If you adopt evolutionary behavior instead, you will be serving the soul’s purpose, which is to raise the consciousness of the group.
Your soul gave you a desire to live a greater truth. In practical terms, you need to reverse each discouraging behavior, as follows:
Don’t obsess over risks. Keep your focus on positive outcomes.
Face problems when they are still in seed form.
Be attuned to the group’s needs first and foremost.
Take responsibility for your last bad decision, and then let it go.
Don’t blame others or make excuses for yourself.
Be immune to the good or bad opinion of others.
Show confidence in those to whom you delegate authority.
Be generous in giving rather than taking.
Open yourself to every avenue of information and wise counsel.
Promise yourself to tell the truth, particularly when it’s most tempting to lie.
Evolutionary behavior can’t be forced–it has to be cultivated. Many successful leaders learn how to evolve naturally, as the result of being tuned in to their inner voices and guided by intuition. Destructive behavior has a way of weeding out bad leaders through failure. But the behaviors listed above are aligned with the evolutionary power of the soul, invisibly bringing that power to aid and support you. Right behavior keeps you subtly aligned with evolution itself, the tendency for all things to organically grow and expand.