Ever since I met Edith van den Anker of High Vibrational People, I have an interest in frequencies, energy and vibration. I came across “Heart-Leadership: Become the wise leader you want to be”. Don’t die with your music locked in you. The book is a potpourri of wisdom. Listen to your heart, some business tips, an alternative way to develop your vision, bliss and tackling busyness.
Your heart always knows
It is simple; your heart always knows. Feelings precede thoughts. Feelings come from your heart. Feelings are an inner knowing. Feelings have a different energy, a different frequency or vibration to thoughts. Thoughts are from our past. Feelings are from our present and future.
The heart is a key component of the emotional system. Scientists now understand that the heart not only responds to emotion but that the signals generated by its rhythmic activity play a significant part in determining the quality of our emotional experience from moment to moment.
Leadership
Leadership is the art of inspiring people to see and bring the best out in themselves and other people. The very best leaders lead with and from their hearts. Focussing on harmony, coincidence, serendipity and synchronicity.Leadership is to identify your essence and inspire others to identify theirs. When we get into the habit of hearing our heart before we give our heads any audience, we begin to recognise our one-of-a-kind voice, our essence. Essence is the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, which determines its character. A combination of:
- Talent (your natural gifts and strengths),
- Need (including what the world needs enough to pay you for),
- Conscience (that still small voice within that assures you of what is right and that prompts us to actually do it),
- Passion (those things that naturally energise, excite, motivate and inspire you).
Listen to your heart
The tips to become more aware of your heart
- Having “an attitude of gratitude” is a foundation stone of Heart-Leadership.
- Happiness is not having what you want but wanting what you have.
- Make a sincere effort to shift focus away from the racing mind or disturbed emotion to the area of your heart.
- Use your intuition, common sense, and sincerity, ask your heart, What would be a more efficient response to the situation.
- Over the next week or so, write down a joy story for every five years of your life. Note the feelings this exercise brings you in your heart.
- Insight is the value, to you and other people, of information. It’s what resonates in our hearts in the moment.
- Very few people take the time and energy to savour insight and imagine what can be. To be inspired, heart is required. Emotions need stirring.
- Any idea from the heart, inspired by intuition, is worthy of consideration.
- Optimise your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.
- Happenstance is a consequence of harmony, heart, head, and hands. It reminds me of “Metahuman“ by Deepak Chopra.
The business tips
- “Use best judgement in all situations” has been the one rule at Nordstrom for over one hundred years. If there was only one rule at your workplace, what would it be? Read “The connected company”.
- The future of your business is all about your humanity, how you see and treat people.
- If I was beginning employment at your place, what would my first day be like? If I came to your place, what would my experience be like as a customer?
- Undertake an extensive review of your client/customer experience. What is it truly like?
- Look at every transaction and interaction with clients/customers. What improvements could be made?
- Overall what is the level of employee satisfaction? Ask them. And take action accordingly.
- Do not try to become a person of success but try to become a person of value.
- What is your value promise to each of your various stakeholder relationships, and how well are you currently fulfilling these promises?
- Value is the glue that binds together living values and feeling valued Employee/Employer Value Promise or EEVP
- People don’t want to be appraised. We want to be appreciated.
- Attracting attention today is a precious gift. We all want people paying attention to us.
- Marketing is simply a series of ‘helpful conversations’.
- Stop seeing people as they are. See people as they can be.
- Provide “feedforward” before feedback and only feedback to people who have asked for it.
- Focus on standards instead of goals.
- Discover a shared-view with your employees about where you are, where you’re going, why you’re going there, how you will get there, who will do what and when, how you will keep progress visible, and how you will behave along the way (culture and values).
- Teach people to take responsibility for their intentions, feelings, thoughts and actions and then let them be, aside from ongoing helpful conversations.
- Name the elephants in your rooms.
- Keep your promises.
- Share success stories other people can see and feel themselves in.
- Be fully present in the now. Now is the only moment that matters.
- Do your life’s work (see previous) and inspire your employees to do theirs.
Decision making
Our lives are a consequence of the choices and decisions we make and don’t make. In reality, and the first problem is that at least half the decisions made by business people are not the best decisions that could be made. The research found that there are three key reasons why 50% of decisions fail:
- One third is driven by ego
- Nearly two-thirds of executives never explore alternatives once they make up their mind.
- Eighty per cent of managers push their decisions through by persuasion or edict and not by the value of their choices
The Future Manifesto
I love the ten guiding principles of developing a vision
- Focus on inspiration more than motivation.
- Jump from competition to collaboration.
- See what emerges when you dance with fear, ambiguity, and not-knowing.
- Discover the inner energy of your breath and your heart.
- Your health and that of the world are one.
- Start your mission to be kinder than necessary.
- Create something humanity really needs.
- Move from measurement into the universe of possibility.
- Join the infinite game and become a compass and guiding star.
- Take this as a time of opportunities unique in our history.
Follow your bliss
The concept of “Follow your bliss” comes from Joseph Campbell in his book ‘Hero of a thousand faces’. The President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation describes bliss as “doing what you can’t not do. The place where the things we love to do and the things we are good at come together.” “Do what you love, in the service of people who love what you do.” What drives us, according to Daniel Pink in his books, ‘A Whole New Mind’ and ‘Drive – the surprising truth about what motivates us., are the three factors below:
- Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives.
- Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
- Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”
The Japanese say everyone has an ikigai. Read “Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy“.
About busyiness
The author meets a lot of people bound up by busyness. Here are the fourteen common telltale signs:
- Decision-making processes not being followed.
- Problems are solved, and then they re-occur over and over again. This has a lot to do with problem-solving being mostly about reinstating the status quo rather than changing what’s normal.
- Decisions being continually revisited.
- Documentation is produced in lieu of action.
- Meetings occur with key players absent. Meetings have no agendas.
- Meetings are poorly conducted.
- Whiteboards full.
- Diaries full.
- Inboxes full.
- There’s a preoccupation with mobile phones and other devices. If you can’t have mobile free days without withdrawal symptoms, you’re in the grip of “time famine”.
- Negative body language of staff.
- Management (PPPPS’s – policies, procedures, practices, processes, philosophies, structures and systems) mean it isn’t simple for people to bring their best to their work every day.
- Leaders who love the sound of their own voice and the corresponding lack of awareness means they are oblivious to the chaos and complication that they are causing.
- Massive confusion exists between what is communication and what is information.
Books
The book reminds me a bit of “Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day” combined with “The quantum leader” and “Humanocracy“. The book is full of fantastic concepts. Unfortunately, the structure of the book does those concepts a huge disservice. A lot of longs lists. Like this blog.
