Leading with Impact: 5 Ways to Lead - Week #25 of The Awakening Journey
The dimensional leadership model is a map to end your leadership struggles. It is the answer to the question: what do I do in Xyz challenging situations with my colleague, child, boss, and employee. This model is the answer to how to lead in a healthy, dynamic and authentic way.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through both the explanation and the geography of the body for these dimensions. So you can feel what it feels like to lead from these places and lock that into your muscle memory so it comes out naturally when you next need to utilize your authentic leadership.
Everyone is a leader
Everyone is a leader. Yet, we don’t receive leadership training in school, at home, and often not even at work. We don’t get leadership training in higher education. At least, if we do, we get it in the hierarchical old leader-on-top, one guy at the front and everyone else follows order kind of way.
But I’m here to tell you that you are a leader and you deserve to have a greater understanding and comfort level on “how” to lead. Who you are being and what is possible when you lead from a place of AUTHENTICITY.
This is a dynamic way of leading wherein every moment you are choosing what dimension you lead from.
Leader Within Review
Remember this is our starting point always. Recall a couple of weeks ago that when you stand up, feet on the floor, one hand on your heart, the other on your solar plexus and breathe deeply, this is your leader within geography. If you repeat this three times, you will begin to feel yourself get settled into your leader within.
This is the place of both stillness and potential energy. It is the place you recover from and create from. You come back to this regardless of what is happening outside of you. Leader Within is where you act from.
Leader From the Front
This is often mistaken for Leader on Top. The old, hierarchical way of one person in the front of the room who tells us where to go. Period.
But Leader from the Front is far different. It is an authentic, collaborative co-creative way of leading that our world greatly needs right now. It is dynamic & intuitive, utilizing all the senses, the thinking, the strategic mind and the executive function of the brain. Balancing all the parts.
When you step into Leader from the Front, you are pointing to your vision. AND, you are enrolling those behind you to align them to the vision of what wants to be made real in the world.
You are unapologetically and fiercely creating momentum forward to make that vision realized. You are 100% committed, trusting, and fully believing it will happen.
The geography of Leader from the Front is Warrior One pose, with your left arm straight out, pointing toward the vision. One eye there and the other eye behind you on your right arm that is stretched out and beckoning those behind you to see the vision and to follow.
Leader from Beside
The leader from Beside is the place of co-creation & collaboration. It is fully leaning into the other, not 50/50 but 100/100. Creating a vision together. Pointing to that vision and pivoting together.
My aha for leader from Beside was when my kiddos went from being babies to toddlers and wanted to make choices. At this stage, we worked together to create a vision, for example, healthy lives, and then we talked about healthy eating for example, and they chose from this place.
They were not ready to lead completely from the front in their own lives, so we were leaders from beside. In a healthy relationship, you will also see this with your romantic partner and your boss or colleagues at work when you work on projects, run meetings or even riff off one another.
The geography of Leader Beside is standing side by side, shoulders touching, facing forward. The shoulder that is touching - the hand on another's back at heart center. The outer facing arm will face forward with the hand flat and sideways, again pointing to a vision. This time though, you will be pointing to the same place your partner is pointing - a shared vision. And as your arm moves, your leader from beside’s arm will move organically and naturally. Together.
Leader from Behind
The leader from Behind is a lot like what a coach does or a really good parent of a teen. Listening, asking powerful questions that empower their teen, their employee to come to their own vision and ahas.
The geography of Leader from Behind is standing just behind your person, grounded position with feet, hands up and ready to catch if they fall.
An example of this might be when your child/employee is interested in working on a project and it’s going to be really challenging. Your role is not to tell them to not try or point out how it could fail.
Your role is to champion, call forth when it gets hard and be there to support them if they fall. By aligning them with the insight they learned from falling and encouraging them to try again not to succeed, but to fail and learn.
Leader from the Field
Where your “spiritual” side meets your leadership. This is where intuitive leadership resides.
It is best described as listening from “outside” of yourself. Like when you have a gut feeling about something and you just “know” something is going to happen.
When you are operating from Leader from the Field, you trust fully whatever intuitive leadership message that comes up and you speak it out and let it go. Not attached to how it lands and not attached to the outcome.
The geography of Leader from the Field is feet planted hip-width distance apart, arms in the air spread wide like antennae. Listening, sensing, deeply feeling. Then bringing that feeling down through the head into the body & speaking it out and letting it go.
This Week’s Practice:
Embody the geography
Purchase this book: Co-Active Leadership: 5 Ways to Lead
Choose your least comfortable dimension & practice leading from there this week
Journal about this experience or teach this to someone
Next, we will talk about Practices That Will Take You to a Deeper Level of Awakening, in the meanwhile remember the present moment is where your best life happens.
With love, presence and gratitude,
Darla