Levels of Consciousness

If levels of consciousness sounds too spiritual, please replace it with levels of leadership effectiveness. The principle itself, works the same way but I‘ve found that the latter term seems to be more digestible in a business setting.

Here’s what I mean no matter what term we use.

In life, and in leadership, the level of consciousness that we come from matters. It matters because we see, perceive and understand things very differently depending on what level we’re at.

And so my intention here is not to say that we need to come from a particular consciousness level, (the more we want to come from a higher consciousness the lower we seem to drop), but rather to have us look how this principle works and to get curious about how it impacts our leadership.

Consciousness is our capacity to see, notice and experience life. In this blog post, we’re using the context of leadership, but it works in all life the same way.

Let me explain this a bit more before we get to why it matters.

My mentor and coach, Micheal Neill, describes it using the metaphor of a glass elevator. The glass elevator of consciousness is going up and down all day long. We don’t have to do anything for the shifts in consciousness to happen, we don’t get stuck on any one floor, and there’s no end to how high we can go. We may visit some floors more than others, and the floors we visit most can change depending on the insights we have about life, leadership and the universe.

Enlightened leaders such as Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie may spend more of their time on the higher floors of consciousness, while I, and perhaps you too, may visit some of the lower floors a bit more often.

Depending on what floor we’re on we have a different view of the same landscape. At the ground levels, things look big and important. We see all the details, the garbage on the floor, the graffiti on the buildings, the broken glass and sad faces of people walking around. We see the things that are not working and the things that need our attention. We are compelled to get off the elevator and get to work fixing all that is wrong with the world!

As the elevator rises however, you see less of the details, and more of the landscape. You see how things come together, you see their interconnected, the horizon, the blue sky, the sun and even the distant stars in our galaxy. All the details we were worried about at lower levels are but a spec within the context of an expansive, greater whole.

While there’s no end to the elevator of consciousness, the higher you go, the more you see the oneness of life, the love underneath everything and the beauty of it all.

It doesn’t mean the graffiti, sad faces and garbage don’t exist. It simply means that they are less of a big scary issue we have to solve and fix, because we have a greater appreciation for something more extraordinary. For the beauty of life. And within this beauty, we don’t necessarily have to fix anything, though we may choose to do some things anyway.

Within the context of leadership this is important. Let me describe this with an example.

I worked with a CEO of a large manufacturing company. When he came to me, he had a long list of all the things that were wrong with his team and the company. He had an ambitious and exciting goal for the organization, but didn’t believe he could accomplish it without fixing the team.

Together we explored the different levels of consciousness. Not in a direct way, but in a way that together we simply naturally raised our level of consciousness. We softened the hard edges of everything that was wrong and we settled just enough to see more of the landscape beyond the individual parts. As he settled, naturally and without any effort or intention on his part, he saw more of what was going on. He had insights around where he wanted to direct his attention and what not to worry about. The circumstances were the same - he continued to have the same ambitious goal, but he held that a bit more lightly too which opened him up to more possibility, not less.

This is what happens as we rise in levels of consciousness (aka leadership effectiveness). When we are on the lower levels of consciousness we primarily see the mess, the things that need fixing, the things that are not going our way and all the obstacles that stand between us and whatever goal were attempting to achieve. As we bring that to our team, they naturally lower their levels of consciousness as well and we get stuck in the mess of the details.

As we rise in consciousness however we hold these more lightly, we can see what is going well, what is working and all of the ways we’re making progress.

The areas that are problems feel less critical and while we still may do something to bring about positive change in those areas, solutions flow with ease and clarity because we’re open and in touch with the infinite creative potential available to us at higher levels of consciousness.

And some of the things that looked like really big problems at ground level, simply disappear at higher levels. We realize that they are no issue at all within the greater landscape. Sometimes they resolve themselves, and other times we realize that we created the problem in the first place and all there is to do is stop doing that.

The result is that we place our attention and effort naturally on the things that benefit from our creative energy, and we allow the other things to simply fall away. We inspire change rather than force it. We flow from one thing to the next knowing that our role is to meet life, not bend it.

And seeing that, really seeing it, has us play this beautiful game of leadership from a place of empathy (I actually mean love, but again not entirely acceptable in a business setting, so I’ll use the word empathy- I mean love thought - don’t tell the others!), interconnectedness and the infinite creative potential that lives within.