A First Principle of Leadership: the Primacy of the Inner Life

I wrote last time about the one thing we miss about culture, and now I want to introduce for your consideration a “first principle” — another one thing I believe tends to get missed.

And that is, your inner life — your soul as the sum total of your thoughts, feelings, and motives — is the real source of your leadership, not so much your skills, nor your methods, though not to diminish their importance. Its just that the inner life tends to get ignored in favor of the outer aspects.

Even the most technically brilliant artist cannot hide the true content of their character from the audience. If they have no depth or wisdom in them their art will reflect that — and this is as true for the painter as it is for the musician, or any other art form.

Similarly, good leadership is dependent on how present you are, and how you show up day after day - which arises out of your capabilities, as distinct from your skill or knowledge. The wholly inner qualities of presence of mind and heart is hard to develop and easy to lose in a moment of trigger and reactivity.

The growing and nurturing of a thriving company culture depends on the capabilities of the organization’s leadership. This is always apparent to those who are further down in the hierarchy of power.

I came across the idea of first principles via Carol Sanford, a favorite teacher and resource whom I discovered through a friend fairly recently. Today I am borrowing her idea that we should take things back to first principles when we consider the development of an organization and its culture.

Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” It describes a basic assumption we are making about a thing that cannot be deduced any further. 

And we must get to know our most basic assumptions when it comes to the humans we work with and manage.

The primacy of the inner life over everything else

It’s easy for us to believe our inner life is hermetically sealed from the world, that our professional life is separate from our private life, and that we’re fully capable of keeping it that way. We also tend to believe that technique, methods, tools, and experience can make us a capable and worthy leader.

These things are indeed important. But how you’ve internalized your life experiences to date, whether you are conscious of it or not, has shaped the quality of your behaviors and presence of mind, which ripples out — both the good and the bad — across all your spheres of influence.

I think we forget this, if we even know of it, and can remain quite unaware of how our behaviors are impacting the culture and quality of the spaces between us and others. At least until life presents us with lessons of such magnitude we can’t avoid the mirror they hold up.

The mirror becomes a crucible, a severe test, because facing our darkness and compromising habits is one of the hardest things we can do in this life. Which is why we can spend so much energy in avoidance or denial. We’d rather not face the whispers of our conscience, nor the annihilating self-loathing, guilt, despair, or shame that can come from confronting ourselves.

Whatever it might be that we’ve not faced will nevertheless bleed out between the cracks in our unconscious behaviors and lack of presence, which impacts the culture as a consequence of our leadership.

The Crucible

The constant, unending story of the soul is: will you succumb to the temptations to continue the same habitual ways of being and doing that compromise you, or will you grow into new ways of being and doing that are more aligned with your higher potential and ideals? 

Will you grow, or decay?

This is the thing about the crucibles of the soul: we have blind spots and therefore we can’t see what we’re inadvertently creating around us. It’s a checkmate.

Another way to say this is, what comes to meet you as life experiences are really coming from you. 

That accident you had was no accident; the repeating patterns of bottle necks, challenging relationships, limits and stucknesses you can’t seem to move through or that are appearing around you, are in a sense pre-ordained — meaning, they have come into being through you, and will continue to do so.

The inevitable shadow cast by leaders

I want you to understand that your leadership presence casts a long shadow and you have to know that’s the case. 

If you aren’t aware of this, then the impact and consequences of your shadow become taboo.

This is because of the power differential between you and those lower in the organization hierarchy than you. They will not take the risk of confronting you about the consequences of your behaviors or lack of awareness. 

Instead, people leave, or they get on with the job and focus on their safety and protection from the shadow cast by the leadership above all else, to the detriment of serving the organization and its customers. This is only one consequence though. Another is that you might never learn about your blind spots, or your lack of self-awareness, and how it shapes the culture in anti-productive ways.

Years ago I worked for a leader who had an almost magical power to start new ventures. He had a magnetic personality, was whip smart, and had no trouble enrolling supporters for his brilliant ideas. But he had unending trouble holding teams together because, inevitably, he would sabotage them. The consequences of not facing his shadow got louder and bigger until, last I heard, he was taken to court over inappropriate behaviors with an employee from one of his ventures.

He was not ready nor willing to face his inner darkness, and so remained open to its destructive influence.

And now we get to something challenging to explain, and to hear, because the forces of influence I want to describe next that play out in the soul are beyond the range of modern and acceptable philosophy, science, or academia. But nevertheless they are observable and nameable, if not provable.

Archetypes of soul challenges

There are forces at play in the soul life that I’ve observed over years of coaching and my own personal healing work. These are invisible forces of influence that live in the realm of archetypes as potential, that come to expression in people’s thinking, feeling, and behaviors. 

For example, we can see at one end of a spectrum behaviors and strategies that take on the expression of inflation: pride, ego, aggrandizement, desire, manipulation, ambition, greed, laziness, complacence, illusion, delusion, ungroundedness, a belief in the inferiority of others. 

At the other extreme, the polar opposite, you’ll see the expression of contraction: fear, anxiety, control, dogma, fixations, obsessions, mechanical thinking, cold analysis, a darkness that envelops but also is seductive. Bloated bureaucracies exemplify this contracting force. Steiner talks about these two archetypal spiritual forces that find their expression in myriad ways through the soul. 

What I’ve observed as I’ve worked with the pictures of these two archetypes is that there is a middle path between them which is where the higher self walks. The I Am, that which we can say about ourselves, is the ability in us to withstand these forces seeking to influence us in all places all the time. 

It really is through the push and pull of the forces of egotism as expressed at both extremes and everything in between that we experience suffering — but also the possibility of growth and transformation. This is the great story of humankind, the battle between “good and evil”. Will the two expressions of evil in inflation and contraction be overcome by the higher self, the I am of the human, that which represents what could be good and true and beautiful? 

This battle is raging in the collective inner life of humanity, and what wars and conflict happen outside of that are merely reflections and outcomes of the real battles within. 

Also, the every day and ordinary battles we fight are so noisy and stressful — think conflict, divorce, failure, taxes, debt, bills, school, work, etc — that we are completely subsumed in them. We easily forget, if we ever even knew, that it’s the inner life that is the source of our suffering rather than the things in themselves.

If you would like to understand more about soul challenges as I'm representing them here, you can find in my podcast more in-depth explorations, for example with this episode, this one, or even this one.

The great illusion of physical reality

We are still living in one great illusion, that the outer world is the only reality.

However, if you entertain for a moment the possibility that the inner life is more real than the outer, or at least is the source of it, then you can orient yourself toward something largely hidden like an open secret: if you focus on the development and cultivation of your inner life, then everything else flows out from there. 

If you grow your inner garden then your outer life will reflect that.

Only once you begin to work on healing, refining, and developing your soul qualities will you find that the outer world shifts in response. Only then will your leadership presence bring regenerative qualities to the company culture, will support the higher striving in others, and will foster more productive ways of working.

This is in effect asking you to embrace a whole new paradigm. One that puts into reversal the more conventional assumptions about what is truly real and important about life.

My thesis for you today is that your inner life is potent — full of potential — just waiting for you to focus on it. Your inner life is more important in the long arc of your biography than you might have considered. Your leadership, your activities, everything you are trying to accomplish in the world, is downstream of your inner thoughts, feelings, and motives — your inner life. 

And so if we use a fierce logic here, we can say your inner life is THE most important thing. 

This is one of my first principles.

The two essential practices

Your leadership is mirrored across the organization in ways that are really challenging to see without a dedicated practice. One, moreover, that is designed specifically for this need. 

I believe such a practice should focus on two main areas: journaling and meditation.

Journaling, because you need to externalize your self-reflection. Reflecting in your head, on a walk for example, is insufficient for the kind of self-examination that is fruitful enough. I use journaling protocols and questions to help uncover, step by step, underlying motives and to get to insight about where my fears and insecurities are showing up and how they are influencing my perceptions, conclusions, judgments, and decisions.

Meditation, at least the way I do it and teach it, is about learning to focus one’s attention in a disciplined way. It is also about focusing the feeling life in specific ways. Both of these activities put you in the drivers seat for short time each day and, at least in the beginning, reveal to you just how much your inner life is not yet under your control. Meditation is the path toward mastering the drivers of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. 

And if you add a third practice: study — reading and contemplating the writings of mystics, spiritual texts, and philosophy — then your meditation and self-reflection will be on steroids. 

This is because such writing contain pictures that speak to the potential and the higher in you. They are nourishment for the soul because they teach it about healthy and lawful movements in it’s own language and medium that is essentially of a spiritual nature. Maybe I’ll say more about this in another article.

To be a truly effective leader, you have to see exactly how your shadow gets amplified across the organization. 

You set the tone of the culture through your conscious and unconscious choices. You need to do the work that reveals to you your weaknesses, blind spots, and projections. 

And you need to strengthen your connection to a source of light and presence in you so you’re managing the burden of responsibilities properly and with healthy inner regulation.