After 27 years of developing “enlightened leaders” in 68 countries, we now understand at the most fundamental levels the real distinctions that lie beneath the actions and behaviors of the very best leaders. These breakthrough realizations have only become clear over the last couple of years. We’ve discovered four specific ways world-class leaders separate themselves from the pack.
Since the groundbreaking book in 2005 by Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, a lot of emphasis has been placed in leadership development, and indeed people development circles, on the key factors of EI (emotional intelligence). Goleman’s “mixed” model looks something like this:
– Self-awareness (Intrapersonal) – ability to recognize one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, drives, values, etc. and ability to recognize their impact on others.
– Self-regulation (Intrapersonal) – ability to control, manage or redirect one’s disruptive emotions and actions based on the changing circumstances.
– Empathy (Interpersonal) – ability to consider other people’s feelings in complex environments.
– Social Skills (Interpersonal) – the ability to effectively manage relationships in the complex world of emotions.
– Motivation (Intrapersonal) – ability to maintain motivation regardless of your emotional temperature.
So what do these look like for the World-Class…
World-Class Factor #1. You’ve likely run into the manager, who whether aware of their emotional issues or not, certainly were not able to manage them and certainly didn’t seem to have any empathy with who he or she was dealing with. What’s the emotion you’ve observed most consistently in that emotion-charged environment? My guess is you’d say “anger.” I’d be willing to bet the most challenging managers, or employees for that matter, that you’ve experienced had a lot of stored anger.
A key factor in truly world-class leadership is not that they do a great job of managing anger and other debilitating emotions, but that they have CLEARED their emotional issues to a major extent. On a scale of 0 to 100% Anger, where Hitler was 92%, and the average anger is 31%, truly world-class leaders are consistently 10% or lower. Gandhi, for example, was 8% on the Anger scale. That’s the first thing we discovered. When anger levels, and other debilitating emotions, are that low, self-regulation is not so much an issue. It’s just WHO THEY ARE.
World-Class Factor #2. Another world-class differentiator is closely related to Empathy. We call it Caring for Others. We have found world-class leaders consistently are at 95% Caring for Others or higher. On that scale, Hitler was 52% and Gandhi was 98%.
When a leader comes from the place of naturally caring for others at a very high level, they will naturally consider the feelings of others in their decisions and actions.
World-Class Factor #3. Awareness and Self-Awareness are closely related to the third world-class factor, and that is Level of Consciousness. Dr. David Hawkins introduced us to a Map of Consciousness, a logarithmic scale from 1 to 1000, where 1 is barely alive and 1000 is the realm of Christ, Krishna, Vishnu… The higher we are on that scale the more aware we are of EVERYTHING, not just our emotions and those we’re seeing in others.
We have found world-class leaders to be consistently over 800 on that scale, hundreds of points above the majority of leaders. Until recently, there really wasn’t much we could do to raise our consciousness except, perhaps, to meditate for 20 years. Fortunately, that is no longer the case.
For most of your life, it has been very difficult and time-consuming to:
– Clear your debilitating emotions so self-regulation is not an issue.
– Enhance the empowering emotions so empathy is natural.
– Raise your consciousness to world-class levels so awareness is sky-high.
Today, it is simple. Welcome to Life’s New Game. The Game where we take the merely High Performers to World-Class levels! For a peek behind the curtain, join us at https://lifesnewgame.com/lngexclusive
To Your New Game!
Ed