Leading from Center

What does it mean to lead from your center?

I’ve been using this phrase more and more lately, and I’ll be honest with you: several  people have told me, “It’s kind of bland. It’s kind of blah.”

Maybe it sounds that way to others, but to me? Lead from Center sounds sooo sooo good. Just saying the phrase helps me feel a little more centered. It also piques my curiosity. Even though I already have a lot of thoughts on what it means, and what it takes to do it, there’s a part of me that keeps asking with wonder: What does it really mean to lead from our center?

(And here I don’t mean political “center,” but our inner center.)

I would have to go a long way back, to the very beginning of my coaching journey, to tell you the story of my own interest in this place in each of us – the place we can call center, or inner wisdom, or inner knowing.. It was that part of us that I kept seeing come forward in coaching conversations: the wise, serene, creative, loving part. It had clarity, ideas to share, solutions to tough challenges.

It was experiencing people finding that part of themselves again and again that drove me to train in coaching skills.

I saw from my earliest coaching days that the wise part of us would come to the fore not when it was told to or shoved or nudged – but when a coach would meet a person with loving presence, spaciousness in the conversation, and discerning questions. It would come to the fore when that coach would, in the most loving way, not take any of their b.s. and keep seeking that person’s deeper truth and their wisdom.

In the Playing Big model, we quiet the inner critic and tap into the inner mentor. That work is so important because it is a vehicle for allowing the wise center in us to come forth.

You and I know there’s something that is imperative now: we can’t just tune into that wise, loving place in our own quiet, private ruminations. We have to lead from that place, out in the world. Not just in positional “leadership” but also in the way we lead in our lives.

That leading out in the world may happen through the way you talk to your kids at the kitchen table.
It may show up in the way you help your team handle another round of mass layoffs.
It may show up in the way you speak up at your Town Hall meeting.
It may show up as you work through an old resentment to make room for something more visionary and whole.

What’s the opposite of leading from your center? Leading from a “stray” state – like resentment, animosity, panic, overwhelm.

We all stray from our center not because we’re flawed, but because that’s the very nature of being human.
Times of greater stress and fear lead to more frequent and intense stray states.
We end up getting stuck in those stray states, unless we have the toolkit to help us move through them, and then out of them.

There’s nothing morally wrong with being in those strays, but we can only do our best thinking and find true connection with others when we are back in our center. A host of research on our brains and nervous systems has now proven this clearly. So we return to center for relief of our suffering, and to have more effectiveness in everything we do. But we also do so for our wider contribution: when we return to center, we are wiser, more creative, more discerning, more effective leaders.

The world is crying out for people to lead from their center, not from stray states. 

For those of us who are coaches or therapists or managers or mentors, the world is also crying out for us to support others in a way that helps them lead from their centers, in their spheres.

There is a toolkit for coming back from our strays, for returning (again and again) to your wise, calm, loving center. I am so excited to be developing and teaching those reliable, simple, yet powerful tools to take us back to our inner home.