The Contemplative Leader Online Course
This twelve-session online course, taught by the author, is designed as an experiential encounter with core content from The Contemplative Leader.
Each session guides you through a series of deepening reflective exercises and contemplative practices. Starting with an understanding of what contemplation is, you’ll then explore various facets of your False Self: from tracing the arc of your journey into leadership to how your body is physiologically wired to experience challenge and change. You’ll next explore the different identities you inhabit as a leader and then delve into aspects of your True Self, including the fundamental meaning, the raison d’être, of your leadership.
Building from this grounded awareness, you’ll consider how best to use your power and influence for good. You’ll begin by exploring various dimensions of interpersonal dynamics and then group and team interactions from the perspective of nonattached, contemplative leadership.
This online course can be taken at whatever pace suits best; over several days, weeks, or months. The course comes with a participant booklet that features diagrams from the animations, exercises, and guidance for completing the contemplative practices that feature in the videos.
Overview
Course Outline
Each session features video content that lasts up to thirty minutes. The course is designed to be taken in order, from session one through twelve, beginning with an overview of where leadership and contemplation coexist, then moving from the inner journey to the outer journey of contemplative leadership.
The course chapters are as follows:
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1. Give an overview of the approach to leadership development we’re taking on this course
2. What to expect as the course develops
3. Brief introduction to the key content
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1. What is contemplation?
2. How is it related to leadership?
3. Practice a contemplative sit (meditation)
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1. What are the narratives that have most shaped our leadership and from what sources have they originated?
2. What are the steps involved in embracing a new narrative? We’ll examine the framework of The Monomyth of the Hero, in three distinct phases
3. How do we change our leadership narratives: we’ll look at the role of Mentoring, how Change often comes with Suffering, a Loss of Control, and requires Courage to work through.
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1. Understanding the physiological dimensions of our autonomic nervous system and how these three states relate to our leadership.
2. Gain insight into our own physiology and nervous system states (as it pertains to our leadership context)
3. Learn ways to change our state and develop practices to help us be more relaxed, open, creative and nonattached in how you lead yourself and others.
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1. Reflect on how we experience challenges and failure though the lens of Growth and Fixed Mindset
2. Examine the power of Should and the roles of Shame and Guilt in our leadership
3. Complete an exercise that helps us to make distinctions between what we ‘should’ have done and what we ‘wanted’ to do.
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1. Encounter a powerful model of personal change called Logical Levels
2. See how it’s connected to our False and True Self
3. Complete an exercise on our Values, helping us to see any misalignments between what we deeply value and how we act as a leader
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1. Look at what we mean by the terms identities and personas
2. An exercise that illustrates the interplay of our own identities
3. Complete an identities exercise
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1. A working definition of meaning as it relates to contemplative leadership
2. An exercise to identify moments of meaning from our past
3. The Three Domes of Meaning exercise
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1. The Dunbar 150
2. Goals, Desires, Boundaries and Co-dependence, and finally
3. Some of the fundamentals of bringing our contemplative presence into our everyday communication
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1. Start with an overview of a typical or predictable evolution of group and team development
2. Then we’ll consider a contemplative approach to being present within the emergent nature of team dynamics where we can’t control group processes and yet we can be fully present to them as they emerge, and
3. I’ll introduce you to a powerful, dynamic exercise on building and restoring trust and respect in teams
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1. A framework for understanding how our awareness and consciousness changes over time
2. How this affects the organizations and systems within which we lead, and
3. How this impacts the different ways we can lead and influence
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1. Consolidate what we’ve covered throughout the rest of the chapters
2. I’ll give the briefest of recaps of some of the key content and then set you up for some questions to further reflect and integrate what you have taken from the course,
3. Then, finally, we’re going to close out the course with a contemplative sit: a physical, embodied way of setting our intention to lead form a place of contemplation through an act of ‘letting go’.
This twelve-session online course, taught by the author, is designed as an experiential encounter with core content from The Contemplative Leader. Use code BOOK10 for a $10 discount (kindle or BOOK25 for a $25 discount (hardback) if you have purchased The Contemplative Leader book - please email your proof of purchase to info@conexus.ie
