6

CULTIVATING FLEXIBILITY

A conscious leader is flexible. We define flexibility as “the capacity to switch modes seamlessly and to bend without breaking, as the situation or the context requires.” Examples of flexibility abound in nature. The bamboo tree gets its resilience from its ability to be flexible; it bends but doesn’t break in the wind. A chameleon knows how to change colors to adapt to its context in order to survive and thrive. Leaders also need to be able to bend but not break, adapting to circumstances in a principled way without sacrificing their core values.

POLARITIES AND PARADOXES

The constant and inexorable flow of life takes us through a continuous rhythm between polarities, which often show up for leaders as dilemmas. For example, leaders may be faced with dilemmas such as efficiency versus innovation, short term versus long term, urgent versus important, and control versus delegation. The mastery needed to handle dilemmas is the ability to flex.

When dealing with polarities, the choice is not between right and wrong; it is between right and right. It is like being asked to choose between the North Pole and South Pole; there is no good or bad or right or wrong. Yet, we still face the tension of having to make a choice. We have to learn how and when to cycle from one pole to the other, instead of trying to be both. We need to sense what the situation truly calls for in the moment from a state of presence. Some leadership dilemmas present us with a paradox. This is where we have a third option: one of not simply choosing or cycling between the two poles, but knowing how to go beyond them into a third sweet spot. Michael Gelb offers examples of the kinds of challenges we face in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable:¹

• Think strategically and invest in the future—but keep the numbers up. Be a long-term thinker, but also think about the short-term.

• Be entrepreneurial and take risks—but don’t cost the business anything by failing.

• Continue to do everything you’re currently doing even better—and spend more time communicating with employees, serving on teams, and launching new products.

• Know every detail of your business—but delegate more responsibility to others.

• Become passionately dedicated to your vision and fanatically committed to carrying it out—but be flexible, responsive, and able to change direction quickly.

• Speak up, be a leader, set the direction—but be participative, listen well, cooperate.

• Have all the traditional masculine virtues—and all the newly ascending feminine virtues.

Facing a polarity is like being caught between the two poles of a horseshoe magnet. Between the magnet’s two poles exists a field that is invisible but powerful. That is your field of potential and creation, created precisely because of the polarity. In such a field, you have the opportunity to convert potential energy into kinetic energy. If you place a wire in the space between magnetic poles, an electric current is generated. The fuel or life force or energy that moves and animates life would not exist without polarities.

POLARITY MAPPING

A useful tool to think about dilemmas is polarity mapping, developed by Dr. Barry Johnson.² When faced with a polarity, most people tend to have a preference for one of the choices. Polarity mapping is a powerful tool to help us come unstuck from our either/or thought and behavioral patterns. Many problems are simply polarities that can be handled by using “and” rather than “or”—that is, by including both polar qualities as interdependent pairs in coming up with the solution. Indeed, in many cases that is the only way to find a lasting, impactful solution.

Here is a simple example of a polarity map, illustrated in Figure 6.1. We all want to live and avoid death. For that, we must inhale and exhale. Many values dilemmas are like being asked to choose whether you prefer inhalation or exhalation. We attach a positive charge to inhalation because that is what brings life-giving oxygen into our lungs. But if you continue to inhale without exhaling, you start falling into the negative, the excessive use of the perceived positive pole. The downside of the excessive use of the inhale pole is that carbon dioxide builds up inside your body. When that happens, your body automatically moves to the other pole, where it starts releasing the carbon dioxide. If you keep releasing carbon dioxide, very naturally you will fall into the excessive use of the exhale pole, which leads to oxygen deprivation.

Figure 6.1—Polarity Map

This is how you cycle through polarities where both are needed. It’s a very natural law: too much of something automatically pushes you to the other side, and too much of its opposite pushes you back the other way again. This is how the rhythm of life is sustained. Far from being bad things, polarities are very necessary. We simply need to recognize where we are on the cycle and respond accordingly.

Shakti Leaders Speak: On Polarities

Lynne Twist offers a compelling way to transcend polarities, rooted in the difference between taking a position versus taking a stand.

When I’m in a leadership position and I’m confused and there are so many voices and you can’t tell which way to go, who’s right and who’s wrong, and whose voice is stronger or louder, I always feel that what wants to come through can’t show up. When people get caught in what I call their point of view or their position, it creates a counter point of view. A position always creates its opposition: left creates right, right creates left, here creates there, up creates down, us creates them. Those are positions. Think of them as just points of view . . . like when you have a particular point of view because you’re in Washington, D.C. Points of view are important and useful; they’re positions on the game board. But if you think yours is the only correct one, that clouds your capacity for change.

A better way to think about this is called “taking a stand.” All great leadership comes from taking a stand. A stand is a place from which you have vision. A stand encompasses, allows, and respects all points of view. Once a point of view has been respected or heard, it can dissolve; it doesn’t need to fight for its position. When you take a stand, you relinquish your point of view; instead, you can lead with an inspiring vision—something that encompasses and allows all points of view to be seen, respected, and to contribute. Once you receive them, they can dissolve because they no longer need to fight for being right or wrong. In a meeting where people are arguing from their point of view, if the leader can stand for a vision larger than or more profound than any points of view in the meeting, and from there receive, hear, and recreate every point of view at the table, then the arguing of positionality and who is right and who is wrong starts to dissolve, and everybody starts to find alignment and a shared vision. The issue can move forward toward its natural resolution or fulfillment.

Gandhi is an example of a leader who took a stand that allowed all points of view to be heard, respected, and begin to dissolve. In the work that I did with the Hunger Project, we were not against anything. We were standing for a world where every human being has a chance for a healthy and productive life. Martin Luther King Jr. is another example; his vision was what inspired his leadership, not his point of view. Obviously he had a point of view that segregation was wrong; he had a position that the laws that were governing our country were bigoted. All of that was totally valid. But where he led from was vision and a stand, not from a position for or against anything.³

Masculine and Feminine Polarity Map

Masculine and feminine values present a similar polarity (Figure 6.2). You may be a woman or a man, but to say “Because I’m a woman I’ve got to be more feminine” or “Because I’m a man I’ve got to be more masculine” is like forcing yourself to choose between inhaling and exhaling. These are complementary qualities; together they bring wholeness. They are polarities to be leveraged to unlock and increase the energy available in them for your use, to evolve and raise your game, as well as your ability to function as a whole human being.

Figure 6.2—Feminine and Masculine Polarity Map

Our age of science and technology has overvalued the mind and the rational self at the expense of our creative and intuitive side. Of course, coming on the heels of the Dark Ages, the rational self clearly needed to be developed. But by going too far in that direction, we are in danger of losing the other side. It’s like going to the gym and only working out the side of your body. We need to develop all these other parts: our intuition, our emotional intelligence, our systemic intelligence, and our spiritual intelligence.

Likewise, masculine energy has been much more cultivated in most of us (male and female alike) through our cultures and educational systems. You can’t fly with just one wing. The other side has been largely ignored and devalued. This whole journey—and the central message of this book—is about knowing how to develop the neglected feminine and bring it into an equal balance.

Once you are conscious of such polarities and your own proclivities, you can determine how you need to be in a given situation. Find your dominant archetype, but know what your complementary archetype is and draw from that to flex as needed. Presence gives you the capacity to flex in a way that is not necessarily your natural tendency or archetype.

Reflections

Take a few moments to study the Masculine and Feminine Polarity Map in Figure 6.2.

Most of us have a preferred pole. Let’s suppose it’s the feminine. We need to recognize it has an interdependent pair, which is the masculine. If we prefer the feminine pole, what are the gifts that are available to us and how do we move toward mastery? There are many wonderful feminine qualities listed in the upper-left quadrant. These are gifts that we start displaying when we are in this pole. While we are in this pole, though, we may tend to neglect the other pole. Or worse, we judge, fear, and avoid qualities of the other pole (masculine) in the terms listed in the bottom-right quadrant. If we continue to neglect our masculine energy, there’s a good chance we will get into our blind spot and go too far on the feminine side. Any excess of the feminine pole creates its own shadow, with the qualities listed in the bottom-left quadrant. Men and women alike need to recognize and cultivate the positive masculine values of the upper-right quadrant.

• Which is your preferred polarity, masculine or feminine?

• How can you stop neglecting and start developing the positive qualities of the other?

• What are your early warning signs when you fall below the line, into excessive feminine or masculine energy? Which behaviors do you start to typically demonstrate? Make note so you can catch yourself in time. You need to take prompt action to move diagonally across into the positive behaviors of the complementary pole.

• What are some immediate and easy to do action steps or behaviors you are willing and able to take then? Note them down.

The key insight here is that to be a conscious leader you must stay vigilant and present to remain “above the line,” and flex with ease between the upper two quadrants. Otherwise, you risk falling into unconscious leadership and getting stuck in a vicious cycle toggling between the lower two quadrants—an all too common experience.

 

The Story of the Sagar Manthan

The Hindu myth of the sagar manthan, “the churning of the ocean,” brilliantly captures the idea of how dealing with polarities can bring the elixir to the surface. The story is set in the ocean of consciousness. Just as we churn milk to make the butter rise, so too we must churn this ocean of consciousness to bring the amrita up, the nectar of immortality, which will break us out of our limited human experience of disease, decay, pain, suffering, and death.

In the myth, the devas and the asuras, the good guys and the bad guys, have to work together to churn the ocean. Vishnu, the Preserver and Protector, becomes a tortoise. Mandhara, the mountain, becomes the churning stick, the centering principle around which all polarities move, and rests on Vishnu so it doesn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean. The great serpent Vasuki becomes the rope that the devas and asuras use to churn the ocean. The devas represent the positive pole and the asuras the negative pole.

As they churn, many ratnas rise from the ocean of consciousness, fourteen different jewels that signify siddhis or psychic or spiritual powers and are shared equally between the devas and asuras. Finally, a great big pot of nectar rises to the surface. Here, the light needs to trick the dark, because ultimately this whole thing is a game that the good guys have to win. In the end, the grand design doesn’t want the dark to win; the dark is simply serving a role to surface more of the light. What’s the point of evolution if everything goes back to dissolution? We need to and want to evolve. The trick that the light plays is that Vishnu assumes the form of Mohini, a beautiful temptress. All the asuras are so excited they follow her, leaving the pot of nectar behind for the devas to drink and regain with their immortality the kingdom they had lost (how that happened is another story).

The essence of this story is that we all have positive aspects (what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”) and lesser aspects (our internal demons). They are all within us, and they are churning us. That’s the role they have to play, because through that churn we surface the elixir, the nectar of immortality, the truth that will set us free.

Where there is great light, there is also great darkness; where there are angels, there are demons. We must know that and watch for it. Life is a constant inhale and exhale, an undulation between one pole and the other. You have to be present and be ready for the other pole when its time comes. When the churn starts, all that is in the ocean (our unconscious) comes up. This is an important warning: when we churn our psyche or engage these polarities within, we have to do so with discernment and proper guidance so that what comes up does not unhinge us.

ARCHETYPES ENCOUNTERED ON THE JOURNEY

Having described the universal pattern of the heroic leadership journey, we introduce another key feature of journey work: the cast of characters one encounters on the way. These are archetypes; they are agents of our individuation and awaken us to the realization that “No one is our enemy, no one is our ally; all alike are our teachers.”⁴ Navigating the dynamics each unleashes upon us and extracting the teachings and gifts they are here to give requires great flexibility and agility.

The characters in our journey are reflections of the four-fold self that we described in Chapter 5: eros, thanatos, logos, mythos. These are the main drives, urges, and voices in the unconscious that are in polarized conflict within us and churn our mind and body. Navigating these archetypal powers is supremely challenging and a true test of our capacity to survive and thrive. Emerging through these distills our full-blown psychological and physical resilience, resulting in our coming of age as mature, self-directed humans and leaders embodying our unique awakened Shakti.

We come across thousands of people in our life. But according to the hero’s journey framework, it actually boils down to a handful of archetypal characters. As in most movies about human lives, there’s a hero, a heroine, a villain, and a helper. If you were a screenwriter, you’d come up with a pretty standard set of characters. Those characters exist in all our lives, but most of us simply haven’t seen them that way. They are called archetypes because they are simply the personalities through which a classic, timeless pattern is manifested. It’s not really about who they are; they each play a certain role in your life. It’s about something bigger than them, a universal pattern of behavior that gets played out through them toward you.

Major Characters

Major characters in the heroic journey include the mentor and the nemesis. The mentor carries your higher self for you, what we could also call your divine self or your soul self. You are meant to mature and grow into a powerful being; the mentor represents that being. He shows up as a role model to guide you.

Just as the mentor carries your higher-self aspect, the nemesis carries your shadow: all the parts of you that you have repressed, suppressed, and denied. These could also be undeveloped parts of yourself. They remain undeveloped and therefore almost infantile, and you recognize them in the behavior of someone who shows up in your life. That’s the way life mirrors to you, indicating where your unfinished business lies. It is a part of you that you need to reclaim in some way, that you need in order to become whole, to heal. It could be a fear you need to face. So even seemingly bad guys play essential roles in the unfolding of your potential.

We evolve and become more of who we are when we start recognizing that all these characters are in fact aspects of ourselves. Then we can start reclaiming those parts of us, those energies within us. We start becoming more whole by bringing everything that was in our undeveloped, unconscious, or subconscious self into our consciousness and awareness. Suddenly we have more energies available to play with; we become more flexible, agile, fluid, and capable of showing up in different roles and modes, even as we become more whole. That’s how we grow.

People who show up in our lives often trigger us and push our buttons. They are here for our awakening and growth. When we are challenged by such people, we should say,

• What do I need to learn from this experience?

• What about this person’s behavior triggers me? In what way am I perhaps also like that?

• Is that something I need to acknowledge instead of deny? Better still, is there something in this denied quality that may be something I need?

• How does that relate to who I am? What part of me is being reflected in this situation?

• What do I need to claim about myself that’ll make me a little more whole?

If you remain present with your discomfort and denial long enough, you will eventually mine the gift that is in it. You may discern that you need to create healthier boundaries and gain the power to become more assertive. Or you may find yourself opening your heart and feeling more empathy towards yourself and others.

You grow by making meaning from all the archetypes that show up in your life, instead of playing the victim and feeling sorry for yourself. You come to understand that each person has played a vital and necessary role in furthering your growth.

It is one thing to recognize that your mentor is a reflection of your higher self, but recognizing that your adversaries too have something to teach you can be a challenge. You need to eventually take on some of the qualities you judge harshly in the villain. But in order to do so, you will have to find the goodness in the so-called badness. You have to recognize that the original quality is not in itself bad; it’s just showing up in a distorted way. When you can find that quality, the goodness, the golden nugget in that darkness and can manifest it in your own behavior, personality, and being, you become more of who you can be.

Complementary Energies and Projection

When things happen to us in life, we are quick to label them as good or bad, based on how they appear to us in the moment. Just as there is goodness in what we label as bad, there is also some badness in what we consider good. Our value judgments and preferences tend to take one pole and deem it good and judge and deny the other as bad. The minute you choose one complement over its opposite, you create its shadow. Once you create the shadow, it’s only a matter of time before it shows up in your life as a limiting factor, an impediment to your growth.

In sum, that which we deny in ourselves we project onto another and judge as bad. For example, if you are a workaholic, what part of yourself, which complementary energy, have you denied? It is probably the part of you that would like to leave at 6:00 P.M. and do some of the other things you enjoy and value. That self has been denied by you. How does it show up in your life? As a colleague you judge very harshly who goes home at 5:30 P.M. every day. Because you have denied it so much in yourself, there’s a negative charge attached to that part of you. There’s a huge positive charge attached to the “good” workaholic part of you, a nice halo around your head. But the other part of you looks like a fellow with horns, so you distance yourself from that person. The archetypal energy of that complementary aspect of you shows up through the behavior of this one person. Instead of seeing the energy as a mirror, you reject it.

It is startling how often this occurs and how much it impacts our relationships. Most conflicts we have with others can be traced back to a part of ourselves that we haven’t fully owned. This is then projected onto another person and shows up in their behavior toward you. Life is giving you a mirror, asking you to look at something and take responsibility for it. When you realize this and take a moment to say, “I’m going to do something about this instead of being a victim of this situation,” the energy that was polarized gets discharged. What happens when you discharge that energy to neutrality? You cannot change anyone else, but the minute you change yourself, everything around you starts changing. Once you withdraw your projection from that person, by reclaiming your own denied energy (that they were effectively carrying for you), the other person now shows up as the person he really was all along!

The so-called “villain” can be your greatest teacher, but it’s a difficult lesson to learn and can take a long time. Be kind to yourself and don’t judge yourself harshly if you haven’t been able to forgive. Instead, dig deep and find the endurance to stay with the process. Realize that “one day I will get to love, accept, forgive, and truly move on, and will have grown from this.” Indeed, a time may come when you will have learned so much from your “villain” that gratitude will flow from you toward him, not just forgiveness or acceptance.

Minor Characters

Along with the major characters, we encounter a number of smaller role players during the journey.

The Herald

This could be a person in your life whom you have known for a long time, but one day they herald something to you, something that to any other person might feel like nothing, just another trivial part of the script. But there is a message that zings home to you in what they have to say. You’re being given a little warning: it is time to get out of the complacency and comfort of normal life. Changes are imminent; things are going to start happening. Your soul is ready to journey.

When the herald shows up in your life, it can be like having a dream or vision. In fact, heralds do often come to people in their dreams. It could happen when you are watching a movie, or when you are stopped at a traffic light and you turn and see a huge billboard in the middle of nowhere that strongly speaks to you. Everything goes out of focus and this message seems to be tunneling to you. These are herald moments. You have to pay attention and recognize these moments when they occur, for it is all too easy to ignore them and miss the opportunity they are pointing to.

Threshold Guardians, Testers, and Tricksters

In many traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, masks or statues of wrathful or malevolent deities are placed at the entrance of homes and temples as gatekeepers. These threshold guardians are there to ward off and scare off pretenders. Only the true hero has the courage to enter the special world. The guardian wants to make sure that you are worthy of entering.

The role of the guardian is to test you, to ask, “Are you smart enough? Do you have what it takes to see this through?” Sometimes he can actually play a more subtle role; he may be someone who makes you think you’re going a certain way but actually tricks you into another experience. Gollum in The Lord of the Rings is such a tester, because you never know if he’s a good or bad guy. Is he friend or foe? Should you follow or not follow? These guardians confuse you and test your resolve to go the distance. In the Indian epic the Ramayana, Shurpanakha (the sister of the demon king Ravana) is a tester; she disguises herself and asks Ram to marry her. He says, “I’m already married, go to my brother Lakshmana.” She does, but Lakshmana has discernment and doesn’t get fooled. On his heroic journey, he passed the test, proving his worthiness as a hero.

The “Fool” archetype is another version of the trickster as teacher. It reflects the hero’s innocence and our inner child-self and reminds us to forgive our stupidity, embrace our shame, lighten up and not take ourselves too seriously. This archetype provides much needed comic relief in life’s all-too-serious script. It is why the Sufi path engages and cultivates this fool-self, seeing it as a high road to self-mastery.

The Shape-Shifter

A shape-shifter can be your anima or animus. For a woman, it would be a man who shows up. He may look like a lover but reveals himself to be a villain. She doesn’t know if he’s someone she should love or hate; he seems to be shape-shifting. It is an encounter with a seemingly “light man” who changes persona and becomes a “dark man.” He is mirroring the woman’s inner process of integrating her positive animus with her shadow animus. This can be a rocky and unsettling phase in the journey to maturation.

The Goddess and the Temptress

There is, in the hero’s journey and sometimes in the heroine’s journey, the goddess or the temptress. The positive aspect is the goddess, who is like a great mother. In the yogic tradition, it is the Kali energy: she looks like she’s destroying things, but in her fire you can be born again. You feel like you’ve come back to the womb.

Sometimes for the hero there can be an encounter with a temptress, who asks him to forgo his journey and stay with her. Many years may pass and the hero may completely forget why he started the journey. In the Mahabharata, Arjuna hangs around for ages in a beguiling underwater world with Uloopi, the Naga princess. In the more masculine spiritual traditions, the message is that when you’re on your journey to come into your enlightenment, don’t get waylaid by women who are described as distractions, nymphs, and apsaras. You’ll find many such tales dotted through heroic epics. While this can come across as dismissive of women, most spiritual traditions discourage romantic entanglements on the way to awakening. But once the goal is attained, having sublimated the libidinous lower nature and matured into wholeness, the return journey allows and encourages entering into enlightened partnerships.

Shifting Roles

Archetypal forces are actually part of your own personal unconscious, and the more you can make your unconscious your own and claim it, the more conscious you can be, the more enlightened you become. You could fulfill any one of these roles for others. The role played by a mentor can shift; you could get into a codependent relationship or a power game with your mentor. The mentor starts feeling his greatness and his power over you. When you come into your own power and say, “I don’t want to give you that power anymore,” you become the shadow of that mentor; he may get angry with you because you’ve taken your power back. Individuals who play these roles for you may not remain that way forever. They may shift according to the journey or the stage of the journey you are in. Once you complete a journey and start a new one, the same individuals may fill different roles. Some could play two different roles in your life simultaneously.

Remaining flexible and being able to dance and flow with these inner and outer forces is a critical capacity of Shakti Leadership.

ARCHETYPES SIMPLIFIED

All of this is terrific for script writing, but what relevance does it have for our lives? If you simplify these archetypes, you realize that they fall into two categories: those who are your enablers and those who are your disablers.

You only discover this after you’ve completed the journey, because while you’re in it, the villain is the worst person in your life. But once you are done and you’ve learned your lessons and emerged with your elixir, you realize (as we said earlier) that no one is your enemy and no one is your friend; all alike are your teachers. Whether they’re playing the role of enabler, which is one polarity, or of disabler, which is another polarity, they are helping create the energy field needed for you to cut through and find your power.

It is one thing to understand this. To live it, to cut through the polarities and unlock the energy—that is the journey.

THE DRAMA TRIANGLE

Most of us could certainly do with a little less drama in our lives! We often feel ill-treated and go running to someone else asking for their help, feeling like helpless victims of the situation.

How does drama get created? It is almost always because of another person who shows up in your life. By yourself, you may be perfectly fine and peaceful. But the minute a spouse, parent, daughter, or son enters your energy field and starts engaging with you, the two energy fields intersect. This intersection results in what physics calls interference, experienced by us as dissonance in our lives. The daily breakdown of equilibrium in human systems, at work or at home, is unavoidable. Depending on our personality type and orientation, we may experience it differently. But it will happen—that is a given. The name we give it and meaning we make of it can change.

This all comes together very nicely in a framework called the drama triangle, originated by Stephen Karpman.⁵ It elegantly captures human dynamics and how we get into codependence with other people in our lives (Figure 6.3).

Something difficult happens in your life. You’re really challenged, and you feel like a victim. When you enter this mode of victimhood, you automatically attract the opposite energy. You start projecting your victimhood onto someone: “I am a victim right now because of this person; he has done me wrong.” When you get caught up in this persecutor/victim polarity, you will soon draw into your life a rescuer. Rescuers have an innate need to show up and help. They want to be needed and do good. People who become coaches and healers often take to these professions because they fit the archetype of rescuer.

For some time, the rescuer gives a lot of energy and the victim absorbs it happily but passively. The victim feels good because she’s getting the support she needs, and the rescuer feels fabulous because she’s needed. Then, inevitably, all the polarized energies swing. At some point, the rescuer starts to feel depleted, thinking, “No matter how much I give, it’s never enough.” The rescuer has become a victim, and the victim is now seen as a persecutor. Often, this is when the original persecutor starts showing up as a rescuer! The former rescuer starts understanding why the persecutor might have been behaving as they did. A strange kind of bond develops between them.

Figure 6.3—Drama Triangle

You enact this drama in your life in all your relationships where you are stuck in codependence with others. You’re locked in this little dance of despair, depleting your energy in a downward spiral. This is what happens when we’re unconsciously playing roles. Like a game of musical chairs, everyone shifts into a different mode but the drama continues.

How can we live differently? We have to wake up one day and realize that it is silly to continue playing this game. There is a better way, without all the drama.

Figure 6.4—Drama to Dharma

From Drama to Dharma

Have hope! You are not in some endless dance of death with this other person. It takes just one person to change a situation, and that person is you. We learned from the work of Gay and Katie Hendricks that we can move from drama to dharma by flipping the triangle (Figure 6.4). When you start making these roles conscious, you start seeing them with more awareness. The first thing to do is to stop being a victim, and take on the role of a creator instead, by reframing the whole thing. Place yourself in a creator role and ask yourself how you can play with this dynamic. See the persecutor as a challenger, and seek help if you need it from a coach. Ask how both of these people can teach you and serve you: what can you learn from them?

Thinking of oneself as a victim of circumstances comes from a place of disempowerment. Step into the role of creator. If you were to take responsibility for your experience and how it is landing for you, what would you do? If the context is not okay for you, change it; do not accept the unacceptable. Take responsibility for the situation and your experience of it.

When you are the creator, see the persecutor as a challenger. Think about it: if you spar with someone stronger than yourself, or if you run alongside a pacer, they reveal your potential to you and help you attain it. They make you reconsider what you thought was your limit.

We often tell other people to change, but that rarely works. What does work is for you to shift internally, change your energy, start to carry your power and your weight on your own two feet, without leaning on someone or being overbearing. The minute you do that, the other person’s energy has to shift. They cannot play the same game anymore because “it takes two to tango.” Someone can be a perpetrator only if you are willing to be a victim. The minute you shift into creator energy, in which you are present and centered and carry your own weight, you change the energy of the other person.

Similarly, you can reframe your relationship with someone who is seeking to rescue you by holding your power as a creator and seeing them as your coach. You must run your own race, but you can take advantage of their support to raise your game. Use the challenger’s energy to push you out of your comfort zone, and use the coach’s energy to pull yourself up into a better place. The two roles can work in tandem to propel your growth in a healthy way.

The big shift is to move out of codependence into interdependence or even better, inter-independence. When you can lead yourself out of victimhood to become a creator, you can become your own rescuer. In a conscious way, you can be your own coach as well as challenger.

ASSESSING YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE

It is very important to understand your dominant energy archetype. Some of us are more masculine in our leadership, others more feminine. It is fine to have a preference but it’s important to recognize which is your dominant pole and which is your complementary pole.⁶

Shakti Leaders Speak: On Ground Leaders and Dynamic Leaders

Sally Kempton says,

Some leaders are ground leaders. They hold the space, and create a ground in which people can be creative. Some leaders are dynamic, in that they are like Steve Jobs, just endlessly creative Shaktis. At some basic level, leadership is about figuring out if you are a ground leader or a dynamic leader. The inner marriage is the ability to access both your static and dynamic states. My image of Shakti is the leopard who is completely still, the hunter who is totally unmoving but completely present until it unleashes its coiled power at the appropriate moment. This is the image of the Shiva/Shakti. The utter absolute patience of the stillness, which is not passive. It is coiled power waiting for its moment to act. In a state of presence, you hold both polarities. You know which one to play as needed. What may be initially a conscious act can become unconscious over time. You don’t even need to know. You just naturally do.⁷

 

What do you focus on to get the job done? How do you exercise influence? How do you get others to do what is important? What energizes or drives you when working with others? How do you resolve disagreements or disputes? For each of these areas, there are multiple polarities, such as hierarchy (considered masculine) versus network (considered feminine), or level and status versus relationships (Figure 6.5). Fill in the appropriate score in each line, as it corresponds to you, to get a sense of what your style is (with –1 or +1 being least, and –3 or +3 being the most feminine or masculine, respectively). Sometimes you might be equally both, which means you put a ‘0’ in the middle blank. There’s no right or wrong way; it’s just about becoming aware.

If you have scored a –3 or +3 on any front, ask yourself if there are situations where that may not be serving you. The takeaway from this exercise is that it’s fine to have a dominant archetype, to be either masculine or feminine. But you must know this in order to call on the complementary energy when needed.

Former corporate executive Betty Ann Heggie uses a simple metaphor to explain how to balance our masculine and feminine energy in any situation as required. Think of hot and cold water from a tap. She says, “When you feel the water getting too hot, dial down the temperature by turning on the cold water tap. When it cools too much, turn the hot back on and reduce the cold until you find the perfect temperature.”⁸

Pay particular attention to this when you find yourself in a leadership moment or dilemma and feeling stuck. You are stuck because what you’re doing isn’t working. That’s when you need to know what to pull from the other pole. You can always use it, let it go when it’s done, and come back to being in your anchored place.

Figure 6.5—Masculine/Feminine Leadership Styles Assessment

The whole idea of flexibility is that you should be anchored in yourself, but also know how to flex toward something else. Bend, but don’t break. Bend toward it and then come right back when you no longer need it.

Remember that the ideal to strive for is the ardhanarishwar, the beautiful depiction of half man–half woman in the yogic tradition: to have transcended gender and its surface qualities. Learn to hold both and play to one or the other as needed.

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is a consultant who helps to build gender-balanced businesses. She advocates that businesses and their employees learn to be “gender-bilingual”—to speak the language of the feminine as well as the language of the masculine.¹⁰ Speak the language of the country you are in. But you don’t stop being the other.

Cultivating Positive Masculine and Feminine Traits

Once we understand that choosing only our masculine or feminine nature is as unsustainable as choosing only to inhale or to exhale, the next question is: how do we cultivate our necessary complementary qualities?

There is a simple answer: just the same as we learn any skill.

• We identify what we want to cultivate. Let’s take the quality of gentleness.

• Take it up as a quality you want to genuinely learn. Adopt it as your leadership practice or sadhana for the week. Write it up as a big sticker on your preferred screen/s: “Gentleness.”

• Start paying attention to this quality and apply it intentionally in your leadership moments and relationships over the next week or so. Note the outcome.

• Identify some role models who exemplify this quality and study how they do it.

• Watch YouTube videos or enroll in a life-skills/soft-skills class that teaches this. For example, a simple 5 to 10 minute Buddhist meditation called metta practice leads you to embodying loving kindness or gentleness. We have shared it with you as part of the higher-self dialogue on page 122.

• Try it on for size. Practice it relentlessly. If necessary begin with low-risk situations. Much like riding a cycle, you may be awkward at first. But with committed practice, you will find that you have gone from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, then to conscious competence, and finally to unconscious competence that comes quite naturally.¹¹

• Once you’ve mastered the quality to a degree of satisfaction, take up the next quality you wish to develop.

All these qualities are potentially within you. You have to have the heroic heart to make the effort and find the teacher—if needed, to fake it ‘til you make it. Your cause is worthy, so don’t worry about falling and failing a few times.

If failing is a fear, then the next quality you may wish to take up is vulnerability.

Our advice may sound simple, but it comes from some of the world’s great wisdom traditions. For example, monks in Buddhist training are told to take up a higher emotion such as compassion, loving kindness, empathy, or equanimity as their daily practice and are tested by their teachers accordingly. Much like going to a gym is an effective way to build our biceps, taking up such a routine is effective in building our masculine/feminine traits.

Practices for Integrating Masculine and Feminine

Michael Gelb recommends the following practices to help integrate our masculine and feminine natures:

• Cultivate patience, receptivity, and empathetic listening.

• Be bold and assertive when appropriate.

• Learn to move freely from patience and receptivity to bold action and vice versa.

• Balance imagination and logic, intuition and analysis. Use your whole brain.

• Cultivate the “ability to behave with compassion and wisdom while maintaining inner and outer peace regardless of the circumstances.”¹²

• Transform stress with the Love Response—teach yourself how to shift from a fear state to a love state.¹³

• Be aware of your anxiety and do not be afraid to deeply feel your feelings. (This may be the single most important thing.)

• Embrace a daily practice to facilitate the integration of masculine and feminine energies. Do pranayama (regulating the breath through various techniques), Tai Chi, or some other practice every single day to help change your nervous system, to be more aligned and attuned to this new integration.

 

Conscious leaders are flexible. They know how to draw Shakti from all the different forces available and use each as needed; they are not fixated on any one way of being or doing things. They adapt, unlearn, and learn with agility, leveraging all polarities with presence, coming unstuck from all ors and finding the best in all ands.

In the next chapter, we look at a third important capacity of Shakti Leadership: achieving congruence.