Dear Founders: I’m Going All in on Integrity. How about You?
My Conscious Leadership Certification Cohort
As Findaway Adventures weaves conscious leadership into the fabric of our coaching practice, we seek founders willing to make the same commitment
Last week I completed the Conscious Leadership 15 Commitments Coaching Certification program, and I want to celebrate a little bit with you and then make an announcement of sorts.
The certification program involved 13 months of intensive work with the Conscious Leadership Group that supports organizational coaches. I did it because I wanted to be able to bring these tools around conscious leadership to the founders whom I work with in my role as Managing Partner at Findaway Adventures. The whole point of conscious leadership is to live a life, including a professional life, of integrity. When you reach that point, you feel as though you are in the flow, working in your zone of genius and unencumbered by the defensive, fight or flight emotional states that can take hold of us when they do us the least amount of good.
So, what does it mean to live a life of integrity? I wrote about integrity and the perils for founders who fall out of integrity here, but a refresher will be helpful. When you think about what integrity actually means, think of it as the quality or state of wholeness, congruence and alignment: congruence with yourself, alignment with the world and being whole in your body and in your space. When you are “in integrity,” you are not only at peace with yourself, you are also more trustworthy. We’ll get to this in a moment.
Integrity includes four pillars: emotional intelligence, impeccable agreements, healthy responsibility, and conscious communication. To be “out of integrity” is to have feelings we don’t feel, commitments we don’t keep, responsibilities we don’t own and feelings we don’t feel, along with truths we don’t say. If you and I are connected in any way, you will see me doubling down on these commitments to being in, rather than out of, integrity.
It might feel a little strange to you, so let me explain what it will look like. You’re going to hear me owning my responsibilities. If I blame you for “rocking the boat,” for example, I will likely come back and realize that what I’m objecting to is the part of me who doesn’t like to “rock the boat.” So, I projected this discomfort onto you. I will take my 100% responsibility.
Another thing you may see is my willingness to feel what I’m feeling all the way through. I might tell you that I’m “feeling fear right now, and a little anger” at something. I feel fear in my stomach and sadness in my throat, so when my body feels these things, I may need to pause for a moment and figure out what my body is telling me. The feelings may be positive: we may have a deep conversation about something, and I’ll pause and close my eyes to check in with my body to see what I’m feeling. And then I’ll be honest with you about what I’m feeling and thinking about it all. These are all unarguable truths, which I am experiencing as emotions or a story I’m telling myself about something.
By acknowledging these feelings and thoughts for what they are, rather than suppressing them, I am using them as helpful reference points rather than primitive fight or flight responses. And then I may ask that we examine the facts, which are not the story I am telling myself or that you are telling yourself. The facts are more like what a video camera would record if left to run continuously and record everything that happens. By separating fact from story in this way, I am still speaking unarguably, which makes what I say more trustworthy.
The reason this makes me more trustworthy is that when we’re not speaking truthfully with someone — when we’re holding back feelings or ignoring our body sensations or hiding our thoughts from someone — we create a disconnection with them. And when you create this disconnection, you need to go back and clear it up. In conscious leadership, it’s actually called clearing an issue. So, if you say or do something I disagree with or that rubs me the wrong way, I may lack the courage to react in real time. But I will circle back with you to clear the issue and say, “You and I talked yesterday, and I made up this story about what you said, but there’s more to discuss. Let’s look at the facts.” I muster up my courage to have this conversation so that we can ultimately be closer.
I also plan to keep clear agreements: about meeting times or the scope of our work together. We’ll agree when and how long to meet and to use the meeting to come to impeccable agreements that we will keep. I’ve found that in practice this approach creates guardrails that you can push up against to create a safe space for the relationship. When I know that I am going to miss an agreement you can count on me to renegotiate, but I aim to do this with less than 5% of my agreements.
These are the kinds of things you will see from me personally as I commit myself to living my life in integrity. But I also want to say that Findaway Adventures will seek founders who are willing to make the same kind of agreements. It takes practice, and integrity doesn’t happen overnight. But we are convinced that as the founder goes, so goes the company. If a founder is happy and enlivened and motivated, the company will be happy and enlivened and motivated. If the founder is grumpy and pissed off all the time, then the company will also be grumpy and pissed off. If a founder is in integrity, the company will be integrity.
As an investor, I want a “whole” founder, because that means I will also have a “whole” company and ultimately “whole,” happy customers.
So, what do you think, change-the-world founders? Are you willing to be in integrity with yourself and with your company and in the world?
Sincerely,
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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!