The Value of an Outside Facilitator for Gaining Practice and Mastery of Conscious Leadership

This month marks the exciting launch of the new website for the Conscious Leadership Group, and this is no mere visual facelift. The new site is a material reconstruction, and the most notable feature of the new site is that it gives you — the leader — all the tools you need to bring the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership to you, your team, and your company.

I want to take a moment to highlight the deep trough of resources now available for your unlimited use, all of which are built around the 2015 bestselling book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership:

• You’ll find all of our videos and animations in one easy place
• We’ve shared meditations for nearly every commitment
• Grab downloadable handouts for each commitment
• There are podcasts by leaders describing their experiences in bringing Conscious Leadership to their companies

I love being a part of a company whose core mission is to support the expansion of Conscious Leadership in the business world. For us, this means ending drama, getting more shit done, and having a lot more fun doing it. With a vision of that scale, it makes good sense to make our resources available, easy to locate, and dead simple to work with on your own.

I want to take a second moment to suggest that developing an active, cross-company culture and practice of Conscious Leadership is materially supported by using a certified Conscious Leadership Consultant or Coach to bring this work to life.

First, it is ALWAYS easier to learn a new lifetime practice with a live teacher. I know people who have learned banjo, fly fishing, or golf — three things I chose for their nuanced characteristics — from YouTube and magazines. Yes, it’s possible, but building mastery in a sophisticated new behavior is harder, less engaging, and more time-consuming without a skilled instructor.

Second, the work of Conscious Leadership invites leaders to engage in radical exploration of their own patterns. Self-awareness is the primary game, and having an intelligent, reflective, trained outside resource makes this often-challenging process more friendly and honest. An outside guide is particularly valuable when some “push” or coaching is of service in the early learning moments of Conscious Leadership. As a team, we have learned this through working with hundreds of companies. We’ve seen that a timely challenge, insight, or observation often is of greatest service when it comes from an unattached outsider.

Third, learning Conscious Leadership in a work context can be playful and fun. A half- or full-day workshop is an experience. This work can build deep and lasting intimacy and shared vision across a team or company. Conscious Leadership Group coaches have the experience and training to increase the likelihood that this work is received with excitement and gratitude. Our client CEOs tell us again and again about their team members’ appreciation for being exposed to this work with a trained CLG Coach. This is not a check-the-box training; this is a meaningful transformative experience that individuals and companies come to count on as indispensable for personal and professional growth.

CLG consultants not only bring their deep expertise and seasoning in the Conscious Leadership models, they also bring an ability to offer teams and companies a chance to use these models in a workshop setting to garner real insights on current key issues at the company. In a single CLG session, teams and companies not only learn the models, they practice the tools using live issues. So not only do team members gain valuable new practices for understanding their patterns and unconscious beliefs, they also see new ways of looking at major unresolved issues at work. This adds more to the transformative power of Conscious Leadership.

I am not attached to the belief that having a CLG coach or consultant is the “right” or best way to take in this material. For some companies or organizations, adding a facilitator isn’t an option. For others, they have strong in-house trainers who are wildly capable at bringing the work to life. I’ll never forget meeting two senior Human Resources execs at a Taste of Conscious Leadership. They brought their 15 Commitments books in to show me, and each book had 150 tabs, notes, and cross-references. They had worked toward mastery on their own. But for the companies with whom we have worked and the leaders who have shared their stories of success around this work, a trained outside resource has been invaluable.

Want to learn about how to bring a CLG coach into your company or organization? Tell us about your needs, and we’ll be in touch directly.