We feel it. We know it. We’re participating in a transformational unfolding of human history.
Some days we feel up to the task. Other days – well no, we don’t. Whatever we feel on any given day, we see, as this changed world comes into focus, that we need new ways to operate within it.
What Is It?
We began this journey 10 weeks ago with the promise of a way to help you navigate during a time of peril, uncertainty and disruption. It was the promise of a path to help you connect to your center of wellbeing – a way of leading and living that I call “winning from within.”
The approach of “winning from within” encapsulates a fundamental shift of our times from the Information Age to the Integration Age. The call of this moment is to break down the separation between the spiritual and the worldly, to bring the sacred into everyday life.
In this Integration Age, we join our inner world of reflection with our outer world of action. We weave one fabric out of two realities: the tangible world of objects and companies and world affairs, and the intangible world of purpose, truth, beauty, values, and ease. It is within this intangible world that we find our core, our essence, our center of wellbeing.
Stepping Back to Think About Thinking
In scenes from the past, a young scholar, driven by a craving for knowledge, bids farewell to his family to board a train toward a new life at the grand university.
Civilization embraced this pursuit in the Scientific Revolution, voraciously chasing understanding through rational thought. French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote, “Je pense, donc je suis,” codified in Latin as “Cogito, ergo sum,” – I think therefore I am.
Fast forward several centuries to the Industrial Revolution when machine labor replaced manual labor as the bedrock of the economy.
In our own lifetimes, we’ve experienced a shift from a “bricks and mortar” workplace to the unbounded, amorphous cloud of the Digital Age. Now “knowledge workers,” paid to think and solve complex conceptual puzzles, reign supreme.
Our Information Age delivered technological and communications advances that gave us instant access to knowledge that might have eluded the young scholar on the train for a lifetime. We have benefitted immeasurably from the range of discoveries, innovations and breakthrough solutions.
Yet here we stand, on the precipice of another radical reordering of the way we live and work, unprepared.
As the dreadful year of 2020 slogs to an end, many of us ache. We are mentally exhausted and emotionally drained. Our jobs or businesses are forever changed, or perhaps gone. We’ve lost 1.34 million souls to a global pandemic that didn’t even have a name when the year began.
The prospect of a Covid-19 vaccine renews our hope, but it’s not enough to soothe our wounds.
This year of crisis laid bare the limits of the Information Age. We are Google clicks away from anything we want to know at any moment, but in our collective moment of need, knowledge alone failed us.
We need to usher in a new age within ourselves.
The Integration Age
Over these 10 weeks, we’ve looked at the inner team I call The Big Four: The Dreamer that drives us to innovate products; The Thinker that analyzes problems; The Lover that connects with other people; and The Warrior that produces results.
We’ve met three other inner players, The Transformers: The Lookout, The Captain, and The Voyager. They are our internal advisors that orchestrate the Big Four in real time and push us to evolve over time.
The approach of Winning From Within stands for the idea that both outer and inner experience constitute who we really are. The Big Four aren’t more or less important than the Transformers. The Transformers aren’t the only aspect of human nature that really counts. Winning From Within is one system with seven elements, each with its role to play.
We can get through this perilous time of upheaval by integrating the various parts of who we are, and by grounding ourselves in our center of wellbeing. When we engage our deeper, inner selves in alignment with our outer, worldly selves, we lead and live from a full expression of who we are. When we combine the depth of our experience with the breadth of what we contribute, we lead and live from a full expression of who we can become.
Then we are “winning from within.”
Read more here:
Week 1: How To Connect With Your Center Of Wellbeing
Week 2: Close Your Inner “Performance Gap” To Tap Your Most Powerful Self
Week 3: Leverage Your Inner C-Suite: How To Bring Your “Big Four” To The Negotiating Table
Week 4: How To Draw On The Energy Of Your Big Four
Week 5: How to Tap Your Inner Superpowers in a World Gone Mad
Week 6: Don’t Overthink It: How To Allow Your Full Inner Genius To Speak
Week 7: Spend Quality Time Inside Your Mind To Turbocharge Your Leadership
Week 8: How To Follow Your Inner GPS To Your Center of Wellbeing
Week 9: ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’: What does that even mean?