Susan Trout

Soul Lessons of Leaders
(Excerpted from The Clarion Call: Leadership and Group Life in the Aquarian Era)
By Susan Trout, Ph.D.

Leadership can arise from our personality or our soul. Here are five soul lessons for leaders who view their leadership as a classroom of their soul as they transition from the Piscean Era to the Aquarian. The first four lessons must be mastered before the leader can attain the fifth soul lesson of standing alone.

Vision:
Learning to formulate, sustain, and ground a vision is the bedrock underlying all soul lessons of leadership. This lesson gifts leaders with sustained energy to manifest the vision in the world. The soul lessons in vision include the ability to:

Learn about vision

Formulate a vision

Ground the vision through the mission and organizational structure

Acquire skill in the practical, day-to-day operations that ground the vision

Translate personal vision into the slow, step-by-step creation of a shared vision

Create shared vision with members of the organization while maintaining healthy working relationships with staff or with the population served

Work with and appreciate diverse points of view while maintaining objectivity

Maintain constant vigilance for needed organizational change in direction or structure

Right Relations:
When leaders neglect their physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing and do not engage in continuous self-development, they are prime candidates to learn the second soul lesson, right relations. Learning how to be in proper relationship with self and others assures leaders that the highest good is served for all. Soul lessons of right relations include the ability to:

Acquire self-knowledge and identify obstacles to personal growth

Attend to shadow issues

Study the nature of the human psyche and healthy boundaries and implement this understanding in the workplace

Apply communication skills and reframe mistakes as learning opportunities

Seek and use wise counsel from helping professionals, mentors, and spiritual advisors

Analysis:
Learning the soul lesson of analysis helps leaders distinguish between criticism and the ability to analyze. The energy of analysis promotes fairness and a nonjudgmental attitude. The energy of criticism is judgmental, accusatory, harsh, and attacking. Soul lessons of analysis include the ability to:

Assess a problem to determine accountability and address the solution without blame or condemnation.

Apply systems thinking by recognizing that a system is made up of dynamic interactions between parts that form a complex whole.

Appraise mistakes as opportunities to learn and to do a better job next time.

Synthesis:
Through the soul lesson of synthesis, leaders learn how to see the bigger picture and the destiny of their organization. They examine their willingness to serve as the “glue” that creates cohesiveness within our organization. Soul lessons of synthesis include the ability to:

Recognize every piece of the organization— person, information, idea, task, program, or event—as contributing to the creation of a shared vision and mission

Perform all tasks in the spirit of service and maintain a holographic team and a holographic organization

Apply both/and thinking and avoid polarization into right/wrong, black/white, either/or thinking

Engage intuition and imagination for problem solving

Employ the Witness Self, that part of the mind that can stand back and observe without judgment

To Stand Alone:
The ultimate soul lesson as leaders is to learn to stand alone. Leaders achieve this lesson when they learn to unconditionally love humanity and after they have mastered the four soul lessons of vision, right relations, analysis, and synthesis. Soul lessons of standing alone include the ability to:

Express self-confidence based on feeling connected to their spiritual essence

Embody the spaciousness that comes with the acceptance of life as it is

Face ambivalence about being a leader

Discern attempts to compensate for ambivalent feelings about leadership by misplacing trust

Acknowledge that they can stand alone only when they learn to love enough, regardless of the challenges and dangers experiences in the leadership role

Susan Trout co-founded the Institute for the Advancement of Service in 1980, served as executive director for 22 years, and is now Director of Outreach. She is author of Born to Serve: The Evolution of the Soul through Service and The Awakened Leader: Leadership as a Classroom of the Soul. (www.ias-online.org)

Vision: Learning to formulate, sustain, and ground a vision is the bedrock underlying all soul lessons of leadership. This lesson gifts leaders with sustained energy to manifest the vision in the world. The soul lessons in vision include the ability to:

Synthesis: Through the soul lesson of synthesis, leaders learn how to see the bigger picture and the destiny of their organization. They examine their willingness to serve as the “glue” that creates cohesiveness within our organization. Soul lessons of synthesis include the ability to:

Vision:
Learning to formulate, sustain, and ground a vision is the bedrock underlying all soul lessons of leadership. This lesson gifts leaders with sustained energy to manifest the vision in the world. The soul lessons in vision include the ability to:

Synthesis:
Through the soul lesson of synthesis, leaders learn how to see the bigger picture and the destiny of their organization. They examine their willingness to serve as the “glue” that creates cohesiveness within our organization. Soul lessons of synthesis include the ability to: