Benefits
Successful leaders must continuously adapt.
Yet even with extensive traditional coaching, CEOs revert to familiar patterns during high-pressure situations (reactive leadership), something that leads them to move away from novel creativity and clarity.
This lack of neuroplasticity can hinder their ability to lead effectively in today’s VUCA world.
We emphasize transformation — of the mind, heart, and gut —because you can no longer afford to just think differently. You need to be different.
5 Core Pillars
When a Chief Executive Officer’s breadth of experience is integrated with a Chief Enlightened Officer’s depth of insight, the result is CEO².
Choice
Young leaders react. Mature leaders choose.
Emotions seem to happen to us — anger, jealousy, envy — when the truth is these are almost often reactions we (unconsciously) choose.
It can be the same with the way we respond to situations that seem familiar — we react based on past experiences, which can be effective much of the time but disastrous other times.
When we slow down our minds, we can see there is always a choice point before we react.
Slowing down allows us to choose our response and see outside of our predictable reactions. This is necessary to respond intelligently to an ever more complex world.
Benefit: capacity to see what’s really happening
Polarity
Mature leaders see how growth and balance (personal and corporate) are always situated inside of a paradox.
Mature leaders also see how focusing on one pole of success or improvement sets them up to fail at the other pole.
Without using paradox and polarity, long-term innovation over time is impossible.
Examples: Customer Service vs Employee Satisfaction, Low Cost vs Service Excellence, Failure is Necessary for Success, and Go Slow to Go Fast.
By embracing both/and solutions, antifragility is created against novel market changes.
Benefit: antifragility
Integration
Your strengths blindly repeated become a weakness, even a failure, over time.
When something familiar happens and you react differently, integration is beginning to take hold.
Leaders must know and be able to use and integrate information from their heads, hearts, and guts.
Integration is where paradox and polarity are seen, held, and transformed into opportunity.
They are held in a mind that has learned to relax around itself, to not trust thought so blindly, and to listen with ears attuned to deeper frequencies. This intuition is what guides, and has guided, the most visionary leaders
Benefit: reaction transformed into choice
CEO² allows you:
1.) See what’s in front of you (polarity), rather than what appears to be in front of you
2.) Understand what’s (really) at stake (your care, not just your values or integrity),
3.) Slow down, so you can stretch out of your comfort zone of your habitual patterns and instincts (choice and awareness),
4. Do the work in a way that creates permanent neuroplasticity and anti-fragility (integration).
Awareness
Seeing a choice point where a reaction normally occurs — rather than a thoughtful response — requires cultivating awareness.
Any competent leader can change what they think — they’ve done this many times in their careers.
When you learn to listen to what’s underneath your mind, you gain access to a deeper intelligence of gut, heart, and a deeper knowing — awareness — that transcends merely changing what you think. It changes how you think.
Without this, you will continue to react in predictable ways, ways that have worked in the past but will fail in the future.
As demands on leaders’ time increases, the paradox of taking time for mindful reflection becomes vital and necessary for clarity and novel creativity.
Benefit: clarity & novel creativity
Care
A leader’s and a company’s values demonstrate what they care about, which decisions get made and why, and how their integrity meets reality.
Knowing what you really care about allows you to create the kinds of change that factor competing values and differing kinds of integrity.
The bigger picture of care provides a more accurate context for key decisions.
Care includes a number of circles. We have a responsibility to shareholders, company culture (its health and sustainability), financial growth, employee retention, environmental concerns, and diversity.
Care also includes a CEO’s personal values and envisioned long-term legacy.
Benefit: seeing what really matters