Connecting with Your Higher Self: A Pathway to Conscious Leadership

If asked, most leaders would tell you, “Yes, I want to develop as a person.” Whether you’re a leader in an organization, a leader of a household, or just the leader of yourself, I suspect that if you’re reading this, you’re seeking ways to learn, grow, and connect with the highest version of yourself.

But did you know that there’s a framework to track adult development that can help guide you toward a more effective, expansive and elevated state of leadership? 

Let’s dive right in. 

When we step into adulthood, life can be hard. We try to fit in, to belong to a group that feels comfortable and aligned with who we are. And because we long for acceptance, we can sacrifice personal values or beliefs to fit into the mold. This stage is called the “Diplomat.”

As we move forward in life and career, we look for ways to distinguish ourselves. We become the “Expert.” How can we carve out a niche so that we can be recognized and celebrated as an expert practitioner of something? We get value from being right, and build our identities around what we know, who we know, and how much stuff we can do. This is a lovely stage of development, but it has limitations. If people give us feedback, it ruffles our feathers. “What do they know, anyway?” we might think to ourselves as we withdraw from the conversation. 

There comes a time when we realize that our “Expertness” is holding us back from real leadership. Sure, we can lead a team of people who don’t know as much as we do from a technical standpoint, but can we really nurture and develop them into something greater than who they are as human beings?

When that ah-ha moment hits, that maybe there are things we don’t know about ourselves that are holding us back from our true greatness, we start to open. We actively seek feedback and get hungry for development. Gaining these insights propels us forward into a better version of who we are. This “Achiever” stage is what most organizations aim for when developing leaders. In this stage, we are driven, results-oriented and open to feedback that will help us achieve more.

What I’ve described above are codified stages of the Adult Development framework. When I learned the framework, the stages were called Diplomat (fitting in), Expert (defining yourself by what you know), and Achiever (gaining feedback for improved performance). 

While Achiever is the most developed of the “conventional” adult stages, there is a whole group of stages that emerge as you continue on the journey of conscious leadership. Interestingly, fewer than 18% of us ever expand into post-conventional stages. 

These stages are where your higher self lives. It is in these stages that we are able to question our own assumptions, see the hidden complexities of systems, and sit comfortably inside paradoxes. 

In post-conventional stages, we fully commit to win-win outcomes. We release the judgement of others and self. And we begin to find peace, and even humor, in chaos. We continually peel away the layers of our false selves and get closer to our core. We are unshakeable, courageous, and noble. We are our future selves: connected, complete, free.

When I learned of this system in my coach training at Georgetown’s Institute for Transformational Leadership, I was 43 years old and tested as an Expert. As Experts tend to do, I had a negative reaction to my “low” score. 

But once I was able to accept where I was in my development, the framework allowed me to peek into future stages of who I could become and to connect with a part of myself I had not yet developed. 

As you continue to develop yourself, spend some time imagining how your higher self will think and behave. You don’t need to wait to pass some invisible threshold to advance to the next stage, but you do need to actively seek out new ways of seeing yourself and the world. The path can be painful as you let go of old ways that feel familiar and safe, but the payoff is in being a more expansive leader with a greater capacity to invoke real change.

Treat your development as an experiment and see what parts of the new you are ready to emerge. If you’re interested in diving into this framework through an assessment or coaching conversation, give me a call. I’d love to help you experiment with new ways of being.