“Gaining access to being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership as one’s natural self- expression also requires dealing with those factors present in all human beings that constrain each person’s freedom to be and act. They constrain and shape our perceptions, emotions, creative imagination, thinking, and planning. When one is not constrained or shaped by these factors – what we term “ontological constraints” – one’s way of being and acting results naturally in one’s personal best in any leadership situation. We work with the students so that they accomplish this for themselves.
Having mastered a context that leaves you being a leader and effectively exercising leadership as your natural self-expression, what is left is to remove from the way you wound up being what limits or distorts your natural self-expression.
Most of us think that the way we are being and acting is our natural self-expression. However, as you will see, our natural self-expression is a virtually unconstrained freedom to be and to act. Unfortunately, that freedom is limited and distorted by certain ontological constraints that have become a part of “the way we wound up being” along with certain patterns of action.
These automatic, hidden-from-our-view ways of being and acting can be removed or diminished considerably. The first step is discovering them for yourself. The easiest way to do it is going through the leadership course.
Or possibly through working with others and the slide deck text book.
If they are not dealt with you will be run by them. However, if your future is big enough and you have added some strong emotion (tells your brain that it is important), you won’t be stopped. Our brains create realities outside of our consciousness and select from that reality opportunities that will fulfill that future (before you even realize that it has happened or it is happening. Verified by neuroscience research. This is why we say “a new science” and “a new paradigm of performance“.
In the Being A Leader course it will be less of a crucible event. More about that here. “
Distilled and quoted from: Erhard, Werner and Jensen, Michael C. and Zaffron, Steve and Echeverria, Jeronima, Course Materials for: ‘Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Model’ (October 4, 2022). Harvard Business School NOM Working Paper No. 09-038, Simon School Working Paper No. 08-03, Barbados Group Working Paper No. 08-02, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1263835 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1263835