How to Amplify Your Leadership Voice and Values Based on Who You Really Are

Sometime in mid 2016, I felt the urge to fly from Vancouver to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for a brief visit for personal and professional reasons that included catching up with my old Mindvalley friends and colleagues and reconnecting with the founder with whom I had worked closely for 6 years.

Little did I know that it would lead to a filmed mentorship training video and conversation with the founder, Vishen Lakhiani, on his online education platform Mindvalley.

Shortly after arriving in Kuala Lumpur, Vishen and I met up at a Starbucks, and as he began sharing updates about what he’s now up to we somehow got deep into the topic of core values and cultural alignment.

I had to intervene on the spot and demonstrate the crucial missing distinction that was unnecessarily causing problems for Vishen, and that is the distinction between organizational values that come from the team at large and foundational values that come from the founder or founding team directly.

Having worked with David Anthony Childs of Living Blueprint and some of our team members in Vancouver on a variety of organizational alignment initiatives, I saw the consistent results our process produced first hand.

More importantly, I saw opportunities for more distinctions and innovations.

In particular, I really liked a specific visual facilitation tool called the Polarity Funnel that David had originally designed for clarifying brand identity and creating alignment in an accurate way that was inclusive of diverse voices and the various perspectives of different stakeholders involved in a client project.

It is deceptively simple, but in fact has a lot behind it that makes it work when wielded correctly by a facilitator.

From my perspective, it enabled us to harmonize the competing voices of executive leaders in a boardroom from discord to a unified voice and vision so that their teams and organizations can move forward boldly with clear intent and accurately discerned aligned values while playing to their strengths.

That evoked a question based on a quest I had been on my entire life:

What if I use this tool on myself based on deep psychological insight from my own origin story and already collected data points to become aligned within?

And then, what if I could conduct even better facilitations designed to get a leader to feel aligned within themselves to lead more consistently, decisively and influentially?

(Bye bye shiny object syndrome and entrepreneurial A.D.D.)

As an executive coach and consultant with a journalism background and knack for deep conversations, for years, I had already been privy to the inner workings and silent struggles of entrepreneurs and leaders in positions of authority and responsibility. Things they felt but didn’t speak about openly with most people around them.

Every leader in such circumstances would often wake up to multiple voices in their heads wanting different things, pushed or pulled by different competing desires.

The inner disharmony and misalignment can be excruciating and very costly.

Without self-awareness, it’s difficult to integrate these inner aspects of our inner lives as leaders, and the blind spots we all have don’t make it any easier.

This is why it is better and far more valuable to work with professional facilitators who can expose your blindspots to you, hence increasing your self-awareness.

Mindfulness practices are great for this, and with the Polarity Funnel as a visual facilitation tool, the discernment can be logical, evidence-based and written down in real-time with everything laid out in front of you for ease of comprehension, and then steady absorption and application over time.

Having experienced the increasingly profound results of my own self-experimentation with this approach I’d been working on and refining, I instinctively began taking Vishen through a facilitation using a piece of paper and hand-drawn Polarity Funnel.

The almost instantaneous clarity results and crucial aha moments and realizations stunned him. “You’re a frickin’ genius!” he declared. I thought he was being his usual enthusiastic self and didn’t think much of it.

But then after he recorded this video testimonial, the impact became clear.

This may very well be the start of something special.

To learn more about this one-on-one coaching methodology and process for leaders, you can sign up to Mindvalley and watch the full video conversation and mentorship training here. To inquire about working with Living Blueprint, get in touch here.

Editor’s note: this is a post from Amir Ahmad Nasr of Living Blueprint on his unique story-driven approach to align individual leaders with their true voice and values, facilitated with Mindvalley founder and CEO Vishen Lakhiani.