Seminars

Going beyond your own limitation

Nature of Event:

One day seminar for 20 -100 participants

Who should attend:

You are a senior manager or leader who already has leadership experience. You know the rewards of leading and you also know the real challenges. What is important to you is that you clarify for yourself the essence of leadership. You want to learn how to fulfil your leadership potential, and discover the best leader you can be.

Learning Methods:

The seminar will consist of an exciting mix and integration of:

The overall tone of the seminar will be active and interactive. Each participant will take away with them applications and practices, which they can implement in their work contexts.

Themes and Content:

Becoming a leader takes more than acquiring more managerial kills. It requires nothing less than a change in your way of being – a leader sees the world differences to a manager, and conducts himself differently in that world.

To achieve a shift in your way of being entails undertaking a challenge that is capable of taking you beyond the limits of your habitual way of managing your business. This also connects us to the root meaning of the term leader, which originally meant a ‘guide on a journey’.

The seminar helps you explore your current work situation, to identify what would be a relevant journey to undertake for yourself, and your business, that would transform you as a leader. It gives you an understanding of, and experiences in, building inner resources to sustain you on the journey, and how to face the inevitable challenges of such an adventure.

Finally it helps you consider how to apply the learning back in you work life, and how to sustain yourself for the joy of life of continuous adventure and discovery!

Structure of the Day:

1. The Leader as Guide on a Journey
2. The Everyday World
3. The Call to Adventure
4. The Challenges Along the Way
5. Developing Supports to Face the Challenges
   Connecting with Allies, building Inner Resources
6. Identifying the Treasure to bring back to the world

Benefits:

You will:

1. Gain insights into the true nature of leadership
2. See more clearly what your organisation needs in order to grow
3. Identify what is your own inner voice that calls you to be a leader
4. Learn how to connect with allies and helpers insight and outside of your organisation
5. Develop practices that build inner resources and begin to change your way of being.

Nature of Event:

A three day seminar with a workshop format for 15 – 20 participants

Who should Attend:

You are a very successful and senior leader. You have fulfilled many of the goals you set yourself to your career-financial security, senior organizational position, power, influence, maybe even a little fame! But now you are beginning to feel that something is not being satisfied… What can it be, is there another stage in your evolution as a leader?

Learning Methods:

The seminar will consist of an exciting mix and integration of:

The overall tone of the seminar will be active and interactive. Each participant will take away with them applications and practices, which they can implement in their work contexts.

Themes and Content:

The high performance leader has learnt how to be authentic – they have learnt to listen to their own inner calling, to have the courage to create a vision that takes them into the unknown, and the presence to inspire others to follow. But the Great Leader goes beyond this. The Great Leader realises that their role is not to be the centre of the community, but its servant. Not to build themselves up to be impressive, but to give from their greatness, their abundance to give life to the world. Of the good leader people say ‘you were inspiring, you lead us and showed us the way’. Of the Great Leader people say ‘We did it ourselves’. The ‘You’ disappears!

The archetype of the Wise Ruler – the King, the Queen, the Sovereign – has at its centre the selfless servant leader. The paradox is that ‘You’ , the competent self that has made you successful, finds it very hard to step aside and allow your deeper self to guide you into the state of service.
The workshop combines knowledge from the Wisdom Traditions concerning the science of the Mind; with knowledge from research into the science of the Brain, and with insights from Myth into the secrets of the heart and Imagination. Together they will show you how to take the journey from leadership to Sovereignty. How to combine profound inner peace and authority with a true capacity for selfless serving your world!

Structure of the Day:

1. Reviewing the Leaders Journey

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. Know Thyself – understanding yourself in your everyday world
            2. To Thine own Self be True – identifying examples from your everyday world of your authentic stance vs. your adapted performance.
            3. Hearing the Call, Finding your Path – realising what your true journey is and how to succeed.

2. Understanding the Realm

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. Deepening Sense of Self and World – connecting to your True Self, and seeing the interconnectivity of life.
            2. Co-creativity and the Web of Life – understanding the interdependence of living systems and the wonderful co-creativity of organizational life.

3. Stepping into Sovereignty ‘Me’

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. Moving from ‘Me’ to ‘We’ – expanding awareness beyond me and mine to we and ours.
            2. Entering the Path of Servant Leadership – letting go of self and understanding what it means to serve, and contribute from a state of abundance.

Benefits:

You will:

1. • Clarify and appreciate what it has taken for you to be successful so far.
   • Learn to see the ‘bigger picture’ of your organizational context – what true growth and prosperity looks like for your organization and all associated with it.
   • Understand, and learn to navigate within, the truly interdependent nature of social life. How you contribute to and are informed by the social system in which you live.
   • Develop practices and insights from the Wisdom Traditions, the Mythic Traditions, that show you how to cultivate the state of consciousness of selfless service
   • Experience the joy and satisfaction of identifying what your true contribution to Life is, and giving from a place of fullness and gratitude.

THE OUTER CONDITION OF A BUSINESS IS DEPENDENT ON
THE INNER CONDITION OF IT’S LEADERSHIP

Today we are all clear that we are in the middle of a deep crisis. Few are clear on what to do. Every crisis is a crucial turning point where the conflict between dynamic forces reaches a culmination. The everyday world is disrupted and a new form is in the process of emerging. It may become a recovery and a growth or it may turn into a demise and a deconstruction.
The Gift of a crisis is that it makes clear, often dramatically, exactly what the underlying dynamics are and have been for some time out of our awareness. As the crisis reaches its peak there is an intensification of energy and a destabilising of old forms. Here is the chance for something new, something that has never been before, that is present as a potential from the future.
The danger in a crisis is that we become anxious, fearful and uncertain. We contract, we repeat what we know and what has worked before. We become overfocused, narrowing our vision, and we withdraw into ourselves and together with those who agree with us.
The Antidote to this danger is to come together to talk with each other, to share our experiences, and most of all to learn how to open our minds, how to open our hearts, how to open our willpower to the seed of potential and possibility that lies at the centre of every crisis. This is the Essence Programme.

• selfrealization
• the development of true creativity, intuition,
• compassion, empathy, silence and stillness
• access to unknown and hidden abilities
• enhancement of concentration
• the capacity for clear discernment between the
• essential and the non-essential
• integrity, where thought speech and action are in
• accord with each other
• ability to create innovative solutions

„No problem can be solved through the same
consciousness which created it.“
Albert Einstein

We are facing a crisis in leadership which, to paraphrase Einstein, will not be resolved by the same level of consciousness which created it.

The crisis will not be resolved by simply adding new skills to old ways of being. The chance to grow beyond the crisis requires a transformation that will demand the development of as yet unrealised human potentials and abilities to create a new way of being. This will entail a radical process if success is to be realised.

The whole point of leadership is to take people into the unknown future. In this seminar you will arrive full and leave empty, because only from the deepest internal silence and emptiness can true creativity and intuition be achieved. The new capabilities of the 21st Century Leader will include not only the ability to let go of the old, but also the capacity to stay in the quiet unknowing in order to perceive and ‘pre-sense’ what the future needs of the organisation.

This training facilitates leaders in becoming genuine and outstanding leadership personalities who can:

• deliver on performance, profit and stakeholder value
• yet can move beyond to a deep concern for meaning, purpose and human well-being
• find meaning and a sense of fulfilment in their work and
• feel responsible for their environment and for the greater good of human kind.

Languages English and German
Fees on request

Individual Feedback and Mentoring

The personal questions, concerns and feedback of the participants will be integrated into the content and activities of the seminars.
The participants will also have the possibility of personal mentoring sessions with the course leaders.

Modules

The two year programme will consist of 5 modules.
Between each module there will be a carefully designed set of practical, applied and experiential learning activities to be completed before the next module.

Curriculum

All seminars will base their learning structures and processes on the metaphor of the Human Life Process – from awareness of digestion to metabolism and expression. The following core themes and self- explorations will act as ‘Red Threads’ to give form and shape to the seminars:                                                         

Participants are then encouraged to see their organisations as the contexts in which they explore and apply what they learn in the seminars. This extends the curriculum and the learning out into everyday business life. After each module participants take away their practices, exercises, experiments, explorations and reflections and carry them into their own lives. At the next module the results of all these are brought back for further learning and to develop the next steps.

In cooperation with the World Bank Institute and the Nile Basin Initiative.

Click to follow: Agenda

“It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.”Quote of Nelson Mandela.

“We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind.” Quote of Wangari Maathai.

“Human diversity is both the reality that makes dialogue necessary, and the very basis for that dialogue.”Quote of Kofi Anan.

The leaders quoted above, confirm what we are trying to do under the Nile Basin learning strategy i.e. innovating learning to enable people to make quantum leaps to deal with the problems in water and environment sectors now in the future. Organizations are challenged by the flow and evolution of explicit and tacit knowledge within their systems. While many change processes are geared towards building knowledge management systems and the establishment of knowledge creating businesses, the assumptions underlying these processes need further deepening to ensure sustainable transformation of organizations towards ‘true’ service delivery.

Objectives and Target Group

This workshop is meant for people, professionals and decision-makers with a high area of influence and action who are operating in the Nile Basin (e.g. water, energy, agricultural, fisheries, trade, and universities).

The aims of the workshop are to pay attention to the creative aspects of learning, knowledge sharing, consensus-building, engaging people and supporting you to become a top-professional facilitator in decision-making who will be:

1. Able to design an entire process of participatory and planning, design and/or decision-making mobilizing the best creative in the minds of people;
2. To decide which methods/techniques to be applied under which circumstances;
3. To apply the methods/techniques as a facilitator, and
4. The ‘skills’ of a facilitator to keep the attention or energy in a group focused on finding solutions and on the thinking process.

This training is unique in its kind as it goes beyond just techniques for facilitation; it pays ample attention to the ‘art of facilitation’ emphasizing body-mind mastering of the facilitator. You will apply the techniques of facilitation of learning processes, and you will be an ‘agent of change’ by applying it in your immediate activities and inspire other colleagues to change their decision-making methods and approaches.