I have spent a large part of my working life around people who carry responsibility. Public figures, directors, entrepreneurs, executives, public officials. People who are expected to know what to do when others don't. I have been one of them. And over the years I discovered something we don't talk about very often.
You can be intelligent, experienced and well informed. You can make a decision for perfectly understandable reasons. You can defend it to your board, your shareholders, your colleagues and yourself. And years later, look back and think: Knowing what I know today, would I still make the same decision?
“Conscience doesn't always speak before the decision. Sometimes it speaks years later.”
— Ronald Heister
When your reality changes
I have met leaders who knew exactly what they were doing. And still, something inside didn't entirely agree. Sometimes they heard that voice and overruled it. Sometimes they genuinely believed they were doing the right thing.
Then life happened.
New information emerged. They saw consequences they couldn't see before. They met someone who had experienced their decision from the other side. Or they simply changed themselves. And suddenly something they had believed for years no longer felt true.
This touches on something we regularly encounter in our work: the Perception Paradox.
Two intelligent people can have access to the same facts and still see a different reality. Their experience, position, interests, assumptions and beliefs influence what they notice and how they interpret it. And the same thing can happen within one person over time.
The facts may not even have changed. You have.
What once looked necessary can later look harmful. What once seemed like loyalty can later feel like silence. What once appeared to be success can, from another point in your life, raise completely different questions.
That doesn't automatically mean the person you were then was dishonest or wrong. It means that what you were able to see then was shaped by who you were then.
And that can be confronting.
You may have defended a policy, dismissed people, pursued growth, protected an institution or followed instructions because that was what your position required.
Then one day you see the same history through different eyes.
Knowing what you know today, would you still make the same decisions?
Sometimes the body joins the conversation
There is another signal I have learned not to dismiss.
The body.
People can continue functioning for an extraordinarily long time. Until sleep changes. Energy disappears. Stress becomes permanent. Pain or other physical symptoms demand attention. A symptom does not prove a psychological or spiritual cause, and physical complaints require appropriate medical attention.
But in the deeper consciousness sessions I facilitate, we also pay attention to what the person experiences around those signals. When did this begin? What was happening in your life? What comes up when you bring your attention there? An emotion? A memory? A conflict you have been carrying?
In our own sessions, themes around physical wellbeing have appeared alongside stress, boundaries, self-worth and life circumstances. Dolores Cannon, whose work forms the basis of the method in which I trained, described similar experiences across thousands of sessions over several decades. Within her QHHT® framework, clients sometimes connected physical or emotional difficulties with experiences or lessons from their present life or what they perceived as other lives.
Different lives. The same questions.
That has led to some extraordinary sessions.
One client of mine, struggling in his present life with the tension between functioning within systems and remaining a free individual, experienced another life in which he served under the authority of a king in a military environment. In that experience, he eventually stood up against tyranny and helped others.
Another experienced a painful event in her present life as part of a learning process around finally standing up for herself. Different people. Different experiences. But themes return.
Power. Responsibility. Freedom. Boundaries. Fear. The consequences of choices. Over time, this has changed the way I look at my own life too. I increasingly see life as a learning process. Not punishment. Learning. Creating.
Nature doesn't negotiate with our beliefs
Then my collaboration with Swiss scientist Dr. Arend van Campen added another perspective.
His work on the General Law of Functionality approaches the subject through systems and information. Van Campen argues that reality has natural boundaries for functionality, and that man-made and natural systems depend on conditions, including adequate information, to remain functional. His published work connects information deficits with entropy and dysfunction and explicitly argues that nature cannot simply be forced without consequences.
That matters.
Because reality does not change simply because we believe something strongly enough. We can ignore information. Suppress it. Rationalize a decision. Build an entire organization around an assumption. But that does not remove the consequences when the assumption conflicts with reality. Van Campen examines that principle in systems.
My consciousness work brings me to a related human question: What happens when the reality we violate is also something we already knew within ourselves?
I don't claim that one proves the other. But together they have made me much more interested in information we habitually exclude.
Who are you when the title disappears?
This is why our work with leaders begins somewhere unusual. Not with another leadership model. With the person behind the position.
During the first part of our 3-Day Discovery, we go inward.
Who are you when nobody needs an answer from you? What do you actually believe? What are you afraid of? What have you learned to justify? What does your conscience tell you today? What signals have you ignored?
And what do you already know that you have become very good at not hearing?
Then we look around you: at people, relationships, interests, information and systems.
Finally, we look outward and ahead, using external intelligence and Early Warning Artificial Intelligenc to challenge information deficits and assumptions and identify what may still lie outside your field of view.
Inward. Around you. Ahead.
We don't tell you what decision to make. Sometimes the original direction proves sound. Sometimes the question itself changes.
Truth before comfort.
Because the greatest Information Deficit at the top isn't always something nobody told you. Sometimes you simply see today what you couldn't see yesterday. And then leadership becomes something much more personal:
What will you do with what you know now?
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