INsight/ Are You Psychoactive?

Photo by Dingzeyu Li on Unsplash.

Amsterdam, 1 February 2023 — Transformation to become a psychoactive leader.

Story

It happened in January as we kicked off the LEADyear 2023 Challenge to become a Trusted Leader. What usually happens, also this time, is that it takes a while to sink in that joining a leadership challenge is different from a taking regular training course. For some, it is their first exposure to leadership development. For others, it’s a leadership journey to invite three colleagues to join them to form a Collab and then to lead them through the challenge. In this challenge, we unpack and practice one effective leadership behavior every month. 

Joining a leadership challenge will trigger a transformation. That’s what these experiences are meant to do. It’s much more powerful than training. Why is that so? Since the beginning of time, people have pondered what transformation is and how it works, and this has always involved the experiential learning that comes with going through challenges. Through the ages, shamans, sages, and specialists helped groups of motivated participants to complete challenges that generated transformational changes in their life and work. Today, coaches play that facilitating role.

To experience a transformation goes deeper than having an Aha moment of cognitive learning. Usually, it involves a profound change in the way you view yourself and the world around you. To put it in simple terms, it alters your mind. When you join a leadership challenge and do the assignments together, this can generate an unforgettable experience that many have called life-changing. This, however, will only happen when you commit to practicing each step of the challenge. In this regard, the LEADyear 2023 Challenge is no exception.

Challenge

How can you alter your mind? You have probably heard about psychoactive drugs that have such properties. Psychoactive is usually defined as having the ability to affect the mind, cognitive processes, behavior, mood, and anxiety level. The term is often used in reference to pharmacological agents. However, psychoactive ability goes far beyond the use of medical drugs. Leadership researchers have discovered that changing our behavior can alter the way we (and others) think and view the world. In Learning Leadership, James Kouzes and Barry Posner show that everyone can learn (through deliberate practice) to show up frequently with leadership behaviors and that this leads to more impact. 

In adult development research, a distinction is often made between vertical and horizontal development. Vertical development is interpreted as growing through expanding stages of consciousness, often called worldviews, with each stage enabling us to deal better with the complexities of life. Horizontal development, on the other hand, is often described as experiencing more states of consciousness, for example through regular mindfulness practices. Beena Sharma, a fellow leadership coach and the president of the Vertical Development Academy, argues that “vertical development is a psychoactive model: just understanding that further development is possible helps us grow into our potentials.” 

Experiencing art and music can also be psychoactive. We all have our own personal examples of how certain artworks and music can move us deeply. Such experiences help us to see the world with new eyes and change, in Sharma’s words, “our interpretations of experience and how we transform our views of reality.” From neuroscience, we learn that when we change our thinking and behaviors, this can have a profound psychoactive effect on how we show up as leaders, for ourselves and for the people around us. When we keep practicing effective leadership behaviors, this can reprogram our minds and influence those whom we wish to bring on board with us for positive changes.

Question

As leaders, therefore, influencing change in ourselves and others requires that we become more conscious of the psychoactive abilities we can develop. As we keep practicing to show up with effective leadership behaviors more frequently — for example during a challenge — our psychoactive abilities will grow and gradually start to feel like second nature. That makes transformation possible wherever we are, both in ourselves and in others. 

My leadership question for you this week is if you are psychoactive. Are you developing yourself, vertically and horizontally? Are you committed to growing through challenges that involve the deliberate practice of effective leadership behaviors? Growing as a leader is a process of transformation. It’s not like filling your glass with more water, which is what training does. Rather, it is about being stretched to become a bigger glass that can hold more water. Transformation requires deliberate practices, daily and weekly, integrated with your work and life. You have to go through this experience yourself to understand what transformation feels like and what it can result in. That’s what leadership challenges are designed to help you do.

Your next opportunity to join the LEADyear 2023 Challenge will come at the end of March, in preparation for joining our group of participants from the 1st of April. To do that, why not start now by inviting three colleagues to join you? Meanwhile, if you can’t wait, the Leader in Transition program is designed as an exclusive one-to-one leadership coaching program over three months where you discover your next challenge and then use effective leadership behaviors to execute your challenge. If this appeals to you, then book a free strategy call to discuss what you want your next leadership transition to look like.