You see a big opportunity, a new level you aspire to play at.

They say what got you here won't get you there. 

Leaders I know who have made the leap describe it as requiring a new way of comporting themselves.  A next level ability of political maneuvering and influence. New approaches to reading, inspiring, challenging, and leading others.  Tireless evangelizing.  A prodigious amount of inclusive, Big Tent listening. Coming from a future state, instead of iterating towards it.

But what specifically do you change?  And how do you change it?

You can chip your way through the list of candidate behaviors in the guy-who-wrote-the-book's book.  You can also get some ideas of what to work on from a 360-feedback assessment. 

But behavior change is hard. If you are even able to change your limiting behaviors, you might wind up being a little less annoying, but will you fundamentally change the way you show up? The way you lead?  Will people around you feel you're different or just think you're "on best behavior?"

You lead from the inside out.  People see the behaviors, but those behaviors arise from how you see the world, which is a function of the lenses or inner paradigms you look through.

I chose to examine four inner paradigms, but there are others I did not cover.  For instance, do you see the world and Life as beneficent, no matter what challenging cards you are being dealt at the moment?  Or do you see it more like the Serengeti, a constant battle to guard your turf and stay alive?

Another I left out is Michael Beckwith's To Me, By Me, Through Me, and As Me model for how you relate to the world around you, which was popularized by the Conscious Leadership Group, 

Once you move from seeing the world as happening To Me to one that is By Me, that you are co-creating, you show up in a fundamentally different way.  You lead differently.  Trust me, people can feel it. 

You lead from the inside out.  People see the behaviors, but those behaviors arise from how you see the world, which is a function of the lenses or inner paradigms you look through.

For this series, I picked four paradigms that are so subtle many are not even aware they are there. They operate surreptitiously, like some Jedi "these aren't the droids we are looking for" mind-trick, influencing how you see and how you react and thus how you lead.

The four paradigms covered are your:  Primary Motivation/Driver, "Winning" Strategy, Views on Causation, and Views on Meaning.

Across all four, there are no right answers. My nudge all along has been for you to hold these paradigms up to the light, first, just to make the unconscious more conscious so you know how they are affecting your reactions and choices. 

And, second, to see if they are aligned with this stretch goal or level you want to play at:  Are your beliefs abetting achieving that objective or creating drag?

• Motivation Do you know what is driving you? Why you get out of bed?  Why you work as hard as you do?  Why you prioritize X over Y?  Will this orientation serve you for the stretch objective you are targeting? 
  • Potential Adjustments: Do you need to move from padding your own stats, to helping others play big around you and making sure the team wins?  Do you need to develop a "generosity gene?" On the other hand, maybe you're too accommodating and maybe a little less Belonging/Approval-orientation and being a little more single-minded and Purpose Driven would serve you for the climb ahead?
• "Winning" Strategy Do you know you have one and that you have had it most of your life?  Do you understand how it functions to keep your psychological ship afloat, to curry favor, and to accumulate power?  Do you know it's limitations and how it will likely prevent you from being successful in "next level" games and when tackling an impossible goal?
  • Potential Adjustments: Are you aware when your winning strategy is operating?  Can you keep it in check when you need to?  Can you find a vision, a cause, an objective that is so compelling that you stop caring about playing small ball and keeping your psychological ship afloat and managing the judgments of others, so you can spend more time focused on manifesting this preferred future?
• The Web of Causation Whether the outcome is delicious or distasteful, blessing or curse, what's behind the events in your life?  Do you really think cause is knowable?  Are your views of cause serving you?
  
  • Potential Adjustments:  Are you even open to thinking about cause differently?  Are your beliefs dis-empowering you from seeing or leveraging your gifts by attributing you success to Unseen Forces?  Alternatively, are your beliefs about cause making you overly responsible, for everything?
• Meaning Meaning is not absolute (people experience the same event and draw different conclusions) and your judgments of what has meaning and what doesn't are not stable (they can change at the drop of a hat). 
  • Potential Adjustments:  Does the instability of meaning terrify you or can you taste the freedom in it?  Freedom from the cage bars created from your own judgments and more important, the judgments of others?  Can you use that freedom to pursue something challenging but autotelic, that you want to see manifest in the world just for the joy of playing the game?

And rather than you consciously trying to, a priori, put the puzzle pieces together into some snazzy, ego-clad fever dream, release the tiller and let the pursuit change you. 

Several years ago I had a chance to see the incomparable jazz innovator Wayne Shorter and his quartet in San Francisco.  I told a friend of mine, a jazz educator and master guitar player in his own right, about the upcoming show  He said, "Don't just attend.  Let him take you into his world."

Here is a story about letting the journey...outcomes and judgments be damned...take you.

Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards was Britain's only hope for a medal in ski jumping in the 1988 Olympics in Calgary. On the day of the event, the winner jumped 403 feet. Eddie the Eagle, in a borrowed ski suit and goggles held together with tape, jumped 238 feet. He finished 56th in a field of 56. For a while he was a laughingstock. Television commentators poked fun -- reporters tried to make him look foolish. But Eddie refused to be embarrassed. "This is the best day in my life. I'm representing Britain in the Olympics," he said -- " I just jumped 72 meters through the air -- that's a hard thing to do." Eddie was having a great time. Then somebody noticed that Eddie, was the first Olympic ski jumper that Britain had ever had. He had, by default, stumbled off with the British jumping record. Eddie became the darling of the public.

Eddie got rich over the next few years, giving endorsements. But then things went bad. He lost his money in bad investments, he was barred from the 1992 Olympics and he crashed in a post Olympic jump. "Broke me collarbone, fractured me skull, tore ligaments in me knee, damaged me kidney... And cracked me ribs."

The last I heard of Eddie, he was practicing on a jump simulator in his apartment, more than a thousand miles from the nearest real jump. And what does he say about his brush with glory now that the cameras have turned elsewhere?

"Calgary? Oh, it was brilliant. That was my dream since I was eight years old. Life since has been great. I've had a wonderful time, been all over the world. Been to lots of interesting places, done lots of interesting things, met lots of interesting people. I wouldn't give that up for the world." Mark S. Lewis, Commencement Address, University of Texas, Austin May 19, 2000

I don't pretend to know the causal relationships behind events in my life, but I always wonder why an individual, an event, an opportunity or a dream crosses my path:  am I being asked to pay attention, to learn something, to change?

We've been asking what you need to change to play at the next level or to pursue a huge goal...what you need to do to get 'there.'

Another framing is to trust why it appeared and put yourself in service of the opportunity and 'the call.' 

And rather than you consciously trying to, a priori, put the puzzle pieces together into some snazzy, ego-clad fever dream, release the tiller and let the pursuit change you. 

Then, when the pursuit of the "there" you were trying to get to is behind you, whether achieved and beyond your wildest dreams or accompanied by collateral damage requiring extensive mopping up, whether celebrated by those "in the stands" or jeered, you can join Eddie the Eagle in saying, "I wouldn't give that up for the world."

In most [mythic] adventures, it is not the winning at the end that matters.  It's the willingness to sacrifice parts of oneself in order to awaken the deep imagination in the soul and be in service of something that transcends all the opposing energies in regular life.  The point of the Ideals is not they are reached and fulfilled, but that they are sought after. ~Michael Meade, Mythologist, Storyteller, The Living Myth Podcast, Episode 393

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is an executive coach, organization consultant, and the designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service for leaders in transition who need to get the best possible start in challenging new roles.