Leading from Joy: How to Transform 9 Inner Challenges

By Anna Eriksson

Leading from Joy

Are you a CEO? Do you feel that your performance or leadership has hit a ceiling?

With over 20 years experience of coaching CEOs who felt just like you do, Anna Eriksson has now written the book that will take you through that barrier and beyond.

Leading from Joy&

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avalona Publishing
• Release date: Apr 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9789152710920

Book preview

PART I – CONTEXT

TRANSFORMATION THROUGH COACHING

In this first part, I will share the context for transformation through my coaching.

You will get a sense of how I see you as a human being and your potential for leading from joy.

I will introduce you to my coaching map, the journey from a now-position to any desired outcome.

It is in the gap between these two places that the coaching magic happens.

The journey starts with your willingness and ends with transformation.

Enjoy!

THE INVITATION

This is the invitation to you to open the door

to something bigger inside you.

I invite you to reflect with me

and answer the questions

– as an inquiry.

Being curious about what will show up.

Not knowing in advance.

Allowing yourself to see, hear and feel

– without a filter.

Just to see what is happening.

WHY COACHING?

To say yes to coaching means to say yes to your own transformation.

It includes saying yes to having someone else, a coach, as a partner in your process.

Seeing, hearing, feeling and coaching you on the topic you have chosen.

It’s a yes to creating an inspiring life.

It’s a yes to ongoing training and an understanding that even a master started as a beginner.

It’s a yes to being vulnerable, authentic and in wonder.

It’s a yes to listening to your own inner wisdom.

It’s a yes to being someone to count on – someone who has integrity, stands up for their words and takes responsibility for their actions.

It’s a yes to being a leader in your life.

It’s a yes to the richness of you.

When to Say No to Coaching

When you need therapy on issues from your past.

When you need education – to learn how to do something, where a fixed process already exists.

When you prefer tips and suggestions on how experts/mentors/management consultants have solved an issue.

When you are not willing or ready to be a leader.

Yes, or no?

Just listen. There is no right or wrong.

WHO ARE YOU?

Let’s start.

Are you willing to experiment?

Then, finish the sentences below.

Who are you?

I am…

I am…

I am…

I am…

I am…

Look at your answers – what do they reflect?

Think about the possibility that you have access to everything.

Think about yourself as whole and complete.

Perfect.

Just imagine.

Yes.

WHOLE AND COMPLETE

What does whole and complete mean beyond the words? How can we experience ourselves as whole and complete if this is our true nature? Let’s go back to the question of who we are.

We all have a visible body, and we know when it is functioning properly. Our bones are complete, our muscles are strong, our heart is beating, we breathe, feeling our belly going in and out, our eyes catch the light, our ears recognise different sounds, our skin feels warmth and cold. It consists mainly of water – transformed to material that carries and passes information around in our bodies.

We quickly notice how even the smallest wound affects us, or how a lack of exercise makes us feel weak. Are we whole and complete then?

First, we must ask ourselves again who we are. We are not only a body. We also have a mind and a soul – the thinking and feeling centres in the brain and heart make us unique. And then there is spirit – the connection to something bigger – a field where everything is always whole and complete.

We may not feel the connection to this realm in every moment, depending on how open our channel is. Still, it is there, as a resource waiting to be used.

Body, mind, soul and spirit – these elements combined make us unique humans.

Quantum physics has shown that we are pure energy – visible as the body and invisible as the soul. We are energy in motion, rather than an entity.

When We Forget

In coaching, I address the question of who you are and how you think and feel about yourself and your life. It is here, in our thinking and feeling, that we find the gaps, the misbeliefs of who we are, the forgetting that we are whole and complete.

When the body is untrained, it signals to us to take care and start moving.

When the mind screams at others or at ourselves – it is high time to act, to start listening for the messages from inside.

When the soul is not singing and dancing, when the laughing stops – it is time to start wondering, what is it that we are not allowing into our life?

And when we fall deep, we need to recognise that the spirit is making a desperate gesture for us to please wake up.

As Human Beings, We Are So Much

We all have both masculine and feminine traits within us.

These traits help us compete and collaborate, they help us do and be.

They guide us between aspects of our lives that are goal-oriented and relationship-oriented.

They allow us to be both assertive and receptive, rational and intuitive.

We are task oriented and driven by values.

We are extroverts, ambiverts and introverts.

We have left and right brain hemispheres with different qualities: linear and systemic, focusing on the parts and the big picture, analysing as well as being creative.

We have a whole family inside ourselves: the mother, father, sister and brother, as well as ourselves as a child.

We have a theatre ensemble of archetypes within us, including the lover, the warrior, the enemy, the dreamer, the victim, the judger, the protector, the pusher, the critic, the perfectionist, the pleaser and many, many more.

We all have skills, strengths, multiple intelligences, talents, knowledge and characters.

Think about all the Personality Tests that categorise who we are as a person – we are all of that too.

It is natural that we may feel that some are more dominant and stronger than others – as we have probably spent more time and interest in those parts of ourselves.

No wonder we can feel overwhelmed, confused and stressed with all this going on inside. All of it wants its share of our attention and love.

Imagine what could happen if we look beyond all those labels when we meet each other – being especially curious about what we do not yet understand about the wholeness of us as beings.

The more people there are, the more complex the web of relating gets. Think about the inhabitants of a city, of a country and even of this planet. On a genetic level, all humans are 98% identical. On the level of spirit, we are all whole, complete and connected. And every single one of us wants to belong, to be loved and to contribute.

Questions for You to Reflect On

What are your thoughts on being whole and complete?

Are you in touch with your spiritual energy? When?

Welcome to create a place for your answers and reflections.

WHO I AM AND HOW I WORK

I learned something beautiful once on a course. We had been asked to choose a possibility for ourselves, something that was in us, that wanted to blossom. I found the request very difficult and, when it was my turn to stand on stage and declare my possibility to the audience, I didn’t know what to say. When the audience saw me, alone on that big stage, they started to shout out possibilities that they saw in me. I don’t remember the words that rained down on me at that moment, but I do remember feeling the potential that everyone saw in me. It felt like a wave of love and joy, and this feeling clicked inside, filling me with possibility and the knowing that anything is possible, anything at all.

For you, other possibilities could be passion, courage, adventure, greatness, play, grace, compassion and/or presence. These are possibilities that you can create for yourself – for who you want to be – instead of just continuing as predicted, based on your history.

I still stand in the creation of myself as love and joy that I inhabited that day on stage. It is from this place that I listen to my clients. It is from here that I embrace their complexity.

Another choice I make is to focus on your potential, your strengths, your connection to the spirit and you as whole and complete.

It doesn’t mean I do not see other things as well. I do, but I do not exalt it, in case it is not something that needs to be taken care of to support the process. This is a beautiful side of the coaching process and is very easy to see from the outside where and when someone shines the most. Communication is done with much more than words. It is like looking after their joy and light.

I also choose to welcome what is coming from my clients. I trust them in the process. I know coaches who have a very regulated processes – where one follows steps 1–10, maybe even in print in a nice handbook. I do not work like that.

We all have what we need inside ourselves. During the process, we will sort out and find the next steps.

My way of setting up the coaching is to give questions before we start so that my clients can get on track with what coaching is about and start the process.

It is the client’s time. I am there as a facilitator, giving space for them to be vulnerable as well as joyful, to be the full spectrum of states and feelings and beyond that. Listening to what wants to emerge. Giving space to go to the places inside that want to be shifted to something bigger.

Questions for You to Reflect On

If you could choose a possibility for you – what would it be?

Think about your expectations of a coach – what would those be for you?

LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

First ask the right question. Don’t ask how to dispel darkness, don’t ask how to dispel worries, anguish, and anxiety, just analyse your mind and see why they are there in the first place. They are there because you are not conscious enough. So ask the right question: how to be more and more conscious? – Osho

The idea that we can raise our energy and our awareness has existed for a long time, referred to in different ways. From my studies at university, I bring the salutogenic paradigm, focusing on what brings us health. This paradigm began in the middle of the 20th century and today includes coaching, positive psychology, solution-oriented methods and many more ways to help people build on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. We don’t need to reach the bottom first. We can go for what we want straight away.

David R Hawkins (1927-2012), MD, PhD, dedicated his whole life to learning how we can raise our consciousness, presented in many books, lectures and videos. Hawkins started as a psychiatrist and became a spiritual teacher and researcher. In Power vs Force, first printed in 1995, he presents the Levels of Consciousness.

The Map of Consciousness, in brief, lays out the whole spectrum of consciousness from the lower levels of Shame, Guilt, Apathy, Grief, Fear, Desire, Anger, Pride (that is, levels of force dominated by egoistic drives), to the median levels of Courage, Willingness, Acceptance, Reason (that is, levels of power dominated by personal integrity), to the more expanded levels of Love, Unconditional Love/Joy/Healing, Ecstasy, Peace, and Enlightenment. These higher energy fields are a carrier wave of immense life energy. They are increasingly free of personal goals and are the domain of saints, arhats, and avatars. Note that higher and lower are terms of convenience for the linear mind and do not express actual reality. (David R. Hawkins, MD, PhD The Map of Consciousness explained, 2020, Introduction by Fran Grace, PhD, editor, p 14)

For me, this framework helps define whether I will coach someone or not. As we are creating our life in coaching, the clients need to be willing and responsible for their actions and results. They need to have the courage to step up, trying new ways of being. A higher consciousness, at least at the level of courage, should be of interest to everyone interested in leadership. As we also know that a problem is not solved on the same energy level in which it is created, it should be of further interest to continue transforming oneself.

People with lower energy tend to blame others and think that the reason for their problems is outside themselves – putting me as their coach on the hot spot, instead of the other way around. These people want something from their coach, instead of doing the work on themselves to get access to their own resources. The better choice is to go to a therapist to heal and let go of old destructive patterns. Most of us come back to some negative emotions now and then, as there are layers to let go of. The more conscious we are, the quicker we let it go, see the learning and move on. Neither energy field is better nor worse, they just inhabit different terrain. It is a question of understanding what the next step for all of us is. For this, we need to understand where we are right now.

Questions for You to Reflect On

Do you feel that you are the leader in your life?

In what ways are you training your consciousness?

LEADERSHIP

There are many different disciplines of coaching these days and even more niches. I coach on awareness in one’s leadership, as I see this as the most obvious area for growth and transformation. We start by leading ourselves, then others 1–1, then a team and then a company.

A leader is committed to something bigger that he or she enrols others into. A leader is someone others want to follow freely. Paradoxically, a great leader also knows how to follow.

Over my years of coaching, I have found that almost all so-called problems can be traced back to unconsciousness. To work with one’s awareness is therefore always a good investment.

All the formal questions related to the role of manager or CEO, are much better answered in performance training (because most of the answers, rules and processes already exist in that space).

In coaching, though, we investigate, experience, train, evaluate, create, share, listen and much more to find the answers inside us, in the space that gets created during the process.

An important threshold in coaching is that you need to be healthy and willing to be responsible for your own energy and actions. A sign of a leader is that he already has a high level of consciousness – at least he has the courage to express and stand up for his own will. He or she is authentic and trustworthy.

These qualities mean leaving behind playing the victim, participating in dramas, being co-dependent and blaming others for your situation. You know where your boundaries lie, when to say yes and no, because you are connected to your own values.

You have found a way to live a life that includes more than what you do for a living, and you know how to take care of your own health and mental state.

Imagine if we all became the leaders of our own lives. Imagine if we stopped being victims and started being creators.

Questions for You to Reflect On

For whom are you a leader?

Who is a leader for you?

As a CEO – what vision do you have as a leader?

What qualities do you want to have as a leader?

How do you want to be perceived by others?

CHANGE

If you want the world to change – you have to change. – Jim Rohn

Change happens all the time – it is a sign of life. Changes outside us call for changes within. We must all relate to this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, and figure out how to make our living, staying connected and healthy. With changes come new challenges and possibilities, and with it often uncertainty, before we fully recognise the change and make informed decisions.

When I meet someone for coaching, they often refer to external circumstances. A change is not equal to a challenge for everyone. Two people can perceive the same change in the external world totally differently – as a challenge or as an opportunity. That is why it is so interesting to know how you think about your chances of succeeding and dealing with both changes and challenges. Your answers will lead us to your inner challenge at this moment in your life.

Different Types of Changes

A change can be perceived as complicated and challenging or welcomed as easy and a possibility. A change can be huge, a paradigm shift, or a small daily problem or distraction. It can involve the entire planet, a country, a market, an organisation or an individual.

A change can be predictable – such as the snow or rain coming each year. Other things, like the younger generation’s way of thinking, valuing and acting in the world are a known change but can still feel like a big challenge, and unknown, in terms of how to (not) manage them.

Paradigm Shifts

We call huge changes paradigm shifts. They transform the way we perceive the world (as flat or round, for example). Think about paradigm shifts like the emergence of printing in the 15th century – how books and knowledge could suddenly reach out to many more people, or hundreds of years later, in the 19th century the invention of the lightbulb. As late as 1989, they created the world wide web. And who knows, perhaps recently developed blockchain technology will be the next big transformation of the economic, medical and technical fields.

Black Swans

Nassim Taleb, PhD in economics, found by looking at history that many world leaders have been unprepared and unconscious about the phenomena that he calls black swans – the occurrence of something totally new and unpredicted, like the iPhone or COVID-19. These, though, are risks and innovations that we need to consider and prepare for. As the speed of development, not least in technology, gets faster and faster, we must be ready to come up with new solutions to our rapidly shifting landscape.

Changes in Organisations

Organisations are also going through changes and transforming their way of organising and working. Frederic Laloux has written an excellent overview of the way organisations have developed. From an authority-driven flock to an army, a machine/factory, a family to a living system with smaller self-governing teams where everyone is a leader, in what Laloux refers to as teal organisations.

A change of direction can emerge from inside, or be catalysed by a shift outside, a company. Companies that have embraced change understand human behaviour, engage in new techniques and redefine the industry that they belong to.

Nike repositioned itself from the shoe and clothing industry to the health industry. Lego went from being focused on building blocks to supporting people to have a more playful life. Both created a higher purpose than the product itself.

We can change many aspects, from the product or service itself to the way we market it, choice of the target group, location and/or price.

In business, a SWOT analysis that discovers inner strengths and weaknesses, as well as outer opportunities and threats, is invaluable.

Changes in Life

Life brings with it divorce/separation, losing or ending a job and illness – all transitions most of us will go through. Even positive changes such as marrying and getting pregnant can be very high on a scale of what is stressful. Changing jobs, fluctuations in the economy, children leaving home and parents leaving life are further changes that can worry us. And ultimately, we will all die.

As in nature, or the cycle of the year, we are at a certain time and age in our life cycle. First, we build a persona, a family, a life, to later let go of it and turn more inside.

A Model for Change

I use this simple model to illustrate change.

A Model for Change

We start in the upper-left quadrant where everything is all good. We are inspired, committed and working towards something we feel is