It all… our entire experience in life, starts and ends with our awareness. This is just a basic universal principle. With limited awareness, we get limited perception and therefore our experience in life also becomes limited. And as we learn and grow and expand our perception, our experience also reflects this perspective. So, it would make sense that we should put some effort into continually and purposefully expanding our awareness. The challenge with this, however, is that most of us are not taught what awareness really is, let alone how we can and should work to thoughtfully expand this. And then there is the confusion with related terms such as consciousness and attention and focus, etc.

Let’s clarify all of this in a way that we can begin to understand and utilize our understanding. Let’s start with the term Consciousness since this is a word many of us might be familiar with, due to the increased use of the term “Conscious Leadership”. To me, the term Conscious Leadership is sort of a misnomer. To explore this further, Consciousness is more accurately the field of all of the perceptions and experiences that are possible for us as human beings. Picture it as a really BIG ball, filled with tiny bubbles that represent all of the individual perceptions and experiences we can have as humans.

And our individual Awareness then is the collection of perceptions and experiences that we, as an individual, have access to within this field of Consciousness. Picture our individual Awareness as a smaller ball that is inside the BIG ball of Consciousness. And the tiny bubbles contained within our smaller ball of Awareness represent the perceptions and experiences that we, as an individual, have access to. The unique shape of our individual ball of Awareness along with the collection of bubbles of perception within it represents a key part of our uniqueness as human beings.

But we are not finished yet. Within this smaller ball of our individual Awareness sits an even smaller ball represented by our Attention. Our Attention is like a video camera that we can point in our direction of choice. So, our ball of Attention contains a more discreet set of bubbles of perception that are within our ball of Awareness. Our Attention (our video camera) orients us towards a specific set of perceptions and experiences that are available to us within our individual Awareness.

Now let’s do one more. Inside this smaller ball of Attention sits our even smaller ball of Focus. Our Focus operates like a camera lens that has the ability to take in the vast expanses of our Attention as well as being able to dial down to minute levels of detail. I hope that clarifies things a bit and provides us with a common dialogue and understanding of these key terms and concepts.

So, the term “Conscious Leadership” can be a little confusing, since if we are alive, we exist in the same field of consciousness as everyone else. It is actually our level or degree of Awareness, or our Awareness Quotient, that more specifically influences our perspective in life and in leadership.

As our Awareness grows, or our ball of Awareness gets bigger, we are able to incorporate more of the bubbles of perception and experience that are available to us as human beings. And as we grow our Awareness more thoughtfully, we are able to grow and then perform in more productive ways. And we can accomplish this through the active, purposeful exercise of our Attention and Focus.

By actively choosing to orient ourselves towards, or exercise our Attention, towards more inspiring individuals and types of information and experiences, we further grow our Awareness in this area. If we more consistently orient ourselves towards more “negative” people and information, well, our experience in life will tend to reflect this in some way.

And by utilizing our Focus to discern the breadth and depth and detail of whatever it is we are placing our Attention on within our Awareness, we are able to extract even further important information to contribute to our perspective and experience.
I hope that this model of how our individual ball of Focus sits in our bigger ball of Attention, which sits in our even bigger ball of Awareness, which exists in the really BIG ball of human Consciousness, helps to clarify these related terms. And more importantly, helps to position us to utilize these concepts to grow and expand our Awareness in a way that is most supportive of our leadership purpose. This clarification is really foundational to our journey towards higher levels of leadership, and there will be more to come on this important topic. This is The Leadership Revolution that I am talking about!
In Service,
Brian

What do you think? Please share a comment that further explores this topic.