Anke Sommer writes about process-oriented leadership
The people who approach us at INSTITUT SOMMERINSTITUT SOMMER is not only the name of our company, but also the expression of the approach we take towards the requests we receive. Read more here.... Read more are people in positions of responsibility who want to develop their leadership qualities. In the course of this work, when working on resolving systemic dysfunctions, they often also bring their children to the INSTITUT.
The resolution of dysfunctions in the professional environment during LEADERSHIP work also has a positive effect in the client’s private life. LEADERSHIP work is not to be confused with therapeutic work, because LEADERSHIP work focuses on regaining lost leadership, while the aim of therapy is to heal the inner child.
Most of our clients are unaware of all the areas in which they are no longer using their leadership skills. Instead of leadership, a directive form of communication creeps in. They feel misunderstood and their reactions become increasingly irritable.
In the INSTITUT’s personality development programme, therefore, the focus is entirely on personally taking over leadership. You take up once more the leadership that you’d lost. The pivot is the change work, in which you yourself play the main role.
Your world changes
The change in you personally also changes your environment. We detect all the places where you have lost your leadership skill, and you take up leadership again. You gain more conscious awareness: your field of activity expands; you become attentive and see yourself as the starting point for every change.
If you want to live responsibly, and if you want your work to be useful to the ‘world’, i.e. to be beneficial, then you cannot avoid this development work. You need to recognise how you see things based on your past experiences, and what consequences arise from that. Only then do you perceive the necessity for change.
Everyone’s growth into awareness is individual, because everyone has a different background story.
You may be familiar with LEADERSHIP work as a methodological process with a theoretical approach. At INSTITUT SOMMER, our process-oriented approach to LEADERSHIP work is based on regaining the inner feelings of your heart. And that is deliberate – because holistic leadership can never succeed if the heart isn’t involved.
Taking leadership decisions guided only by your intellect results in a cold approach and you remain caught in old behavioural patterns. You utilise the possibilities that you know from the way you’ve been shaped through experience. Above all, through LEADERSHIP work according to Anke Sommer you maintain your health.
Your heart never acts against your body; it protects your well-being. It is your intellect that can harm your physical well-being because it ignores the body’s signs such as feeling unwell. This prevents you from perceiving and acting on your physical warning signals. In the long term, this may make you ill.
Personal LEADERSHIP Work: your contribution to a peaceful world
As a result of the LEADERSHIP work at INSTITUT SOMMER, you ‘lead’. You can even cope with complex situations without losing yourself in defensiveness or feeling overwhelmed. Your growing awareness ensures that you recognise which of your actions are good, for everyone involved.
If your actions are positive, you grow into a supportive system. You give benefits and you gain benefits. In principle it’s that simple. LEADERSHIP work is successful when you are integrated into a supportive system. Therefore this process of change makes you aware of everything that isn’t positive.
Then you can act and prevent yourself from becoming part of negative processes. If you remain unaware of this aspect, your actions can also lead to the perpetuation of negative elements.
That is why the LEADERSHIP work is based on the continuous development of your perception and your heart’s feelings. Through this work, you develop your perceptive ability. You become far more aware of what is happening around you, and every new perception that you gain enables you to comprehend the world in a new way.
Your view of things becomes less judgemental and more neutral as your new perceptions enable you to see your surroundings with fresh eyes. In time, you recognise reality while your distortive view fades into the background. Things you were previously unaware of become tangible.
Your intellect is the distorting factor, because it learns through past experiences; it learns to see the world, but from the viewpoint of your parents and other people close to you.
Understanding leadership processes
If you were lucky enough to have had enlightened, loving parents, it is no problem if your intellect takes on their viewpoint, because it also learns to see the world in loving and appreciative ways. However, if your parents suffered under unresolved experiences, your mind became familiar with the restrictions that resulted from the latter.
These limitations are based on painful experiences in the past, which had a massive impact on the loving part of your personality. If you were unlucky, your heart closed itself off, so you are now lacking an important element that you need for positive leadership work. It is not easy to gain fresh access to your heart, since your intellect blocks access to it like a guard.
In other words, LEADERSHIP work is a continuous process of taking up unresolved information from the past that often has huge implications, without laying the focus on these negative factors. LEADERSHIP work does not probe into painful experiences.
Through special LEADERSHIP questions, where your entire body is involved in the process of finding answers, you recognise the connections between the existing situation and your lack of leadership.
The heart is an essential part of the process
Process-oriented LEADERSHIP work has one decisive advantage compared to purely methodological approaches that address your intellect. You may feel safe in your intellect, but you are depriving yourself of your existing physical leadership skills. Process-oriented LEADERSHIP work is profound and addresses both your intuition as well as your intellect. You recognise the difference between heart-felt feelings emotions controlled by the mind.
LEADERSHIP work enables you to see ‘with your heart’ once more. Your actions become warm-hearted instead of following the cold emotions that are controlled by the mind and express old wounds.
After successful LEADERSHIP work, you no longer distance yourself from your heart, for fear of being hurt: instead, you distance yourself from every form of violence and every heartless action around you. Brakes on activity that stem from feelings of dependency on someone else disappear.
You recognise that dependency occurs when you think that the other person must change in order for the situation to change, whereas in fact it is your altered reaction that improves the state of affairs; in this way you manage the situation.
LEADERSHIP work sees the heart as the centre, because it is your heart that has wisdom. It gives you back the stability you have lost. Restless nights when you replay scenes in your head fade into the background. Finally, you realise that all forms of fear originate in your head.
The heart knows no fear; it simply recognises danger stimuli. If danger stimuli are registered, there is a real reason behind them. You can react, instead of being distracted by the thoughts controlled by your intellect.
Feedback from Beate Birnick, Managing Director of a civil engineering company
“(…) Anke’s LEADERSHIP coaching leads people directly to free themselves from narrow, restrictive structures. Unfortunately, these are not conscious, but still work and make you incapable of action! Like a poison, supposedly a normality, which one takes for a long time in a usual dose and which consumes one then over the years. The special thing about this, I call it the detoxification process, is that it is movingly fast! Without long research into the causes in conversations – simply pick up the signals, take them out of the body in a process and it is gone and no longer influences. For me, the effect of this work is decisive. I deal differently with recurring everyday situations. I experience stress situations in particular less strenuous, which is very healthy overall. Things that have been difficult so far are becoming smoother and smoother. I still find it exciting how within the LEADERSHIP work the difficult processes become visible in oneself! Wherever you block yourself, restrict yourself and take your strength with it! (…)”