mountains reflected in water personal growth and development strategy

Leadership Development Intensive:
A Self-Discovery Approach to Leadership Effectiveness

Private, Half-Day, Online Leadership Development Intensive

If you are a business leader who would like to better manage their emotions in high-stakes situations, consider our executive wellness coaching and advisory services. For those looking to develop habits of inner calm and emotional regulation, we recommend our private meditation coaching.

A Self Discovery Approach to Leadership Development: The Role of Self-Connection in Managing the Infinite Demands on Your Attention

A Yogic Approach to Achieving Inner Clarity, Self-Awareness, and Self-Connection (Beyond Corporate Training Programs)

A yogic approach to leadership development requires that you establish distance from being consumed by your habitual ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and acting; it requires that you establish distance from yourself. You want to be able to see the unconscious commitments that have been producing and re-producing your anxieties, rumination, and habits. You want to get clarity on what is stressing you out. What are you trying to accomplish? How do you define leadership? More importantly, how would you know if you experienced effective leadership? What would be different? And what would this different thing do for you? In other words, what do you want by pursuing effective leadership? What do you really want?

Our Leadership Development Intensive is conducted from a yogic perspective on leadership effectiveness. Traditionally, yoga wasn’t concerned with solving the ego’s problems. Instead, it was concerned with freeing awareness from the limitations imposed by the ego’s desire for permanent security. Freed from these limitations, one has no choice but to engage more fully in/with yourself and with life, and this means being able to recognize your own intrinsic motivations and being fearless enough to confront what you’ve been avoiding in your life. Deepening your connection with yourself allows you to connect with (and pursue) the things that make your life most meaningful and ‘full’ without the fear, doubt, insecurity, and self-sabotage (which may mean that what has become an insurmountable problem need never be addressed). Leadership doesn’t ‘happen’ in some other place, outside of your “life”. And to think that leadership development only requires developing career or leadership skills is misguided at best and, at worst, self-destructive.

Yoga prescribed practices precisely because theory wasn’t enough. Without practice—without implementation—change is near impossible. We can delay meaningful action and wait for change to occur spontaneously, or we can begin the process re-habituation using courage and awareness. Of course, while we always remain open to miracles, we don’t rely on them; if all we do is wait for a miracle, we run the risk of spending years feeling like we’re not any happier or have simply been wasting time.

A Balanced or Holistic Approach to Leadership Development: A Yogic Approach to Leadership Effectiveness

Self-Esteem, Self-Criticism, and Avoidance Anxiety in Leadership

Mining for gold requires digging up some dirt. But we don’t dig up dirt for the sake of digging up dirt. Self-improvement does not require sanitizing our inner lives of whatever (we think) causes our sense of inadequacy. It doesn’t require ‘fixing’ all our weaknesses so that we are immune to all forms of criticism. It doesn’t require achieving perfect mental health. In fact, the quest for any kind of personal perfection can reinforce our sense of inadequacy inner lack (the source of our deepest anxiety).

We inherit and develop a range of habits that help us avoid the people/situations that produce our difficult feelings and thoughts. These intrusive thoughts and overwhelming emotions determine so much of our lives because we avoid them (and our tendency to continue to avoid them means that they will continue to prevent us from being free). Our fulfillment is often precisely in these tangled emotions connected to the very things we avoid. Confronting what we avoid replaces our meaningless stress with meaningful stress, the kind of stress that makes us resilient and allows us to pursue our most meaningful projects and a life of meaningful freedom.

buddha entangled in banyan tree self discovery leadership development executives entrepren

Leadership doesn’t ‘happen’ in some other place, outside of your “life”. And to think that leadership development only requires developing career or leadership skills is misguided at best and, at worst, self-destructive.

Half-Day Leadership Development Intensive: A Personalized Leadership Intensive Program/Experience

Your Effectiveness is Tangled Up in the Emotions Connected to the Things That You Avoid

A Leadership Development Intensive with Balrāj functions like a kind of mirror: it shows elements of (the habitual, unconscious) you to (the conscious) you. By making your implicit, unconscious habits more explicit, you see how these habits have been determining your life. The resulting inner clarity creates the conditions for you to experience freedom from the powerful grip of your compulsions, anxieties, and rumination (and any related destructive and self-sabotaging behaviours). Effective leadership requires being able to carefully confront your anxieties, not continue to avoid them. What can then emerge is something like a more focused path towards accomplishing leadership goals that you are intrinsically motivated to accomplish.

In your 4-hour Leadership Development Intensive, you will identify and address the most significant ways in which your habits are sabotaging your own efforts to find a sense of freedom from limitations, so you can connect with your deeper personal motivations, needs, and values. This allows you to find freedom from your destructive and self-sabotaging habits so you can experience deeper connection with yourself, with others, and with life itself. This is a core component not just of meaningful leadership development, but also of stress/anxiety management.

This is unlike corporate leadership training/programs. The objectives of an executive or leadership development programs offered by employers tend to be based on the employer’s needs, not yours. Furthermore, corporate leadership programs pre-define leadership and the so-called characteristics of a good leader, and then attempt to see where/what you are lacking in their leadership framework/model. Our approach to development emphasizes freeing yourself from yourself, from your unique limitations to quickly finding clarity and being responsive to the demands of a situation. (When you free yourself from yourself, what remains are the qualities that leadership programs often encourage you to develop.)

Our Leadership Development Intensive is also not intended to produce good feelings and false confidence or a false sense of control over one’s circumstances (with no attending meaningful changes to your life). Our Intensive is not therapy/healing.

Our Leadership Development Intensive is also not group-based program or a course, and does not contain any video components. 100% of our session is live, private, and personalized. A group program will not adequately address your own unique traits/skills, obstacles, and circumstances.

The purpose of our Leadership Development Intensive is to produce results. A simple intellectual understanding of your deeper and unconscious habits is rarely enough to affect your lived experience. (In fact, you may have experienced this in previous stress-relief and/or self-help books/courses/retreats: insights with little/no action or results.) For this reason, we don’t pursue leadership skills without self-connection. We don’t encourage generic assessments and skill development (e.g., personality assessments, 360-degree feedback, “leading change” training, simulations, goal setting, etc.). Instead, we want to get to the heart of what’s stopping you from being more effective, which never fits neatly into a leadership program’s pre-defined categories.

To facilitate self-awareness, we offer psychological astrological insights. And to facilitate change, we provide a conversational hypnosis session. Our Leadership Development Intensive is deeply personalized leadership intensive, so it is unique to you and helps you establish a more meaningful connection to your self and to your current situation, and helps you feel deeply seen, heard, and understood. It dedicated to your personal leadership development and success, which may or may not be equivalent to your employer’s vision for your leadership development.

In your intensive session, we will begin by exploring whatever you feel is the cause of your restricted growth, which may or may not have anything to do with your career! While issues at work may very much appear to be the ‘cause’ of your difficulties, you may be surprised to know that your concerns at work may have little/nothing to do with the apparent ‘cause’ itself, and may be related to one/more of the following areas:

career, vocation, business
physical health, wellness
relationships, love, marriage
inner life, emotional health
identity, values, spirituality
productivity, achievement
home, family life
social health, friendship

In your leadership intensive session, you will also receive suggestions that are unique to you and meant to be integrated and utilized in a direct and concrete way. Awareness and courage are enough.

Please note that this Intensive contains personalized astrological insights. For this purpose, your birth time is required. If you are not sure if your birth time is accurate enough, please let us know during your Clarity Call. This Intensive also contains a conversational hypnosis session, for which there are no requirements. We recommend that you set aside four hours of uninterrupted time for your Intensive in a private, comfortable location.