Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

by Joseph Jaworski

There was an inner confidence that things would work out in the right way.

at this moment I had the feeling of certainty that I would accomplish this dream. I felt nothing could deter me; I would not let anything get in my way.

The day I left the firm, I crossed the threshold.

Bohm’s latest book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order.

Bohm thinks that the current trend towards fragmentation is embedded in the subject-verb-object structure of our grammar, and is reflected at the personal and social levels by our tendency to see individuals and groups as “other” than ourselves, leading to isolation, selfishness and wars.

I went to the telephone and began dialing. After several calls, I found Bohm’s home number, and before I knew it, he was at the other end of the line. I was pouring my heart out, telling him what I was about and that I must see him. Almost without hesitation, he agreed to spend the entire next afternoon with me.

Different people are not that separate, they are all enfolded into the whole, and they are all a manifestation of the whole.

Everything is included in everything else.

“You cannot think of existence as local,” Bohm said to ...

We are all connected. If this could be taught, and if people could understand it, we would have a different consciousness. “At present, people create barriers between each other by their fragmentary thought. Each one operates separately. When these barriers have dissolved, then there arises one mind, where they are all one unit, but each person also retains his or her own individual awareness. That one mind will still exist even when they separate, and when they come together, it will be as if they hadn’t separated. It’s actually a single intelligence that works with people who are moving in relationship with one another.

Bohm then told me, “You’ve got to give a lot of attention to consciousness. This is one of the things of which our society is ignorant. It assumes consciousness requires no attention. But consciousness is what gives attention. Consciousness itself requires very alert attention or else it will simply destroy itself. It’s a very delicate mechanism.

Mach’s principle: “The whole is as necessary to the understanding of its parts, as the parts are necessary to the understanding of the whole.”

I’ve thought a great deal about the way both Bohm and Mavis showed up in my life right after I made the commitment to leave the firm and follow my dream. At the time, I was amazed by the coincidence of it all. But when I thought about it, particularly in light of what Bohm had taught me, I told myself, “Why be surprised? This is the way things should work in a world that is fundamentally connected.” Yet all my old conditioning made me see the world as fragmented, as made up of separate “things,” so I continually struggled to find a reason to connect “things” together. It was difficult for me to consistently see the world as one of relatedness rather than thingness.

I also found Arthur Koestler’s account of synchronicity in Janus helpful. Koestler traces the idea of unity-in-diversity all the way back to the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres and the Hippocratics’ “sympathy of all things”—“There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy.” The doctrine that everything in the universe hangs together also runs as a leitmotif through the teachings of Taoism, Buddhism, the Neo-Platonists, and the philosophers of the early Renaissance. Koestler concluded that “telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition … and synchronicity are merely different manifestations under different conditions of the same universal principle—i.e., the integrative tendency operating through both causal and acausal agencies.”

I kept always in the forefront of my mind Bohm’s injunction: Just go with it. You cannot be fixed in how you’re going about it any more than you would be fixed if you were setting about to paint a great work of art. Be alert, be self-aware, so that when opportunity presents itself, you can actually rise to it.

As I was to discover, acting in the belief that I was part of a greater whole while maintaining flexibility, patience, and acute awareness led to “all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down. … So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. In climbing, take careful note of the difficulties along your way; for as you go up, you can observe them. Coming down, you will no longer see them, but you will know they are there if you have observed them well.

—David Bohm, On Dialogue

book Unfolding Meaning.

the word “dialogue,” as used by Bohm, comes from two Greek roots, dia and logos, suggesting “meaning flowing through.”

No one mentions the undiscussables—they’re just there, lying beneath the surface, blocking deep, honest, heart-to-heart communication. Furthermore, we all bring basic assumptions with us, our own mental maps, about the meaning of life, how the world operates, our own self-interest, our country’s interest, our religious interest, and so forth. Our basic assumptions are developed from our early days, our teachers, our family, what we read. We hold these assumptions so deeply that we become identified with them, and when these assumptions are challenged, we defend them with great emotion. Quite often, we do this unconsciously.

Dialogue does not require people to agree with each other. Instead, it encourages people to participate in a pool of shared meaning that leads to aligned action.

People always say “We have to step back and see the big picture here,” as if we have to go from seeing the parts to constructing a whole. But the whole already exists; it’s just that we’re locked into a frame of reference that keeps us from perceiving it.

The Power of Myth,

Robert Greenleaf in Servant Leadership:

We tend to deny our destiny because of our insecurity, our dread of ostracism, our anxiety, and our lack of courage to risk what we have.

This is the point where our freedom and destiny merge. “Here I stand. I can do no other,” said Martin Luther.

we cross threshold after threshold, enduring the agony of spiritual growth and breaking through personal limitations.

I began to feel I was indispensable to the whole process, that I was responsible for all the people involved, and that everyone was depending on me. The focus was on me instead of on the larger calling.

In this state, the fear factor began multiplying.

The longer I stayed in this trap, the worse my situation seemed to get. My productivity and effectiveness went down the drain. I began to experience feelings of inadequacy and loss of confidence.

I began to get out of this trap by seeing things the way they really are: I am operating in the flow of the universe.

You have your love and concern for those operating in this sphere with you, but you don’t feel responsible for them.

That’s the very nature of these traps: they are habits of thought, and once we recognize them, they tend to disappear.

scenario planning is a far cry from obsessive worry, which can sap energy and kill the spirit.

We’re not really straightforward with people for fear that we will offend them, and they will leave the team.

We forget that these key people enrolled in our project in response to the flow and that call from our center. That’s why they were attracted in the first place.

understanding of the creative orientation.

It’s critical that you focus on the result and not get attached to any particular process for achieving the result.

It’s a little bit like sailing. If you’re focused on your course rather than your destination, you’re in big trouble.

There are actually two aspects to this cornerstone idea. The first part is the distinction between focusing on the intrinsic result we care about versus focusing on our assumptions about how we need to get there.

And the second is the orientation toward the result itself.

why we have a dream we want to fulfill. It’s actually very rare that people focus on what they want to create for its own sake.

Robert Frost once said “All great things are done for their own sake.”

So at this stage of building ALF, I had reverted to focusing rigidly on the business plan we had devised, instead of focusing on the result, the vision we had intended. This was the exact opposite of what I had done during our most successful earlier phase. At that earlier time, I kept focusing on the dream and had remained highly flexible, going with the flow of things, taking one day at a time, and listening for guidance about the next step.

In this process, a lot of fear was generated. The further we fell behind in the original game plan, the more fearful I got. Being stuck in the process, the fear of no alternative loomed larger and larger.

My habit of thought—dependency on the original action plan calling for Texas funding for the first three years of operations—had almost sent us under. That habit of thought was reinforced by my sense that we were not worthy of national funding unless we had established chapters in other regions.

The traps of responsibility and dependency generate a lot of their energy from the fear of no alternative.

But there are always alternatives. It’s just that we often are unable to see them.

To me, the payroll was huge, the expectations were huge, and the task seemed almost overwhelming. The pressure was on to produce. Who did I think I was?