Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

by Joseph Jaworski

What was I doing here in the midst of all of this? I felt a great deal of anxiety, and I began questioning my ability to carry the whole thing off. It was like the time I almost made a perfect score skeet shooting and “woke up” only to miss the last target. The sense of true freedom and clarity of purpose I had experienced in the early days after returning from London began to erode. I was being forced to operate at a pace I found uncomfortable.

do best when I have plenty of time to reflect on things, and “process” what’s going on. That’s the way I stay anchored in the midst of the necessary chaos. That was fine in the early days, when the pace was less frenetic. But now I wasn’t able to control the pace, and the more I operated at the ot...

It’s so easy under these circumstances to blame the situation on others: “They simply don’t get it. … They’re not committed,” or such.

There’s always a “they.” But that’s where the confusion lies. In these situations, it’s not “they” who are responsible. It’s us.

Taking the time to come together on a regular basis in true dialogue gives everyone a chance to maintain a reflective space at the heart of the activity—a space where all people can continue to be re-nurtured together by what is wanting to happen, to unfold.

The free man is he who wills without arbitrary self-will. He believes in destiny, and believes that it stands in need of him.

he must go to it, yet does not know where it is to be found.

The ground of being that enables the grand will to operate is the ground of being of the implicate order—being a part of the unfolding process of the universe,

In this state of being, we will do things that are very difficult, and which might even be unnatural for us in terms of our habitual way of doing things.

Jung described himself: I had a sense of destiny as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security. … Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters, I was no longer among men, but was alone with God.

I stopped being swayed by other people’s opinions, I stopped worrying about what my colleagues and neighbors would think, and I found a new force within me.

six-hour PBS television series based on Campbell’s writings, The Power of Myth:

I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

we live in a relational, participative universe, that what is unfolding in the world is unique, and that this is an “open” moment in history.

Wherever I seemed to turn, the answers would be provided—a door would open, a “coincidence” would occur; someone would introduce us to another who “just happened” to know a person who, as it turned out, would provide a key direction to us.

I thought about the law firm, and how when we were just a handful of young lawyers, only two or three years out of law school, we used to go on recruiting trips to all the best law schools. We would stand up before a group of one hundred law students and talk about our dream of a two-hundred-lawyer firm that would be a major force in the nation’s legal community. We had a dream and the obvious commitment. Year after year, the best young lawyers were attracted to our small group, until ultimately, our dream was realized. We created our future that way.

It’s like a painting. There are various spots of paint in an impressionist painting, but when you step back to see the picture, there is no correspondence between the spots of paint and what you see in the picture. Similarly, the implicate order and its mathematics does not directly come to describe a sort of correspondence with reality.

It is simply a language. This language is referring to something that cannot be stated. The reality which is most immediate to us cannot be stated.

Francisco Varela,

The Tree of Knowledge and The Embodied Mind.

He explained that a spoon is not something that exists in itself. It becomes a spoon in the background of our species (hands, food requirements, and so forth) and our human history (etiquette, national style, for example), both of them recurrent. We put the spoon to our mouth to feed ourselves. But for this recurrent practice, it would not exist for its present purpose.

When I promise or make a request, I do so while in the midst of the past and current network of human practices. Although it is I who makes the request or the promise or declaration, it is not individual, because it is coming from and inserted into the whole background and history of human practices.”

it is through language that we create the world, because it’s nothing until we describe it. And when we describe it, we create distinctions that govern our actions.

To put it another way, we do not describe the world we see, but we see the world we describe.

Everything that I have studied since that time has confirmed to me that relationship is the organizing principle of the universe.

knowing that whatever we need at the moment to meet our destiny will be available to us. It is at this point that we alter our relationship with the future.

Out of this commitment, a certain flow of meaning begins. People gather around you, and a larger conversation begins to form. When you are in this state of surrender, this state of wonder, you exert an enormous attractiveness—not because you are special, but because people are attracted to authentic presence and to the unfolding of a future that is full of possibilities. This is what occurred when I gathered the trustees, founders, and others who were so important to the success of the Forum.

The people who come to you are the very people you need in relation to your commitment.

At this point, your life becomes a series of predictable miracles.

I have concluded that the leadership that can bring forth such predictable miracles is more about being than about doing.

“when a complete stranger calls out of the blue and wants you to do a book with him about something you don’t fully understand, would you say ‘Yes’? You say ‘Yes’ because something calls you to say ‘Yes.’ You cannot figure it out rationally, because if you try to figure it out that way, you would say ‘No.’”

“Over the entrance to Carl Jung’s home in Switzerland is a Latin inscription: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit—‘Invoked or not invoked, God is present.’”

Bohm’s book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order,

THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT. WE HAVE CREATED A SOCIETY THAT HONORS THE SERVANT AND HAS FORGOTTEN THE GIFT.

—Albert Einstein

Charles Handy’s book, Beyond Certainty,

Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline.

“By deliberately changing the internal image of reality, people can change the world. Indeed,”

the universe offers infinite possibility.

What is the source of our capacity to access the wisdom for action we need at the moment? How can we learn to reliably enable that capacity, individually and collectively? The answer was to be revealed slowly, over a ten-year period, beginning with the discovery of the “U.”

We began in earnest the following week, and over the next three months, interviewed dozens of scientists, social leaders, and entrepreneurs, ultimately developing what we called “the U-Process,” a way of describing what can happen when a team or an organization works together to bring forth a new future that is not simply a projection of the past.

the fundamental triad of reality is information, matter, and energy.

There is a creative Source of infinite potential enfolded in the universe.

The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember, and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is “wind or breath.” This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy to which the manifest world of the finite responds. … That which is truly alive in the living being is this energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies.

Bohm had formulated the principles found in the paper “On Dialogue.”

Lee pointed out that when the mind is silent, transcending the ego (as it is during deep meditation), something beyond thought comes into operation—a knowing that is primary. “It is an awareness decoupled from our view of our self or our view of the world. It is genuinely a new order of insight.”

being.” In Unfolding Meaning, Bohm wrote that meaning is an aspect of reality, tied to the achievement of goals and to specific contexts that are too complex to be represented by any closed formula.

Meister Eckhart: “The outer work can never be small if the inner work is great. And the outer work can never be great if the inner work is small.”

Humans can learn to draw from the infinite potential of the Source by choosing to follow a disciplined path toward self-realization and love, the most powerful energy in the universe.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).