Aligned Personal Functioning

A few years ago, I attended a leadership training program given by Anima Leadership.  I've attended leadership programs before.  Several of them.  But this one was different.  This leadership program changed the way that I think of and work with people -- including the way I think of and work with myself.  I would even venture to say that it's changed the course of my life -- hopefully for the better.

The program was sponsored by the university and all the participants were engineering graduate students.  I don't know if Anima runs all their leadership programs this way or they were tailoring it for this particularly left-brained audience, but we spent the first half day or more of the three day program learning about emotions -- essentially, learning that they exist and that they're important.  Pretty basic, I know.  But to an audience of engineering graduate students, this pretty much went against everything we had learned in life up to this point.

We learned that whether we like it or not, we feel.  And, consciously or subconsiously (and usually the latter), these feelings affect the way we act and interact with people.  Even when we try to mask our feelings, people can often sense that something is wrong. 

Having established that we have feelings, we then learned how to work with them.  We learned about triggers and how the stories we tell ourselves can stir up and reinforce certain emotions.  We learned about leadership in a personal context, in a team and in the community.  One of the main things we learned was that we can function most effectively when what we feel, what we think, what we say and what we do are in alignment.  They call this aligned personal functioning.

Suddenly, I understood why I had such trouble doing certain things.  Like working on some projects or going to some meetings.  Often, I did these things because I thought that's what I should be doing.  I didn't want to do them.  I didn't really believe in them.

Now I realized why they didn't feel right.  And beyond that, my new found understanding of feelings and their importance gave me the permission I needed to not do these things anymore.  And, more importantly, to choose to do other things.