You have to learn to lead yourself before you can effectively lead others. This is the missing aspect of leadership development. Being centered integrates the inner person with the outer person allowing the authentic self to emerge. Centeredness manifests from the integration of the inner and outer self which allows your authenticity to emergence as a significant influencer that empowers you and others to be fully functional. Your centeredness is manifested in your level of awareness, meaningful connections, motivated empowerment, and innovative performance. Being authentic is being who you are in actuality, not your ideal self. Authenticity is revealed through strength-on-strength behavioral conditioning. Too often people focus on trying to become like someone else (i.e., an ideal) and doing what it takes to be who they think they want to be. This type of thinking and practice creates a false reality, and manifests as a performance gap—lack of influence and excessive leveraging of authority. Deep down a leader has to realize their core motivation. What is the motivation for your behavior? Your centeredness offers a profound awakening from an illusionary self-identified image to the true, authenticity of your individuality. Centered leadership seeks to align one’s central self, a connection with your authentic self, and how you encounter actuality and process it into your reality. At the core of your life experiences is a battle within yourself between your calculating self and your natural self. Within that battle, you experience cognitive dissonance and conflation. Life happens, and as it happens you don’t have time to reflect and consider how life impacts you, and how you could best behave, you make mistakes (i.e., motivated toward power, position, intelligence, and beauty [beauty includes pleasure, popularity, possessions, and prestige]), and those mistakes add up. You adapt to conditions, situations, circumstances, relationships, and pressures that affect the way you think, feel, and act. In your effort to adapt you pick up behaviors that are not aligned with your strengths, but your weaknesses. Often, your perceptions are shaped by your feelings, and your behaviors are shaped premised on your weaknesses. A performance gap emerges, and when you need to perform, you fail-it’s frustrating. What happens is that you get out of alignment with your natural strengths when your calculating self is in control. The calculating self is described by Zander and Zander (2000) as that part of us that makes selfish demands because it is concerned for its survival in a world of scarce thinking. It is that part of us that keeps trying to do what it wants, not what comes naturally. There’s an old saying that says “you can do anything you want to”, but that’s not true. You can do what you’re hard-wired to do. The calculating self endeavors to be something it is not and takes shortcuts to get the rewards and benefits it wants. The calculating self believes the horrible motto, “fake it till you make it.” Nothing authentic is ever based on something fake.
