Leadership: Use the Forces of Integration and Expansion to Find Your Purpose
Last week we explored one way people with Leadership Gift skills can apply a heightened appreciation for productive relationships to advance their purpose in life (and at work).
Two additional competencies wielded by those who live “on purpose” include their abilities to
- integrate to expansion and
- expand to integration
To get started understanding these skills, let’s review a couple of principles that describe the way materials relate to each other in the physical universe.
Gravity and radiation are complimentary forces operating on all matter in the universe. Gravity is an integrating force that pulls things together, inward toward a center.
Radiation is an expanding force that sends a body’s essence outward, away from it in all directions, so that it ultimately intersects (and often combines) with other bodies’ radiance.
For example, it’s the intersection of the sun’s gravity with the earth’s gravity that keeps the earth in orbit around the sun while the sun’s radiation provides life energy to earth. In this instance, integration and expansion create a complimentary relationship dynamic.
Well, integration and expansion actually operate similarly among people. If you’ll apply the metaphor, it holds a great gift.
When we live our lives “on purpose,” we radiate an essence from that purpose. And it intersects everything we do.
If you’ll take a “wide view” for a moment, it’s easy to see that certain people trust you immediately because they experience life energy and confidence in the essence you radiate.
When we live our lives “on purpose,” we’re likely to be continuously scanning for people capable of assisting us in that purpose and our “gravity” attracts them to us and integrates them into our lives.
To apply these dynamics consciously, people with Leadership Gift skills
- “integrate to expansion” as a way to draw people towards each other and hold them there so that two or more points of view actually mesh into a larger, more expansive frame, and
- “expand to integration” by suspending judgment and looking beyond preconceptions for the purpose of defining a vision or “game” large enough to include or “integrate” previously unincluded people.
It’s practically impossible to live “on purpose” and not develop extraordinary Leadership Gift skills.
Get Started With This Week’s 5-Minute Stretch
Use the complimentary forces of integration and expansion to assist in discovering or naming your purpose. How? Take 5 minutes to examine who “orbits” around you and around whom you “orbit.” Then, try to articulate what it is that’s drawn these people together. In this reflection lie critical clues to your purpose.
I encourage you to share your insights or ask a question about this post in the comments.
Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. For more on topics discussed in this post, consider his executive report Responsible Change, and download the Responsibility Process™ poster PDF in a more than a dozen languages. CEO’s desiring a culture of ownership may want to investigate the proven Managed Leadership Gift Adoption program.
