The 6 Realms of Elevated Leadership: A Model for Sustainable Success, Impact & Wellbeing

The 6 Realms of Elevated Leadership
by Christine Arylo

The 6 realms of elevated leadership provide a path to sustainable success, impact and wellbeing – for the individual, the organization and the planet.

All six parts are needed for the individual to full embody and express their potential. To elevate their mindset and internal conditioning to create a different, more elevated reality for the people, teams, causes, organizations and societal ecosystems they influence. To have the practices they need to make both the big meta choices and the smaller every day ones.

When these 6 realms are all present, conscious and working together, our decisions, thoughts and actions are guided by wholeness and wellbeing. So the realities we create naturally lead to teams, organizations, choices, societies, etc. that create wholeness, wellbeing and sustainability.

If you look at the center of the model, you will also see the words:  “rooted in relationship.”  Relationship to Self… to people… and to planet. When we are creating, leading and making decisions from relationship on all three of these levels, we naturally create realities that serve both the collective and the individual. And our choices take into account a much wider and longer viewpoint, that includes short, mid and long term impact.

What follows below is a brief description of each of the 6 realms and things to consider about how these realms currently show up for you, or don’t, in both your day to day and your longer vision and perspective. For example, personal sustainability informs our daily, weekly and monthly choices in the now. But also, the choices you are making in the now are setting you up for how your wellbeing, wealth, and way of working will  look 5-10 years from now.

Take a read through.

 

We start at the bottom of the model, which in itself is a difference.

Many leadership and success approaches have us start at the top, with the bigger purpose and goals or our presence and influence. But, if we don’t set a strong foundation of personal sustainability and practice, all the rest will come from a place of distortion and unconscious imprinting and biases. When we create from the distortions or conventional thinking consciousness we create more of the same or just 10% better vs. the elevation this planet and we all need now.

 

1. PERSONAL SUSTAINBILITY 

Until we choose to value long-term sustainability in how we live and design our lives and organizations and lead our teams and families, nothing can really change. Which is why in feminine leadership, we embrace self-sustainability principles and practices such as:

• Sustainability is not a third-bottom line, or a list of self-care strategies. It’s core to what success really is.
• Our health and vitality as humans are directly connected to the health of this planet and vice versa. As leaders, both are at the core of how we make our choices.
• Our human bodies are not designed to handle the pace nor the amount of information coming at us. Instead of accepting this pace, we challenge the pressure created by timelines, deadlines, false urgency and unrealistic expectations. We use our super power to create sustainable paces.
• The systems that make up how people work and live are connected to a value system that at the core values short term profit and gain for the individual over long term sustainability for the whole. To change this systematically, we must first start where we have the power to change, which is within our lives. Then we can influence our immediate sphere. And through that the world.

Personal sustainability includes our Wellbeing, our Wealth, and the Way we work with and within the systems and organizations.

There is lots to say and teach on this topic of personal sustainability, which is why I wrote an entire book on it – Overwhelmed and Over It: Embrace Your Power to Stay Centered and Sustained in a Chaotic World.

To elevate the systems we live and work in, we first elevate how we as women work and live. Which means putting personal sustainability at the core of how we work, how we design and influence our organizations, how we make decisions and design our lives. This is a radical act of activism, self-advocacy and generational change.

 

2. PRACTICE

In this intense world the only thing that will keep you centered, and clear are the practices that hold you and create a structure for how you live your daily life. This is beyond going to the gym. It is the practices that book-end your days. The way you flow your morning and evening. The ways you support your specific body type. The way you flow and focus. Every day. Every week. Every month. Every year.

If you try to elevate and expand in your work without elevating and deepening your practice, you exhaust yourself or short circuit or get sick because your system cannot handle and run the higher frequency and flow of energy, power and presence. Some of the key foundations you want to put in place are:

• Upgrade your daily morning and evening practice – to support you.
• Restructure your weeks – so they support what you are creating next.
• Work with the natural earth cycles monthly and yearly to find your natural rhythm for working and regenerating.
• Use the natural cycles to focus, choose intentions and manifest – a planning system that works.
• Deepen your meditation and energetic practices – to strengthen your nervous systems, cultivate vitality, clear out anxiety, receive intuitive guidance, and more.
• Elevate your commitment to your practice as something you do for you – and something you cannot do without because it is ultimately what supports and sustains you.

 

To elevate your work, presence & impact, you must also elevate your practices.

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Then, We Move to center of the model – the pillars 

3. POWER

 What is power? The models for power we see are mostly distorted, void of the feminine aspects of power, and distorted and toxic in their masculine expression.

As a result most humans operate at half of their power, and many recapitulate distorted power in the way they run their teams, organizations, relationships and lives. The systems we work in tend to value distorted power, which leads to the burnout and overwhelm driven by unsustainable growth and goals that deplete people and planet.

Without language to articulate power, it’s challenging to embody your own full power or know how to introduce different ways of working, creating and leading that are rooted in aligned and integrated power.

In elevated leadership, we use a model I developed called the Spectrums of Power to give language, awareness and understanding of the feminine/masculine, fire/water, yin/yang, intangible/tangible powers all humans have within them.

Like a kayak paddle, we need both to move forward, navigate rough waters, and stay balanced. For example:

• Intuition – Intellect –> Wisdom
• Stillness – Swiftness –> Aligned Action
• Connection – Competition –> Conscious Collaboration

But most people have unconscious biases that drives them to lean too heavily on one and discount the other, especially in times of stress and stretch.

When you know what power FEELS like within you, and you right your own distortions, learn to access and TRUST your full spectrum of power, and integrate your masculine and feminine within, then you can be a more powerful presence for elevation.

As a society, we need new models and imprints for power. As leaders, we need to integrate and access our full spectrum of both
feminine & masculine power. And then wield both consciously to create.

 

5. PRESENCE 

We are taught to believe our power comes from our position, titles and degrees, so we spend a lifetime achieving and amassing them.

In truth, your power comes from your PRESENCE.

Often our presence is what we do naturally, it’s what other really value… and count on us for… but rarely are we acknowledged or compensated for it, yet.

The challenge with presence is that it is not real or authentic or even particularly influencing if you make it about emulating a set of qualities or traits prescribed as what good leaders do.

Your presence is unique to you.

But if you cannot name and give language to your presence, you cannot value it, fully wield it or confidently embody it.

Presence isn’t a mental ideal or exercise, or a skill you learn. You have presence because you choose to speak and embody your power, confidence, wisdom and courage in your unique and true voice and presence – so you don’t have to try to be something other than you are

When you feel what your unique presence feels like in your body, and sounds like in your voice your power and truth streams through when you speak, write, facilitate or lead.

And you learn how to use your presence to shift and elevate a room, a relationship or a situation – you’ll stop wasting your energy & efforting too hard, and start achieving the results you actually desire. 

The power to catalyze, elevate, & harmonize a room, person, situation or organization just by showing up fully and freely as yourself –
THAT IS PRESENCE.

 

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Lastly, We Move the Top, Which is Now Rooted in Sustainability, Supported by a Pure Presence & Power

5. PURPOSE 

The way purpose is taught and held in traditional leadership models frankly puts a lot of pressure on a person! The bigger the better. Solve world peace? World hunger? Reach a million people. We either exhaust ourselves trying to make a difference (and often feel like we are not) or we avoid embracing a purpose all together because it’s just too overwhelming with everything else we have going on. 

It is essential for us to embrace that our purpose is not just what we do to receive money. Our purpose shows up in how we mother, parent, mentor, care-take, design our lives, choose our work & give our gifts. When you can see the wholeness of your purpose, you become so much more empowered in your choices – what you say yes to, no to, and how you choose to design the shape of your work and life.

One way we work with purpose differently is to reference it as “your sacred work.”

Sacred means devoted to wholeness. Your sacred work is what you are here to cause and create and what you choose to give your life force to. It’s the purposes you serve through your gifts and presence. You express it through your jobs, projects, businesses, missions, and roles and also your mentoring, caretaking, mothering, and parenting

There is a more empowering & sustainable way to name, claim and work with purpose to be a guide post and guiding light for the choices you make in your career, organization and life design.

 

6. PATH

Path is two-fold – it’s both the bigger meta and the smaller monthly and yearly choices you make.

On the meta level, Path is your career and life design. The word career means ‘path’ at the root. The meaning of the word career was changed at some point to mean ‘to move at a quick pace’, which explains why we can feel so much pressure to move fast up ‘the ladder,’ or like we are behind where we ‘should be.’

In elevated leadership, we see our career as the path we take over the course of our lifetime. Nothing is lost, everything we have experienced we take with us.

You can’t get off your ‘career path’ because your path is unique to you. You may choose to get off the mainstream define path (which is often a wise thing!) to define your own version of career success. But no one except you can take away the value of the experiences you have gained.

Also, like any path, you take turns, sometimes planned, sometimes unexpected. Sometimes you have to machete the path and sometimes it is wide open.

On the smaller cycles of months and years, in elevated leadership we work with the natural cycles to break down our path into smaller parts and time spans, so we can set intentions, move towards them with both focus and fluidity, and also respond to the changing environment around us. This creates what I call Healthy Time Pressure.

Here’s a glyph from Overwhelmed and Over It, Section 4 on Liberating Yourself from toxic time pressure that illlustrates:

We use practices like the quarterly Power Pauses at the Equinoxes and Solstices, and taking the full month of January to consider and creatively explore where we want to focus for the coming year.  We pause monthly to re-set and re-focus so we don’t live our lives and approach our purpose and intentions like a never ending marathon.

To succeed in a sustainable way, in which you are supported, you must be adept at staying focused AND being fluid. This is how you create and work in the flow.

 

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To explore working with this model in your own personal leadership or with the people on your team or organization, reach out to Christine here.