With great responsibility comes great power
Author: Jonathan Klodt
We increase our ability to step into higher capacities of creativity when we make a commitment to take responsibility. This journey starts by focusing on our inner world and embarking on a journey of the soul towards more personal wholeness.
One of the most powerful shifts in perspective that I guide my clients to as a foundational practice - and that I need to constantly remind myself of again and again - is to take full responsibility for everything that appears in our awareness. We might not have caused it, we might not be to blame, but once it comes to our attention we have the ability to choose our response (response-ability) to it and transform it if it is not in alignment with our values and intentions.
Instead of falling into a victim mindset, thinking why did this happen to me again? We dare to take an honest look at our circumstances to see how we (co-)created this situation - How did I contribute to this outcome? On a surface level, this is basic advice for highly effective people: Focus on what you can influence instead of what have no control over (e.g. don’t celebrate how many deals you closed, celebrate how many proposals you made!).
But it goes deeper than this.
Grow up, Clean up, Wake up, Show up
On of the most influential maps in my thinking is the integral framework, based on the work of Ken Wilber. In his theory, he promotes a holistic and interrelated view on the world. If we look at our own development, it means these days it’s not enough to excel in our careers and repeat the life of our ancestors.
By moving beyond the early stages of our development (grow up), confront our shadows and blind spots (clean up), develop a wider understanding of our interconnected web of relations and the ultimately illusory nature of reality (wake up), speak truth to power and embody the most precious human qualities of generosity, insight, and compassion (show up) in order to become Warriors for the human spirit, as Margaret Wheatley names them.
The threshold into true adulthood and leadership
Expanding our responsibility is a core process of this holistic development and requires us to take action in all four areas. One of the thresholds that many of us face these days is an initiation into true adulthood and leadership. All cultures had initiation rites to mark this threshold. But in our industrialized world we have stripped away ritual and ceremony as there is no place for such esoteric “non-sense” in a linear, deterministic, mechanistic and materialistic worldview. Indeed it points towards a world beyond our limited senses.
We assume that by crossing the magic age limit of 18 years we know how to be adults. And yet many parts of us never make the step into taking the responsibility of becoming mature adults. We stay stuck in early stages of development and repeat the same patterns that brought us to where we are now - and which need to be acknowledged and appreciated for that - at a steadily increasing rate of negative side effects. In a complex world, our behavioral patterns and response-ability need to upgrade in equal measure or more if we want to actively step into leadership and be an embodied example of where we want to go collectively.
At our deepest core we all deeply long for meaning, purpose and our sense of belonging in this cosmic web of life.
Ceremonies and rituals used to help us contextualize and process important developmental steps on this path and mark important transitions.
With increasing burnout, depression, meaninglessness and disorientation more and more people start to notice - often through crisis - a calling of the soul to look beyond our conditioning and cultural beliefs to find out what is essential to who we are.
Once we start to take responsibility for this voice that is calling us, we reach a threshold of maturation into adulthood. This threshold is connect with a deep grieving and letting go. An initiation into the underworld of the soul as Bill Plotkin metaphorically describes it.
There will be not mother or father figure, no president or CEO, no leader or visionary, no extraterrestrials or light-beings who come to take us home. It is all one thing and it is you and you are it. Part of it is a deep abandonment wound for all the times we didn’t receive the attention and love we would have needed as children. We can learn to parent ourselves and be the mother or father for our inner children that we craved in our younger years. This is an important part of what it means to grow up and clean up.
Becoming stewards of a more beautiful world
As painful as this process is, it promises the reward of becoming reconnected to our innate wholeness by bringing our fragmented inner parts into greater coherence. From this place, what was contradictory and separate finds unity with capacity to respond to the world in and around us. We mature in our creativity and can embody more acceptance and compassion for others. They say “With great power comes great responsibility“. Equally true is the opposite: “With great responsibility comes great power“. By expanding our capacity to respond, we expand our power. By taking responsibility for everything in our awareness, inner and outer worlds, we increase our influence and ability to create the world around us.