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This week Katie and I discuss how a leader can cultivate an inner life and why we may want to do this. What we find in our own culture and in our leadership is that we can become focused on the “outer” parts of our life and how we become focused on the parts of our life that actually change every second which can often leave us feeling void of even footing and also, contribute to us feeling as though we are only bouncing from one thing to the other. The real practical application of cultivating our own inner life as leaders is that we can access more of our resilience and that we can find our meaning and fulfillment from within us versus than from without. As well, without cultivating our inner life we are not prepared for things to be changing.

When we experience our life from coming within ourselves, firstly we experience the way in which we really want to work and how we want to “be” in our life. We are able to find the more vertical aspects of our lives versus the horizontal and transactional parts of our life. An inner life gives us the depth and transformational aspects of our lives. Some words that many great leaders have used to describe this way in leading and living life refer to leading from the virtues as Aristotle described thousands of years ago. This life can be described as the eudaimonic approach to living and leading which is a focus on the virtues of life and finding fulfillment from living in the virtues.

How do you cultivate your inner life?