Allowing Ourselves to be Transparent to What’s Most True for Us, with Tom Hurley
In this episode of the podcast, Andrew speaks with his colleague, friend, and mentor Tom Hurley, a very experienced leadership development consultant. Andrew and Tom discuss how we can be transparent to “what's most true for us,” and also explore the connection between spirituality and leadership–a topic Tom has been exploring for decades. Tom talks about his personal experience through a variety of dimensions, about how he defines spirituality, and about the importance of focusing on how we connect with our guidance. He says the most important invitation is for us to explore what is most deeply true for us, and how this inquiry is fundamentally mysterious. This conversation is laced with wisdom and inspiration, and invites us to consider how we can live lives that are more fulfilled and that have a positive impact on the world, even if we are operating in a challenging business paradigm that might sometimes make us confront our deepest personal values.
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Allowing Ourselves to be Transparent to What’s Most True for Us, with Tom Hurley
Importance of Spirituality in Leadership
Welcome back to the show. I love this next conversation that I had with my friend, colleague, and mentor Tom Hurley. Tom and I have great experience working together as part of the Oxford Leadership Academy, which has evolved into a group called Companions for Leadership, a European-based organization focused on developing individual leadership purpose and purpose-driven cultures.
Tom is a wonderful learner, seeker, and professional. He's the kind of man who will uplevel the conversation by walking into the room. I've always appreciated that about him. In our conversation, he talks about his personal story as well as his professional story as ways of connecting spirituality with leadership.
He shares the remarkable intention that came to him while he was doing a firewalk several decades ago, and that led him to integrate his knowledge of Christianity with the teachings of other faiths that he had explored since his introduction to Christianity back as a child. He also talks several times about contemplative and mystical traditions of Christianity, which he points out predate mainstream Christianity.
His professional journey always focused on the frontiers of who we are and what we can achieve, including his extensive work at the Institute of Noetic Sciences for seventeen years or so. He explains that spirituality is about a relationship to the emanation of the Divine source. This belief informs how he works with leaders as well as informs what's possible in the work of leaders moving beyond our individual histories and stories as well.
He said he has, for decades, been focusing on how we can connect with our inner guidance to connect and explore what is most deeply true for us. He said, “The heart of this inquiry is fundamentally mysterious. We can never fully understand it.” Importantly, he talks about being transparent to something that is working in and through us.
We talked a bit about, which was interesting, not being transparent in terms of me being transparent with you but me being transparent to something deeper within me. He also says, and I love this very simple statement, that no part of leadership is not spiritual in some sense. Near the end of the conversation, we talked about what's really the invitation to senior business leaders about how to tune in to what's most important and how to take responsibility and ownership for the impact of the business world and the practices that our business paradigm is perpetuating. It's a fascinating, relevant, accessible, and great conversation. I feel fortunate to have had it with Tom. I look forward to part 2, but here's part 1 with Tom Hurley.
Welcome back to the show. I am happy to have with me my colleague, my friend, and a mentor of mine, Tom Hurley. Tom Hurley is an accomplished leadership development consultant, coach, advisor, and board member. I first met Tom through our work with the Oxford Leadership Academy and then relatedly through Walk Leadership several years ago. Tom's work in leadership goes back a couple of years. Tom, you could tell the story about how you first encountered your work, primarily in leadership and otherwise.
I hate to recite people's backgrounds on this show, only to say that you are a tenured leadership consultant and advisor, and you have always been an important part of my constellation since we met. I'm grateful for you to be on this show because I know you have some things to say about this topic. Without any lengthier introduction, welcome, Tom.
Thank you. I'm delighted to talk with you. Thank you for the invitation. This is a topic that I feel is an important topic. I'm eager to see where our conversation goes.
Thank you. I almost want to pick up right away and say, “Tell me why you believe it's so important,” but I feel as though it's also important to tell a little bit about your story about how you came to approach this, a little bit about what you've learned over the years, and after a little time there, maybe then to delve into why it is important and to talk about your philosophy and experience here.
Let me talk a little about my own spiritual journey and also my own professional journey, which, in a sense, speaks to the two dimensions of this conversation, spirituality, on the one hand and leadership on the other. I was raised Roman Catholic. I was born into a large Irish Catholic clan in the greater Chicago area but grew up in South Carolina. I mention that because the two roots of my spirituality were my experience of that Roman Catholic tradition, particularly its mystical and contemplative roots, and, on the other hand, my experiences in nature growing up in rural South Carolina. Nature has always been a very important spiritual home or spiritual ground for me.
Like many of my generation, I left the Catholic church when I left home to go to college. I left the church largely because the dogma I was taught growing up was unbelievable to me. Without going into a lot of the details, the story was that the concept of God was this elderly gentleman with a long beard in the sky and so forth and so on. None of that made any sense to me. Like many of my generation, I then embarked on a spiritual search, which took me through many different traditions like Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, Daoism, and many other experiences and many other traditions along the way.
When I was about 33 or 34 years old, I had the opportunity to do a fire walk. This was the late 1980s, at a time when those things were faddish. The woman who was running the firewalk and facilitating it asked each of us to state an intention before walking across these hot coals. She said, “You're going to do something unbelievable to your ordinary mind. Doing something unbelievable is going to bring up a lot of energy in you, so use that energy to infuse an intention which you can then realize in your life moving forward.”
I cleared my mind, and out of nowhere or from wherever these kinds of things come, the words, “I will deepen my connection with God,” came to me. This surprised me. It shocked me because I had not used the word God in anything other than a pejorative way for a couple of decades at least, and yet I went with it. That was the beginning of a multi-year journey back into the heart of the Catholic or Christian tradition I had grown up in, fueled by the recognition that there was something at the heart of that tradition, which, for me, has always resided in the contemplative and mystical dimensions of Christianity, which predate Christianity.
That led to me finding a way to integrate what was most meaningful to me in that tradition with everything else of value I had gained through my experiences in other traditions, of nature through the experience of some of the Native American practices, the Buddhist understanding of mind, the Sufi understanding of heart, and so forth. That's a little about my spiritual journey. I'm sure more will come out as we talk.
On the professional side, I've always been drawn to frontier questions regarding who we are as human beings and what's possible for us. After completing my undergraduate work in psychology, that took me into a graduate program in futures research. From there, I found myself in California working for an organization called The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which had been founded by one of the Apollo astronauts, a man named Ed Mitchell. He was the sixth man to walk on the moon.
He founded the Institute in 1973 to support scientific research on consciousness and human potential, very broadly defined, and at the same time, explore the values, beliefs, and worldviews that shape our world, our sense of who we are as human beings, the kinds of organizations that we have, the nature of our communities and cultures, our relationship to the earth, and so on.
I ended up spending seventeen years there, exploring the relationship between our inner realities and our outer life, between personal and social transformation. This topic of the role of spirit weaved its way throughout almost everything that we explored there. This question about the topic of spirituality and leadership first arose in that context. We were involved in helping seed and host conversations with business leaders and spiritual leaders around these kinds of topics in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
To plant a seed for something we may want to talk about a little more later, one of my mentors and friends at the Institute of Noetic Sciences was a man named Willis Harman, a very well-known global figure at the time. Willis, who worked a lot with C-Suite leaders around the world, said once, “The topic of spirituality and leadership is really important. It's gaining some traction in the business world, which is a positive.
However, the reason it is gaining traction in the business world is that it's an easier conversation for business people to have, even though it's challenging in many ways than the conversation about the deep systemic nature of business in today's world and the impact it's having on our planet.” We'll want to come back to that.
To finish my journey very briefly, after leaving the Institute of Noetic Sciences because my soul was calling me in a different direction, I began partnering with a man named Dee Hock, who had been the founder of Visa, the credit card company. I learned consulting by working with Dee to bring ideas about what he called chaordic organization. These purpose-centered principle-based organizations are based more on a living systems model than on a mechanistic model into the business world, multi-stakeholder settings, and a variety of other contexts in which we work. People were looking for new ways to organize, which would liberate the human spirit and bring forward organizations dedicated to nourishing all life.
From there, my consulting career and my leadership development career have gone through a number of iterations. I began working with Oxford Leadership Academy in 2010. It's been a major context for my and our work globally. In that context, we've had the opportunity to explore in a deep way with leaders at the very highest levels of large global organizations as well as with startups and everything in between questions about purpose, the core values that live at the heart of their work, and many questions that we'll unpack together in relation to how spirit shows up in leadership and our organizational life. Let me stop there and see if there is any particular dimension that you want to explore further.
There's a lot there. You've always liked to be on the frontier. You have a Master's in futures and then worked in the Institute of Noetic Sciences with a man who walked on the moon. That’s fascinating. What a remarkable journey. It's interesting what you talked about in terms of Dee Hock’s observation about spirituality and leadership as the easier route, perhaps than the broader sustainability integration and the bigger picture of how we fit into all this. Our conversation wasn't purely conceptual like that, but I'd love to go there.
Needs & Opportunities in the Current World
I don't want you to not talk about all of what you've done, but maybe we could start with, okay, it's now 2024. We're living in a world that's a bit, and people use this term, post-truth world, which I find startling that somebody could say that matter of factly. The planet's chaotic, if not chaordic. I'm curious to know what you are observing and what you're observing in terms of needs, opportunities, and gateways. As you answer that, please feel free to loop in anything from your past that would be useful.
Thank you. Let me start by talking about my own personal relationship to this topic of spirituality and leadership, and then I'll come back to the question of the systemic dimensions of business’ presence in the world. One of the things I realized in reflecting on your invitation and preparing for this conversation was that the way you frame the topic of spirituality and leadership implies that there's something about leadership that may not involve spirituality or that spirituality is something that can be brought into or bolted onto leadership as many other things have been. I'm not saying that you view it that way, but I'm saying by putting those two words together in that way, one could imagine there's this thing we call spirituality and this thing we call leadership, and then explore, “How do they connect, if at all?”
I realized that my own relationship to this topic is one in which there is no part of my life and, therefore, no part of leadership that is not fundamentally spiritual in some sense. There is no part of it that is not informed by my relationship to spirit. Let me put it that way. For me, everything that we experience is an emanation from some divine source, whatever name we give that. Spirituality is most fundamentally about our relationship to that divine source, our experience of that, and our embodiment of that.
My relationship to that divine source and my experience of the energies, the qualities, and the capacities that arise from being in touch with it, all that flows into both how I work with leaders and also, to be honest, my sense of what is possible for leaders in terms of how we open to sources of wisdom, love, and creativity that are greater than our own egoic minds and conditioned histories.
For me, that is the core topic I'd love to explore further with you. If you were to ask me, “Give me a concrete example of how that might show up either in my own life or in how I work with leaders,” a practice that I've been interested in for a long time, decades, has to do with how we connect with our inner guidance or what I sometimes call our souls knowing.
For me, inner guidance or soul-knowing in its deepest form is an expression of some deeper innate intelligence that's working in and through us. In a Christian tradition, it would be called God's will. In other traditions, it has other names. Every tradition I've ever explored has some way of talking about this connection with guidance.
Inner guidance or the soul’s knowing, in its deepest form, is an expression of some deeper innate intelligence that is working in and through us.
My experience of how to bring that into the organizational world or the business world is that it starts with us being willing to look at, explore, and embrace what is most deeply true for us. At one level, that sounds obvious, especially in the business or organizational world, but it's often very challenging for people to connect with and particularly then to express openly what it is that's true for them. That is because so much of our life and organizations and so much of the way business operates involves people closing off deeper parts of themselves. The organizational fields and context in which we operate often don't invite conversation about or surfacing of those deeper intuitions, ideas, aspirations, longings, needs, etc.
The work of people getting in touch with what's true for them in that deeper sense is the starting point for getting in touch with that deeper inner guidance or soul-knowing, which would then find expression in terms of clarity about their own sense of purpose. The sense of what the right relationship looks like in how people are working together would lead many, for example, to a sense of wanting to be more open-hearted and so forth and so on. We can explore the implications of that in greater depth.
To link that to the question of systemic dimensions, I'll be quite transparent with you and say I've been in the process for a couple of years of stepping back from much of the leadership work that I had been doing for about 25 years before that. One of the reasons I've been stepping back is that I know in my work and I know in the work you and I have done together, that we touch individuals very deeply. While I know we can see that our work makes a difference for teams over time, I've realized that it's much less obvious to me that we're having an impact at the systemic level in terms of how businesses are organized, what their fundamental purposes are, and therefore the impact they're having on the world.
I'm at a stage of life where I am not willing to pour my life energy into the perpetuation of systems that, in my view, are doing enormous harm to human beings and all life on the planet. The connection between that at the systemic level and what I was talking about at the individual level is when people are given the invitation and opportunity to start exploring what's most deeply true for them. We know that almost everybody I've ever worked with has a deep longing to be making a positive contribution to the world. They also know that there are limits to their capacity to do that in the systems in which most people find themselves working. There are compromises that are made.
The other thing I want to talk a little about in this context has to do with what it requires to access, discern, and embrace genuine inner guidance from all the other voices that masquerade as guidance in our lives. Our egos are very good at finding a way to speak to us that sounds like guidance but is another way for the ego's needs and motivations to continue to be active.
To really commit to working with one's own inner guidance in a deep and systemic way, we have to be open to learning and change at a personal level. We have to recognize that our experience, ways of thinking, ways of relating, and sense of identity are all conditioned by our personal history and a variety of other factors.
We have to be willing to explore how all of that gets in the way of how that deeper inner knowing or soul-knowing expresses itself in and through us if we want to become more transparent to the wisdom, love, or creativity that flows from spirit. That's challenging to do on one's own, particularly if you don't have support or don't find yourself in relationships or settings where others are supporting you in that. That's part of the challenge that we face in our world. Let me pause there and see what any of that has stirred in you that you'd like to explore more fully.
An awful lot. I hear what you're saying. I so appreciate your story about the firewalk, an experience like that, which you would not have planned to be talking about sometime later, the impact it had on you, and the impact that the question had on you so that this answer could come through. I agree. The challenge that so many of us have is to have the courage to question our own thinking, our own limitations, our own conditioned identities, and past the colonized thinking toward what's really possible and what's going on.
One thing I'd want to reflect back to you is I love the use of the word transparent to the guidance of spirit and transparent to that connection, that communication, and that opening. Often, transparency is between me and someone else out there. You’re talking about inner transparency. I appreciate the use of that word in that fashion.
The Courage to Ask
How can I, as a practitioner, invite people to inquire about what's there or what might be there for them to have the courage to ask those questions? As one of my teachers loves to say, “The world is designed to make you forget.” I don't know if you agree with this. Maybe I'll ask this question and then be quiet. I have heard, and I love this expression, that spirituality isn't something that's taught. It's something that's caught.
First of all, do you agree with that? If so, how can we help a positive pandemic, if you will, so that something could be caught and caught in individualized ways? The last thing that I would want to do is create some sort of conditioned expectation and give somebody else another set of rules that they should buy as opposed to an opening to ask those questions.
Those are really good observations and good questions. Let me share two things in relation to that. One goes back to my own spiritual orientation. Fundamentally, for me, everything we experience, including ourselves, is a manifestation, expression, and embodiment of a divine source, whatever we call that. In different traditions, there are many different stories about how all that began and where it's all leading. One of the core themes is that we're all on a journey of learning and development. Some would say development through different levels of consciousness toward a recognition that we are not different from source or our true nature or essence is not different from source. I'm comfortable with that view. I hold a version of it myself.
Everything we experience, including ourselves, is a manifestation and expression of divine source.
What I want to add is the older I get and the more I reflect on myself and the world, especially the world, the more I feel that the heart of all that is is fundamentally mysterious. Any stories we have about who we are as spiritual beings or what the spiritual journey is or is about have to be held very lightly because, fundamentally, it's a great mystery, and there are limits to human comprehension.
To segue into and speak more directly to your question leaves me, in part, with a very deep respect for the integrity of each individual's own spiritual exploration and spiritual journey. For me, there are no shoulds associated with that. There's no particular story that I feel invested in with regard to spirituality or spirituality and leadership.
In fact, in the work I've done, I very rarely talk about spirituality explicitly. One of the reasons I don't is not only that it's a difficult topic to broach or a sensitive topic to broach in many environments. I don't talk about it explicitly in that way because, for me, what you and I might call more spiritual qualities and capacities having to do with presence, compassion, openness, and love are first and foremost, fundamentally human qualities and capacities.
What I'm most interested in is how we as individuals as well as collectively connect with those fundamentally human possibilities in each of us, especially when, as you affirmed, we're transparent to something greater that is working in and through us. For me, that involves inviting people first to be in touch with what's true for them because being in touch with what's true for us creates a throughline to that, which is the growing tip in a way of our own set of continually evolving possibilities in life.
I'm a visual, so I sense what you're talking about. The tip then is almost going inward and/or downward. The growth is almost in that direction, not exclusively, but certainly significantly.
It's also growing outward in the sense of how we are showing up in the world. Another way to put that is the more we are in touch with our own spiritual roots or our own spiritual depth, talking here about how transparent we can be to spirit, and the more we let the energies of that not occupy some protected space in our lives only when we're in church, in the meditation hall, or we're walking in the forest, the more we let those energies infuse our entire being. No matter what context we show up in, we're bringing a different quality of presence, energy, and attention. It begins to change not only who we are but how we are in the world and how others experience us. It also enriches the ways we contribute to the world. It's not just through what we do. It's through how we are being.
A couple of things come to mind. You say that one is, first, the notion that if we let that energy come through us, there's almost like a choice point to be made. It's not forcing it. It's letting it. It's a little like Joel Goldsmith’s The Infinite Way and the way he talks a lot about allowing it. Secondly, it's, to me, the notion that if we connect with those roots, we can't help but grow.
If you think about an image of a tree, if we're connecting with those roots, we're going to grow. We're going to grow in a way that's going to branch out and provide different types of growth in different ways. There are a lot of different expressions and a lot of different forms, to your point. It’s limitless because, arguably, each person's contribution is somewhat different. The way that person can touch something else and prove something out in the world is going to be unique in special, infinite numbers of leaves or whatever metaphor we'd use. Connecting to those roots, allowing them to grow, and allowing what is going to grow needs to grow, however we want to frame that, allowing that to grow and then serve. I'm hearing service as well in what you're saying.
On that last note on the word service, how each of us serves will be very different. The word service, usually, for many people, connotes operating in a sphere that's different than that of the world of business and the world in which achievement is what we value and so forth. Those are also ways to serve, so I don't want to say that those can't be spaces for service. I'll try to say several things briefly related to what you said. I want to go back to, first, the quote.
“It's not something that's taught. It's something that's caught.” That's the hypothesis, which I would agree with personally. It's my experience.
Building on what I was saying, I agree with what you're pointing to with that in the sense that spirituality is not something that comes to us from the outside. We are an emanation, expression, and embodiment of source. Knowing that and having an open relationship with that spirit or that source is our birthright as human beings. In that sense, it is not something that is taught. It is something that we are open to and allow you to bring in the other word that you are using here.
Spirituality is not something that comes to us from the outside.
Spiritual work, if we can use that phrase, is in large part the work of allowing something greater than us to work in and through us. As a very quick aside, I am aware that there are certain traditions and communities that don't believe it's safe for us to open up to some of the dimensions of experience and consciousness that we open to in meditation or other kinds of spiritual practice because demonic or otherwise life-denying forces will be invited to enter. That's a whole other conversation.
My view is that fundamentally, what flows from the source is life-affirming. Spiritual work is primarily about learning to allow that to act more fully and freely and flow continuously in and through us. The other dimension of spiritual work is learning to recognize what doesn't support that and what closes us off from that. Learning ways of being that are centered more on what we're trying to allow through that discourages the presence. We choose to invite what is emerging from the depths forward rather than allowing the conditioned reality to determine our choices and actions.
You said something that is important and very much a part of my own experience. It's part of what gives me trust in working with individuals or teams. That is when we are in touch with, open to, and working in a discerning way with these energies, intelligence, and love that come from our own spiritual depths. We discover that we start to learn and grow in ways we had never imagined might be possible before. We learn and grow sometimes in directions that we had never imagined before. In some cases, we discover ourselves becoming people we had never imagined we might become.
If we accept that there's a higher, deeper, or greater intelligence at work in and through us, it implies that, first of all, we aren't masters. We aren't in control of that process. Secondly, there's an internal organizing principle that's at work that, in my view, will always escape our ability to fully comprehend it. That's why I talked about mystery earlier.
I want to add one other piece really quickly and then turn it back to you. I've been talking about being in touch with what's most deeply true for us and that, in a sense, opening the door to deeper engagement with our own spiritual reality and fueling the spiritual journey. It's important to recognize that, for me, that doesn't lead to a world that is completely relativistic where it is fine for you to have one reality and it's fine for me to have another reality, and so forth.
In one sense, it is, but in another sense, we have to inhabit a shared world together. That implies that in order for us to together inquire into what nourishes life and not only what's true for you and what's true for me but what's true for us in this deeper sense, there are certain capacities for dialogue, for example, principles, and practices of right relationship that are really important.
To go back to your comment about the post-truth world much earlier, it's not necessarily that there's some objective truth out there that we all have to embrace, but it's vital if we want to collectively create and live in a world that nourishes all life that we are able to co-evolve our image, understanding, and commitment to how we organize and all of the practices that will bring that world forward. This is very far from the world that we experience.
Co-evolve, or at least in a peaceful parallel, evolve, if you will. It's not post-truth because the truth matters. The impact of what we do matters, which circles back to what you were saying earlier in working with people in organizations. We can help people make the best of the deck chairs on the Titanic through some good work, but if the ship is doing what it's doing, what the ship is doing matters. The impact of what the organization may be doing, what it's producing, or how it's producing it matters.
I have believed and continue to believe, and I don't believe chaotically, but realistically, that business is still run by people and people still have hearts, minds, and capacities. I love working with people in business because it's those people who are still more powerful than politicians, or at least most politicians, to make a difference in the lives of people.
The Willingness to Open
I do want to ask you, and I hope it doesn't feel like a detour, the way you talked about how the willingness to open, question, and journey inward, downward, and vertically opens up a whole bunch of possibilities and things we could not have expected. I may be paraphrasing what you said. I would love to hear if you have an example, a story, a way of explaining, or a way of inviting with regard to that.
I can give a couple of examples. Maybe others will occur as I share these. In the context of the work you and I do, the easiest example is occasionally when we invite people in a business context to deeply reflect on their personal sense of purpose in life. Occasionally, people will realize they're not living the life that they feel called to be living.
Ideally, there's no judgment or blame associated with that because there are always good reasons why people are where they are, doing what they're doing. Yet, when people realize that something else in them is seeking expression or there's some other contribution they feel called to make to the world, it can radically change their life path. That's one simple example.
There are always good reasons why people are where they are.
I've been through that experience. In fact, I'm going through a version of it. Rather than tell that story, which you can come back and insist I tell if you like, I'd like to say I grew up in a small town in South Carolina. I was always the brightest and smartest person in my school. I got a lot of rewards for being really smart. That, coupled with my constitutional orientation, meant that for a long time, I lived in my head mostly. I was not, by nature, a heart-centered person as some are.
In large part because of inner work that we've been talking about as well as a confluence of life events, relationships, and so forth, I realized that the next growth edge for me had to do with really learning to open my heart and let myself be loved. There's nothing unusual about this. Many people go through their own versions of realizing there's some fundamental dimension of what it means to be human that they've been closed to.
The experience of discovering that dimension of one’s self and then allowing one’s self to open into that new space, go through all of the discomforts of having to learn new ways of relating, let go of old identities, let go of old certainties, old truths, and so forth, and enter with some sense of vulnerability and not knowing into a new realm can be profoundly transformative. Those are a couple of simple examples of what I mean by that.
What an invitation that is. I hear that as an invitation. I don't want to say a challenge because that has the wrong tone. It’s an invitation if I am as open as I would like to be or as I would want to be to be living in my heart, through my heart, etc. I'm not going to insist on anything. I'm not in the insistence business. I'm in the invitations business, or I try to be, both inwardly and outwardly.
Aspirations
In the interest of time, what are your aspirations going forward? This is my word, not yours. You've graduated to this place of prioritization and are working in a specific space, stage, or area that's most important to you at this point in time, or maybe it has been most important all along, and you're giving yourself full permission. I don't know.
Importantly, I'm curious to know. If we've got the most senior leaders of business tuning into this show, what would be the invitation and the opportunity to say, “Let's take this good work that we've been doing and that perhaps you, Mr. Or Ms. Leader, have been exposed to.” We've worked with a lot of people and they've moved up over the years. They're in very senior roles. What's the opportunity for them to remember, consider, and prioritize in their decision-making and how they live and operate that will help the planet and that deeper sustainability question?
Thank you for the question. It is a really important question. First, I want to also reaffirm something you said earlier, which is that I've loved almost everybody I've worked with in the world of business, the world of organizations, and in almost every other setting in my life. I can say I've been blessed in being able to work with good-hearted people who have positive intentions and, in many cases, smart people as well.
We are, in many ways, creatures of the environments in which we live and work. I'm thinking of senior leaders in large global businesses, in particular those who have an enormous impact on what's going on on the planet. I'm thinking of these people. You and I both know that many of them, if we were to sit with them with a glass of wine and reflect on what's most important, would talk about things that you and I would resonate deeply with in terms of wanting their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to live in healthy communities, have opportunities for healthy lives, and so forth and so on.
We also know that when they're in the business environment, whether it's in a boardroom, a C-suite, or whatever the context, there are many pressures driving the choices and decisions they make and the actions they take. In many cases, in my view and in my word, their own deepest vision and values become compromised.
To specifically answer your question, my wish would be that all of us, as much as we can, keep in mind that the choices we're making, the actions we're taking, how we're living, and how we relate to one another are creating the world that our children and grandchildren are living in and will live in. It is to really take to heart the responsibility that comes with that and do everything we can to ensure that our choices and actions have integrity with what we most deeply believe, aspire to, and long for. That takes us back to what I've been talking about several times in this conversation, which is it requires us, first of all, to be in touch with what's most deeply true, what we most deeply aspire to, and what we most deeply long for.
Transparent: The choices we're making today, the actions we're taking, how we're living, and how we relate to one another are creating the world that our children and grandchildren are living in and will live in.
In many cases, that dimension of our own longing and our own deeper knowing finds little welcome in the context in which we work. We need to make more space for that. We also need to have the courage to act on that, knowing that it may create difficulties in the sense that we may, at times, be making choices trying to bring things into being that are not consistent with the way the mainstream world works and that involve challenging certain assumptions and certain basic organizing principles or values at the heart of the mainstream economy, for example.
It will provoke difficulties. I don't mean to say that in a pithy kind of way, but as innovation is the enemy of efficiency, these types of questions are the enemy of, “Keep your head down and do what we do,” or, “Do what has been proven to be most efficient,” etc. You're operating on a different plane. There will be resistance. I do believe that it's net positive, but it does create challenges. For example, let’s, as with other people in discussions on this show, raise the conflict that needs to be raised courageously. That creates difficulty. It also creates healing, growth, harmony, and stronger bonds, but it isn’t easy. When you're going through it, it could be rather challenging.
That’s exactly right.
I feel as though we could talk for at least another hour. To me, this is a mark of a great conversation. I feel like there are a number of ways I want to go next. I appreciate the seed planting or the root deepening that this provides, if you will. Mostly, thank you for your wisdom and your clarity. It's a pleasure to engage with you without having to tweak PowerPoint decks.
Or design a program.
That’s exactly right. Let's focus on this important space. Let's continue the conversation. If people want to learn more about you or the work that you're doing, where would they look? How would they best inquire?
I do have a personal website. I haven't posted anything on it for about a year, but it is there. It's personal, so it doesn't go too deep into the work I've been doing or the leadership dimension of all this. It is TomAndSaraHurley.com. I welcome any outreach through that. People can find me on LinkedIn as well.
When we do this again, we don't talk about Sara's work. We talk with Sara. That's what we’d do.
I’d love that.
That would be great. Thank you again for your time, energy, focus, and wisdom. As always, it’s a pleasure.
Thank you again for the invitation. It’s great to talk with you. I look forward to our next conversation.
Thank you.
Important Links
LinkedIn - Tom Hurley
About Tom Hurley
Tom works with purpose-driven leaders at crucial points of change in their organizational, team, or professional life. He serves organizations around the world in four capacities:
Trusted advisor for experienced leaders facing complex challenges, important choices, or significant professional transitions.
Mentor and executive coach for leaders seeking to deepen their self-knowledge and develop greater self-mastery, in order to contribute with greater meaning and impact.
Master facilitator for teams or multi-stakeholder groups facing complex challenges that require sensitivity, nuance, and skill to navigate.
Program designer and lead teacher in transformational leadership development programs grounded in the principles and practices of “leadership from within.”
Tom often works independently and can also assemble a world-class team to support larger groups or scale an engagement, through his role as a senior consultant for Oxford Leadership in the UK and Walk Leadership in Spain.