Leading with Honour
In a beautiful exercise at a workshop in 2017, I did a piece of work which has stood with me ever since.
I defined my values.
Not for the first time. But in a way that has stuck with me in the seven years since.
The first way, really, that had ever stuck.
Something about the high-paced, intuitive, relational nature of the exercise bypassed my thinking self and cut to the subconscious truth underneath.
In fact, it went further, inviting me to define a purpose. Here is what emerged: to live a life of courage, honour, vulnerability and truth, and inspire others to do the same.
The four values contained in that statement stayed with me.
They became the foundations of my group work with coaches and leaders: explicitly invited from the participants by me in my role as facilitator and coach.
I found that they created powerful learning experiences.
And then I noticed something.
I wasn’t using all of them.
From the start of my first group coaching programme, three of those four values had been present. Testing them, I found that by inviting people to lean into courage, vulnerability and honesty more than they do elsewhere in their lives, the conditions for deep connection and powerful learning were created.
I added a fourth condition, leadership: inviting each participant to own their experience and co-create the group with me.
But one of those deep values was missing, almost forgotten in my work.
That value is honour.
Our Task Is to Bring the Whole of Who We Really Are to Our Work
Over and over again through my career, I have learned a lesson.
At each stage, as my perspectives grew, as I learned, as I left behind jobs, roles and dreams, I have seen this: that the task is to lean more into my uniqueness.
This is not only smart, but wise.
It is smart because if I can find the things that only I can do, the unique twists of strength and experience that set me apart, then the possibilities for impact and earning are far greater than if I am forcing myself to do things that don’t come naturally, and that others might do better. In a business like mine, I can be pretty sure that the people I can serve the most deeply need all the things I might bring; and that the uniqueness of those things holds unique value to the clients who I might support the best.
And it is wise because if we look down the barrel of the gun facing the human race – the many potential ways that things could go wrong on our planet to put our existence at risk – leaning more into our uniqueness is our best chance to make a difference. That is: if we work in service of a better tomorrow by doing the things that only we can do, and if we do the work to make sure we are doing those things as skilfully as possible, we can be pretty sure we are doing the best we can to make things better and not worse.
In the face of the complexity of the world, that is about as much as we can hope to do.
And if more of us do that each year, we might just have a chance.
Our task, then, is to understand the whole of ourselves, everything.
And then to bring all of it to our work: all of who we really are once the fears, anxieties and neuroses are navigated.
This I have learned from teachers, from books, from my own experience.
And so I looked at this fourth value, honour.
A part of me I was not bringing to the world.
And I thought: what’s up here?
What Does ‘Conscious Business’ Really Mean, Anyway?
As I reflect on what shook me out of my previous professional life – landing me, in the end, here in front of you – a key moment came when I visited my brother Ewan for his 30th birthday. Present at a small dinner party in the Netherlands were two of his friends, Diederick and Jeroen.
They weren’t just his friends, though, they were his business partners. They had set out, the previous year, on an adventure together, creating the Waking Up the Workplace interview series.
The reason the dinner matters to this story is that through the conversation I finally got something I hadn’t got before: what they had just done was important.
At that stage, all I knew was that it was important to them. That woke guilt in me: my brother had done something important to him, and I hadn’t engaged with it.
I had all the normal reasons for not engaging, including not seeing its relevance to me. But my fraternal loyalty was woken, and over the subsequent months I listened back to Waking Up the Workplace on my commute across Yorkshire.
And it shifted something in me.
It showed me something.
Waking Up the Workplace gathered speakers from the field of Conscious Business which, in some ways, Jeroen, Diederick and Ewan defined – for me at least – by creating the series.
It showed me that there were people at the cutting edge of thinking around business and leadership who shared my idealism about what work could be: not just a way to pay the bills, but the potential for an adventure far greater than that. An adventure towards our life’s work, our destiny, and our full potential.
It showed me there were people who saw the potential of business in particular for huge-scale change, but who also believed there could be something more to business than profit. It was possible to think about business and money and doing the right thing.
More than that, people believed that business could be the best vehicle for changing the world for the better.
When, a couple of years later, I moved to London after a career break, I wanted to work in a conscious business. I tried to find one. But I couldn’t, really. Not in the way I imagined.
I found many organisations working to make the world better but still working in older ways.
I found others who felt connected to the mission or the speakers from Waking Up the Workplace, but whose work was different, somehow – far earlier in its genesis than I had imagined. And they didn’t seem to have the money to be recruiting.
The large-scale (or even small- or medium-scale) businesses practising conscious business didn’t really exist, even in London.
Or, at least, I couldn’t find them.
The world has moved on in the decade since that job search.
And the impact of the speakers on Waking Up the Workplace and others like them is different to how I imagined it would be.
In my naivety, I had a simple story. That some businesses would declare themselves ‘conscious’, and others wouldn’t, that the movement of ‘conscious businesses’ would grow and I could just find one of the ‘good guys’ and work for them.
As I have followed the work of the leading thinkers who bring to the fore a new paradigm of business and leadership, I have seen something different. The gradual and skilful integration of the ideas of ‘conscious business’ into coaching, consultancy, training and, yes, businesses and organisations in all sectors.
Many small shifts, created by many courageous people, in favour of that ideal: businesses that consciously set out to change the world for the better as well as making money.
And, as I have worked to bring the whole of who I really am to my work, I see now that my role in it is different to how I imagined, too.
Ten years ago I wanted a gift: come, work here, be a contributor to the greater good. Feel like you’re making a difference, feel the excitement of the cutting edge, have your professional fulfilment taken care of… because this is a ‘conscious business’.
But that would have ignored some parts of who I am.
It would have ignored the call of leadership, present throughout my life.
It would have ignored the adventure of discovery, of finding my own path.
It would have ignored the drive for creativity: for making something, something unique, something that only the whole of the real me, brought to my work, can do.
And it would have ignored a question that may seem semantic but - to me - matters: how do I know if a business is ‘conscious’?
To the average person (not to mention philosophers or neuroscientists), consciousness is a confusing idea.
Am I conscious, or conscious enough? If someone else (or a business) says they are conscious, what does that make me (or us)?
How conscious do you have to be to be Conscious?
What, underneath, were the people talking about Conscious Business, really talking about?
And, how do you know if an some organisation is a conscious organisation anyway?
Which brings us back to honour.
A Story of Three Leaders
In my work, there have been three times when the universe showed me something about the world through my clients with a clarity I couldn’t ignore.
Each time, there have been three clients, within a few weeks of each other, speaking about and experiencing something in almost exactly the same way.
I was sitting with my question about honour: what’s up here? Why am I talking about my other three values and hiding this one?
And as I was sitting with it, feeling my way into speaking about honour in my work in different ways, showing the parts of me that related to honour more publicly, three leaders appeared.
As I started work with each, I asked, as I do as part of my practice, ‘What is success for you?’ And, ‘What is success for us in this work together?’
And they gave me the same answer, in different (and yet really remarkably similar) ways. Here is what they said:
I want to succeed in my work, but I feel that to succeed I have to do it in this way, which is how I see others doing it, and I can’t bring myself to do it like that. That would feel like a betrayal of myself and what I believe in.
I want to be able to succeed without having to compromise who I really am.
The focus of the work was diverse – from public speaking to influence and more – but the underlying message was clear.
And as I sat with this, I realised something. Underneath it, whatever the challenge, the question was one of honour.
What is honour, really, but to do what you believe to be right, even when it’s hard?
Perhaps, especially when it’s hard.
Once I had the frame that emerged from those three leaders - I want to be able to succeed without having to compromise who I really am – I saw it everywhere.
In my work supporting coaches to create businesses that thrive – helping them find the authentic and aligned ways to sell and market themselves, without them slipping into becoming the kind of seller or marketer they hated.
But even more so in my work with leaders.
Again and again I found myself supporting leaders and entrepreneurs to navigate choppy waters by grounding them in practices of courage, vulnerability, honesty and – above all – honour.
Practices that allowed them to do what they knew to be the right thing, even when it was hard.
Ways to be skilful and honourable. Smart and wise.
Ways to succeed whilst going beyond only ‘not compromising who they are’: ways to succeed by truly honouring who they are.
This, I have realised, gradually, was the world opening up my contribution to a new paradigm of business, of work, of leadership.
The invitation and challenge to lean into the purpose that I discovered at the workshop in 2017.
To contribute to the field of Conscious Business by integrating the practice of honour in leaders and their workplaces.
The opportunity to bring, even more fully, the whole of who I am into my work.
Because honour seemed to answer all my questions about Conscious Business.
When people or organisations have it, honour is something we can see.
Honourable Leadership
It has been several years since I first noticed that honour was absent from my work, explicitly.
And it has been several years since those leaders showed me how it might appear.
As I have gradually introduced the idea of honour more and more I have learned more and more about what it might mean.
I have seen leaders wrestling courageously with how to do the right thing.
I have helped countless clients speak out with honour in the face of the pressure to conform or follow other routes.
I have seen people resist the pulls of how everyone does things in inspiring ways.
I have witnessed many people leading with honour.
When I appeared on Mike Trugman’s podcast, Mike’s Search for Meaning, in early 2024, we spoke about leading with honour. Mike’s reflection was profound. He reminded me that in essence honour is about values in action. It is about showing what we believe in through our deeds, not just our words.
And that isn’t easy.
It is a heavy responsibility.
It is challenging and confronting.
But… it is really the only option.
We only get to live this life once. And at the end of it, we may find ourselves looking back.
In the end, almost no human will look back on their life and not wonder how things would have been if they’d turned out differently.
No one gets everything their own way.
But not every human has to look back with deep regret.
It was the consultant Fred Kofman, whose work I first came across in Waking Up the Workplace all those years ago, who really brought home the power of knowing our values in a way I’d never seen before.
A practical, tangible way – different to the valuable but insubstantialness of self-awareness alone.
In his book, The Meaning Revolution, Kofman introduces the idea of success beyond success.
In the complexity of the world, even the most skilled human can’t control the outcomes; can’t always get what they want; can’t win every negotiation or secure every piece of funding they need.
But they can control something: whether they acted in line with their values throughout the process.
Success beyond success.
Living with honour.
This is what is available to us if we are bold enough to confront the gap between what we say we believe in and what we do.
If we are bold enough to take what Mike Trugman had seen in what I said and accept the challenge.
This idea is evident in a question I learned from Kofman: what would you have to do in this situation in order to be at peace with yourself?
When the outcomes are uncertain, when what other people do is confronting and discomforting you, that question will return you to courage and honour.
It will open for you the possibility of success beyond success.
It will change the path of your life.
Come on the Journey with Me
Honour is a word pregnant with meaning for me.
It is in all the stories I love.
It is an old concept, that calls back through our history.
And it is still here, in our culture, surprisingly present despite seeming old or out of fashion.
This article is the first part of a public exploration of honour for me – it’s been part of my work for years, but now I’m inviting something more.
If you’re someone who loved or loves stories of honour…
If you find yourself wanting to create impact on the world without having to compromise who you are…
If you believe the world could be how it ought to be, and never want to settle for how it’s always been…
Then get in touch.
Maybe we could do some powerful work together.
Maybe you could create – right where you are now – more honour, more courage, more honesty, more integrity.
And your corner of the world could be a part of the revolution to how this thing could be, if we all dare to dream it, and then dare to live with honour in line with that dream.
If you want to hear more about Leading with Honour as the project develops, sign up here.
Over the rest of this year I’ll explore and share what I’ve learned about taking our values and putting them into action: about how to create a code to live by; about integrity and honesty in the face of a world that doesn’t live those ideas; about how to do the things people feel contradict their values - sales, marketing, negotation - with honour. And more.
I’d love to have you with me on the journey.
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