In response to requests from a growing number of business and professional leaders, Rites of Passage in 2010 began offering programs focused on leadership. These programs allowed us to grow our vision of the deep connection between leadership and rites of passage, and the value of nature-based work for the development of visionary leadership.
Consider these questions:
– Is there an inner calling that I’ve been neglecting?
-How can I align my soul truth with the outer world of work?
– What do I need to do to live the vision of my give-away?
– How can I be the leader in my own life and dreams?
– How can I gain confidence to follow my authentic path?
– What’s happened to the passion I used to feel for my work?
– What do I need to heal in myself so that I can give my gifts?
Through offering a Wilderness Quest focused on leadership, we discovered a world-wide community of people passionately interested in these questions. We attracted people from several countries–including Japan, Russia, France, Iran, Ukraine, India, and African-American—in addition to Americans of diverse backgrounds. Some of these people were involved in the work of coaching and leadership development, while others worked as entrepreneurs, in the corporate world, and with non-profit organizations.
Participants in this program reported significant changes to their work and personal lives as a result of the program—balancing work and family, managing with more compassion, listening better to employees, bringing new business visions to light, and even finding the clarity and courage to change careers in response to inner calling.
In presenting programs on leadership, we found that our model of the Medicine Wheel was richly compatible with business coaching models, such as the Integral model based on the work of Ken Wilbur and others, and we found that our work could achieve a high level of complexity, allowing for both differentiation and wholeness—the holding of opposites that is so significant for personal and leadership development.
Our intention is always to guide participants to ask their most important questions, and then to help them listen to the responses from wild nature and inner soul. Participants in our leadership programs desire to make a difference in the world, to create and to live from their soul’s calling.