5 Elements of Courageous Conscious Leadership by Violetta Pleshakova

I’m going to talk to you about five elements of courageous conscious leadership. And those five elements, they represent the five elements that we have in nature. I’ve chosen to approach it in such a way that you can remember it and that you have some ideas, key principles and tools, and I will also give you some questions that you can ask yourself. So for that, to motivate you and to unlock your inner leadership. So, what are the five elements? We see them all around in nature, everything is made out of those five elements. They are earth, water, air, fire, and ether or spirit. And if we apply that to leadership, all the five are necessary, and of course everyone has some of them very strongly embodied. Maybe it’s your strengths. Maybe you have a lot of fire or maybe you have a lot of water. You are emotionally intelligent, but all of us can develop it.

And developing these qualities will help you on your leadership journey no matter where you’re going. So let me start right off, and let’s start with earth. So, in times of change where everything is unpredictable, where you don’t know what will happen tomorrow, the element of earth for you as a leader is all about building strong inner foundations. And that means ask yourself such questions asked, do I have my foundations in place? Do I have the right structures? Do I have support systems that I need and the foundation of my purpose? Am I providing the right foundation for my team, for my business and for myself? Am I in this for the long haul? Because earth is about growing roots. And as a leader, you need to be rooted. You need to stand for something because when the winds of change are blowing, if you don’t have strong roots, you are going to be carried away.

And it is that inner strength and clarity on who you are. It’s clarity on your essence. I always call that ‘get centered in your core’. When you’re starting a business, of course you want to have results and many of us are impatient, especially in the current day and age when we can get anything delivered the same day. But we need to understand that success is not Amazon Prime. Yeah. So it’s not same day delivery. And those of you on this journey, you have already found out that there are also no shortcuts. If somebody says this is the formula, these are the five steps, go and make six figures in six minutes, just follow my blueprint. You know that it’s that it doesn’t work like this, but the past is often non-linear. So my advice to entrepreneurs always is do not think that you need to to move too quickly.

Do not measure your success in terms of time. Find different metrics, measure it in terms of impact, measure it in terms of your roots, in terms of your legacy. Cause what you are building is not just a once off I hope so. And it’s not even an offering or a product or a service. You are building a brand. And brand is bigger than just certain offerings. A brand is a legacy. It’s a message. It’s, it’s something that you want to leave behind. So that is the, this element, that’s the element of being rooted, of being stable. So do not be stingy with your time when it comes to working out your foundation. Spend all the time you need to figure out your message to figure out your why, to figure out your purpose and get really, really good at that because it will carry you through.

So that is earth. Now next up is water, the element of emotional reality. So here it’s all about mastering your emotional reality. And why is this so important? Because as leaders, we are responsible for the way we show up. You cannot, as a leader, not walk the talk and have temper tantrums when things go wrong. So we can have no control over circumstances as they are right now in the world. Nobody could have ever predicted this current state of what we, what we are having. And I can tell you, I have experienced it in a really crazy way. I came to South Africa to deliver a training with the Firepower group. I came for a month with a suitcase of summit races. I stayed for five months having no clue when I’ll be able to go to Europe. But I thought, okay, I cannot control the circumstances.

The only thing I’m in charge of is my reaction. I can now go into panic mode or I can use this as, I can reframe my attitude. And so back then in South Africa, my business partner and I, we have decided, alright, the whole world is freaking out. All the coaches we know are giving sessions for free. People are panicking, people are doing whatever. We sat down and always thought we are going to create a different attitude. And we started to deliberately cultivate the attitude of no matter what, we are going to be successful, we are going to be successful no matter what. And we focused on that attitude of celebration. And every day, minding what context do I have for my day? Meaning, what is my attitude today? So here’s some questions to ask yourself. Look at your current framework, at your current perception of what is going on in your industry, in your business, in your life.

And think, is this attitude serving me? Or if it’s not, if you find yourself in a disempowering story or in a negative, negative spiral, what attitude would serve me? What perspective would empower me? And that is courage and consciousness. That is the consciousness element of leadership where you are able to be so self-aware and so mindful that you can shift your attitude, that you know that you are aware of the stories your mind is telling you. You can pause, you can reflect, and then you can choose a different story. So that is the element of water, being able to always move with your emotions. And next, in the element of air, this is all about your vision. And here I wanna talk to you a bit about values. When you are clear on your values, then making decisions is easy. Then you do not have to go on mental loops because you know what your priorities are.

And it’s very funny that many leaders profess big values. One of the big ones I always see when I’m doing work in companies, that’s integrity. Everybody has it on the wall as a poster ‘our value is integrity’. But next thing they do is they don’t even have basic behaviors that reflect that value. They are late to meetings, they never submit reports on time. So values are useless unless you translate them into daily behaviors. So here the question to ask is what are your values and how can you translate them into behaviors every day? And what specific behaviors in your business and in your life represent those values? How do they translate? So what do you need to stop doing to really match those values and what do you need to start doing? There is great power in not doing stuff that doesn’t serve you. So that is the element of values, element of air.

Now the element of fire, that is the momentum, that is forward movement. And here it’s all about taking responsibility. The fire of power comes when you are willing to say, alright, I’ll go first. That is leadership. I’ll go first. Just sign me up. I’m going to model this behavior, I’m going to jump, I’m going to take the leap. And I think it’s this quite famous superman quote that ‘with great power comes with great responsibility’. But what if we flip that? And what if we start thinking that with great responsibility comes great power, power and responsibility are connected. And a really short story here, you know, in the Middle ages, the concept of king or queen being crowned, the whole concept of coronation. What is that about? When a leader is being crowned with the crown of responsibility, receiving a crown is not about being put on a pedestal and the archetype of the queen.

That is often, you know, fluctuating in personal development space being like, be the queen of your business. Maybe you’ve heard that. So the idea is to not be put on a pedestal and to not start seeing yourself as better than others. The idea is rather with accepting the crown, the leader, the real leader in the royal lineages, was accepting the connection to responsibility, being responsible to the purpose, being responsible to the people. I accept this crown as the symbol of my willingness to serve. And that is to say, if you are in a leadership position or if you are, let’s say a leader for your community in your industry, you accepting the power that this position gives means that you are willing to use this power to be of service. And when we start seeing that power and responsibility intertwined, this gives us the courage to step up.

So some self-reflection questions to ask here are, how can you be more courageous in your leadership? What do you need to take responsibility for? Especially if something is not going your way or if you feel something is not working, you feel stuck. Look at what can you take responsibility for and what power have you been possibly giving away? You cannot keep moving unless you own the power that comes with a leadership position. And finally, the element of surprise, the ether or spirit, which is the element of magic. This is the why. This is connection to some higher purpose. Yeah, this is so important. And this, as I said, is about being, building a legacy, building a brand, not just doing something. And here also a little story for you. I had a client once who was really, really stuck with regards to her purpose. And she was like, what is my purpose?

What am I to do? And finally we have discovered that it is not about ‘what’, it is about ‘how’ you are showing up. And what she started to do, instead of looking for repurpose, that will be the business idea. She started looking at how can I be purposeful and intentional today? How can I be purpose? So purpose is also how you show up. It’s not necessarily what you do. And maybe you have already a big, bold, brilliant business idea, maybe not yet. And while you are looking for it, embrace it as a journey. And look, how can I bring more magic into my everyday? How can I infuse everything I do with purpose? And ultimately the courageous conscious leadership definition that I have developed together with my business partner, the Firepower Group is that it is all about that overarching dome of purpose and the leader holding it up. So the leader is not in the front, the leader is actually at the foundation carrying the people and carrying the purpose and elevating that purpose. Because everything is in the name of that.
So to summarize, what can you do today to move the needle forward in your business and in your purpose? What could be the next right action? And so building it all together, courageous conscious leadership is a way of showing up that is incorrectly pursuing excellence that is driven by higher purpose and that cares, cares holistically for everyone involved. And I encourage you to live with courage, with consciousness, and with compassion in everything that you do.