Category Archives: Self Reflection

I buried a good friend last week; Brian Magennis. I don’t intend to use this piece as a testimony to the wonderful person he was or to the brilliant leader that he was, (and he was both those and much more). However, I do want to highlight the real benefits for organisations of even one influential leader in your company living a life from the place of connection to their true self, that I write about regularly in my work.

A lot of what I have written about in these blogs and on different LinkedIn posts talks about the power of connection, about the brilliant design of being human and about the wonderful outcomes that can result from bringing our authentic self into our dealings with others. In any business situation or even any situation in life, the greatest chance of a successful outcome lays in the authentic self, turning up for the conversation.

If you take the simple definition of selling that I use in a lot of my work as making a connection with the other human being and seeing how you can help, a definition that can be extended to many aspects of business where influencing and persuading communications are being carried out.  Then fostering deep connections has got to be at the heart of business relationships, fostering deep connections has got to be at the heart of great leadership.  These sorts of deep connections are not possible when the ego is doing the leading.

When we are thinking about the impact of what we do and say, and how it might reflect on us personally, we are less likely to be acting from our authentic self. We are more likely to be appealing to the intellect, and ego, of the people we are speaking with or leading, and therefore not speaking to the whole person. Not connecting from a coherent embodied place within us that is connecting with the body, mind, heart, and soul of whoever it is we are communicating with.

Building soul-to-soul connection is possible in business. It is not something to be ignored in business or relegated to the more spiritual aspects of life. It can be the foundation for transforming an organisation into one where colleagues are fully engaged in delivering the vision and goals of the group.  Where colleagues are fully invested in their work and receiving the well-being and mental health benefits that arise from the strong, meaningful connections built from being led by ‘Whole Person’ leaders.

Brian Magennis was a perfectly, imperfect example of a ‘Whole Person’ leader.  He understood that to deliver the best financial results for a business you had to lead your people from their whole person perspective, body, mind, heart, and soul.  It wasn’t just enough for the people to intellectually get what it was the business was about or what it was their roles were about.  He lived the power of deep connection to others in all his business relationships.

Miss you Brian.

As you read this, I encourage you to reflect on how you show up in your own life and work. Are you leading from a place of connection to your true self? Are you fostering deep, authentic relationships with those around you? These aren’t just ideals – they’re the foundation for creating a thriving business and a fulfilling life.

What if we allowed ourselves to lead like that? What if, in every business interaction, we showed up fully present, seeking to connect and serve rather than simply achieve? True connection transcends ego and intellect – it fosters environments where colleagues thrive, and organisations transform.

In honour of Brian, let’s strive to lead as whole, imperfect, and beautiful human beings.

The story is often told about the 3-year-old girl who asks her parents if she can have 5 minutes alone with her newborn baby brother. The parents wait outside the room to listen to what is going on and they hear their daughter ask her brother “Can you tell me what it is like before being born; I’m beginning to forget.”

It seems that from an early age, we start to forget who or what we really are. We create our own idea of who we are (our ego) through the great gift of thought. Our consciousness of those thoughts is what we identify as our world and this in turn creates our perception of who we are and what our purpose might be in the world. This is all wonderful, and it would appear, a necessary part of being human and growing as a person. The problem with this is that we soon forget the connection we had to the energy of life before we were born. We forget or don’t feel that connection after we are born. And yet it is not true that we completely forget or completely lose the feel for this connection. We are driven to rediscover this connection. We cherish the small moments when something inside of us remembers that connection; anything from a loving hug, a shooting star, a magnificent sunset, or a smile from a baby; all serve as reminders that there is something more to being human than just the thoughts we have and our consciousness about them.

Living our lives as if this connection to something more than just our individual selves does not exist, is ultimately a frustrating experience: A) because deep down something in us, some part of us knows this connection exists and B) this part of us that knows we are connected, acts as a kind of homing beacon to bring us back to who and what we truly are.

It brings us home to ourselves.

The difficult part for most of us is tuning into this homing beacon, tuning in to the signals of how much more there is to us than the perception we have created about us. The interference that prevents us from tuning in is normally the busyness of our lives and always the thinking that seems to constantly occupy our minds about the challenges of daily living as well as the challenges of future living and the guilt or regrets about past living. In other words, we are so rarely truly present in the quiet moment of the now that we miss the call of our homing beacon. We do not know of its existence because life has made us forget we were ever connected to something so wonderful as the divine creative intelligence of life. Our relationship with our thoughts convinces us more and more that we are who we think we are, we are who our ego says we are. But the call of this “always on” connection to something greater than who we think we are is so incessant that we always have this restlessness until we are resting in the knowledge and feeling of our divine connection.

Like the little girl talking to her new-born sibling, we know we are forgetting about this wonderful connection, and we know we will never be truly happy until we feel the beauty and love that emanates from this place, this knowing, this fact of connection to the divine intelligence of life.

“Who are ya” is one of the more polite, derogatory chants commonly heard in English soccer stadiums when opposition fans want to question the ability of their opposition team or selected players within that team. Some dictionaries even suggest it may have been in common use in the mid-19th century in London, again as a means of insult to the person on the receiving end of the chant. So let me state from the outset, in posing this question “Who are you…” I do not intend it as a derogatory question or even a chant; however, I do pose it as a means of provoking you to think about who you really are, or indeed who we, as humans really are and why it can be a source of great help and comfort in times of trial to know who we really are.

Self Reflection! On the one hand, increased self-reflection can become a useful positive enquiry that allows us to become more comfortable with who we really are at our core or essence. On the other hand, self-reflection can also become a vehicle by which we drive ourselves into a space of anxiety, worry and even recriminations about how we are perceived, what we have achieved, or what we will become.

I hope this article facilitates more of the positive enquiry type of self-reflection and reduces or eliminates the potential for any negative outcomes.

Who are you…

Beyond your roles

Beyond your self-image

Beyond your personality type?

Who am I beneath the external designation of my different roles? In my case Father, Brother, Husband, Son, Businessman, Coach and Event Speaker. Who am I beneath the self-image I have of a compassionate, caring, occasionally arrogant, sometimes angry individual? Who am I beneath the personality type that many different self-assessment tools have designated for me?

I first remember reflecting on this question in 2005 when trying to figure out why I had ended up in hospital with all the symptoms of a heart attack that in the end turned out to be a panic attack, albeit a quite calm panic attack despite the heart attack feelings in my body.

Part of my reflection fell into the idea that I was no longer “somebody,” I was not important to others. In my previous role, I had been a Sales and Marketing Director, with a team that looked to me for leadership, guidance and direction; customers and suppliers that looked to me for business and a share of a multi-million-pound marketing and trade spend; and one of a team of fellow directors that ran the business. In other words, who I was, was apparently, in my subconscious anyway, heavily associated with the role in which I was employed. This was my first major insight into the power of my thinking and the link between my conscious and subconscious thoughts and my physical well-being.

Through further reflection, reading and some great counselling and coaching I began to see that who I truly am is not the construct of my thoughts, or of my Ego’s thoughts, about who I should be, based on roles, self-image or personality. Who I really am at my core is the same as who all humans are at their core before life, parents, teachers, events, circumstances, religions and thoughts take over.

We are Infinite Potential and we are directly connected and at one with the Infinite Potential of the Universe or indeed Cosmos.

We are, or we are connected to, the Infinite Potential for whatever Wisdom, Creativity, Peace, Love, Compassion and even Healing we need in our lives at this time.

In my experience, the reason we do not feel connected to this source is because the thoughts in our heads or the story our egos have constructed prevent us from seeing or feeling the connected nature of our true selves.

How do we come to know our true selves, how do we get to feel that we are connected to this marvellous source of Infinite Potential? Bookshops and Libraries are full of books, ancient and modern, addressing these questions; so one blog is never going to do justice to answering such questions.

However, I will point to 3 things that have helped me;

To paraphrase Sydney Banks “The only thing that stops me feeling connected to the source of Infinite Potential is the thought that I am not connected to this source.” Notice that it is your thoughts that directly affect your feelings; not the circumstances of life.

Einstein is quoted as saying “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Be more curious and wonder-filled about life.

Develop “Ego Apathy:” put less store by how some action will look on the CV of your ego but rather do more stuff for the simple joy of just doing that stuff.