Flipping Ordinary Experience Creates Extraordinary Leadership

By Ginny Whitelaw

Originally published on Forbes.com on November 1st, 2024.

A SEAL team making the switch into a flow state of thinking and acting as one. A marathoner opening into a state where time seems to stand still as the body moves on its own. An opera singer dropping into resonance with her fellow singers, the audience, the moment, and delivering a transcendent performance. A first responder spontaneously entering flames to carry out a child. Such examples of extraordinary human behavior can be found across many disciplines and situations. Studying it became a focus in Positive Psychology, notably through the flow research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is characterized as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake.” It arises through an intense mix of challenge and support.

Robert Dilts was another keen studier of human behavior and how people transformed. A leading figure in Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), he formulated what became known as the Dilts’ Pyramid comprising six levels of human experience (See Figure 1): spirit, identity, beliefs and values, capabilities, behavior and environment.

A key finding of his work was that enduring change at any level required comparable changes to the levels above it. Conversely, changes at a higher level trickle down to levels below it. While Dilts was clear that spirituality was part of any complete description of human experience, he wasn’t entirely settled on how to depict it. For example, another rendering of the Dilts’ Pyramid is shown in Figure 2. Labeling the spiritual level was no easier; how exactly can we talk about spirituality, recognizing that it’s a radically different experience for different identities? He likened it to secular leadership terms like purpose and vision, that is, something we put our self-identity in service of.

While the effort to bridge the spiritual and secular realms in the workplace can seem awkward, it’s an awkwardness well worth navigating, as these two streams of research show: when we transcend our ordinary sense of identity—when we forget ourselves—extraordinary performance is possible. When this transcendent experience flips our enduring sense of who we are, extraordinary leadership is possible.

The research around flow leaves no doubt that flow at least temporarily unseats the ego. The lack of self-consciousness is one of the requisite conditions for entering a flow state, so that one can be totally engaged in a challenging activity for its own sake. As Csikszentmihalyi described flow in an interview, “The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.”

Likewise, the Dilts’ pyramid leaves no doubt that flow is a spiritual experience. It’s not the only kind of spiritual experience, but it certainly qualifies as one inasmuch as ego falls away and one becomes totally in service of a purpose or a vision. What the pyramid structure implies is that such an experience will propagate down in some way, changing the levels below it. So, to return to an earlier example, once the SEAL team mission is complete and the flow state is over, team members might make sense of that experience by still regarding themselves as individuals who, under the right conditions, can make the switch into this altered flow state. They might believe a certain warm-up activity like hiking together to the site of the mission is needed to make the switch and build this capability into their future missions. They might notice the switch is made more readily in the absence of talking and with acute attention to the environment, all of which becomes part of future behavioral protocols. In this example, taken from the actual experience of a SEAL team leader interviewed by Kotler and Wheal for their book, Stealing Fire, the spiritual experience of flow is interpreted by “I’ as a peak experience “it” had, giving rise to some new values, beliefs, capabilities and behaviors, just as Dilts’ Pyramid would predict.

Similarly, a marathon runner could look back on the magic that kicked in and interpret it as “I had a great run.” Or the opera singer might reflect on her extraordinary performance as a personal accomplishment. Or the first responder might look back on events and say, “I don’t know what got into me, I just acted.” In such cases, people might remember the wonder and magic of their experience and want to replicate it, so they take another mission, run another race and so on. While their sense of self has been expanded by the experience, it’s still relatively intact. Their ego may have expanded to include “losing themselves” in this particular activity. But their sense of identity hasn’t flipped to include everything outside their skin as well as inside.

But such a flip is possible. Another interpretation of a flow experience could be: “I flipped from self to no-self and the universe (or God, source, inspiration, purpose, mission, team, emptiness, absence, the force) flowed through me.”  Or “I became the whole team, the whole picture and magic happened.” This is exactly the flip that comes through Zen training and informs Zen Leadership. 

The conditions for entering flow—high challenge, high support, requiring total engagement where ego falls away—are also apt descriptions of the highly physical form of Zen training on which Zen Leadership is based. The intensive training of a Zen sesshin, for example, induces a flow state (i.e.  samadhi) that comes to feel like a kind of jazz, where every action follows inevitably from the previous. At its essence, however, this flow state is devoid of self. It sees through the ego to its universal nature, rather than the ego trying to take credit for it.

This flip in identity changes everything.

In making this flip, we go from being an ego riding the roller coaster of life to being the whole picture and having a body (and its ego) to play the game of life with. From Dilts’ work, we could predict that this reframe of self to no-self has radical implications for every other aspect of human experience. Stretching out the spiritual dimension as shown in Figure 3, we find a spiritually-enriched parallel to every other layer:

Coming from no-self, value and beliefs are no longer thoughts stuck between our ears, but rather the inward flow of inspiration and the outward flow of intention, one-with the field and whatever we face. 

Coming from no-self, capabilities become mastery as they no longer carry the scent of a self-proving  “I” but rather a naturalness and universality that resonates broadly. This is the art of a Zen master or masterful art, the poetry of a mystic, or the grace of a selfless act of leadership.

Coming from no-self, the environment springs to life as a churning energy system with which one can dance; an endless swirl of presencing out of absence, of creation and destruction of forms arising in emptiness, of comings and goings in a field of no-coming and no-going. This is the environment of sages and of fearless leadership, dancing with the cosmos.

As Csikszentmihalyi concludes, flow states bring out not only optimal performance and service to others, but also happiness. This joy guides the entire journey to wholeness as we allow the spiritual nature of flow to be not just a peak experience “I” has, but a radical revelation that our life and leadership need not be bound by the ego “I.” When “I” gets out of the way in a capable leader, the actions of that leader flow with the Way in a universal sense.

Ginny Whitelaw is the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership.