Unleashing Your Inner Leader With Huna

Aloha everyone and good morning. I’m doing this Facebook Live a little bit early this morning because I’m going to be on a train, or getting to a train at 11 o’clock and who knows what the internet will be like so I thought I’d talk to you today about unleashing your inner leadership with Huna.

I’ve been running this forgiveness challenge, this 12 day forgiveness challenge and it’s been so interesting to hear how unforgiveness so the act of not forgiving has affected people’s lives and how releasing that, how getting in touch and starting to forgive has really helped them.

Particularly forgiveness of self because if you look at the work of people like Brene Brown, forgiveness of self, it’s very much tied up with this whole question of shame and shame is something that can really get in the way of standing up and standing out as a leader and when I talk about leader, I’m not just talking about the politicians or the big leaders in organisations, I’m talking about being the leader in your family, being the leader in your community, being the leader in your own life.

How can you lead your own life really well because for me that’s the essence of leadership. If you can’t lead your own life well it’s very difficult to lead other people in any other context so how can you unleash your inner leader? Can’t even say it.

And I think one of things is that when I was doing my PhD, I did a PhD in Esoteric Studies and my thesis was all about Huna and leadership or spirituality and leadership and how you could use Huna to create a leadership model and the model I created was based on aloha which is the, in Hawaiian means hello or welcome or goodbye but aloha means love and for the Hawaiians, many Hawaiians have a kind of acronym so each of the letters of aloha, L-A-O-H-A has an Hawaiian word associated with it and the lineage that I come from, qualities like persistent perseverance, community collaboration, coming together, humility, ha ha, dedication to the path and honesty, truthful honesty

and one of the things that’s interesting is that for some people there’s almost a conflict between humility and truthful honesty. How can I be humble and at the same time be truthful about my achievements? Well, there’s a way of being truthful about your achievements.

There’s the bragging way, which clearly isn’t very humble, and there’s the simple acknowledgement that you have particular qualifications, particular skills, particular expertise, particular experiences so me, I’ve got more degrees than you can shake a stick at and I don’t normally talk much about them unless they’re relevant but when they are relevant, yeah, I’ll talk about them, they’ve something I’ve done. I’m proud of ’em.

And if it’s relevant I’ll talk about it so there’s balance between humility, so being modest almost if you like and really being truthful and honest about what’s going on and for me, in terms of leadership, whether it’s me personally leading myself or whether it’s going out and leading other people, that balance of humility and honesty is so important, particularly in terms of self with honesty. It’s so easy to tell yourself little white lies. I do it all the time, I’m always fibbing to myself and I have to remind myself and most of the lies I tell myself are lies about myself that limit me so lies that I’m stupid, I’m not, I’m intelligent. I’ve got a PhD for heavens sake.

So lies to myself, I’m not intelligent enough or lies I used to tell myself that I wasn’t lovable enough or I wasn’t good enough for fill in the blank. Learning Huna gives me techniques to release those kind of lies, to release those beliefs that lead to those lies and lead to these amazing stories that we construct for ourselves about who we are when actually mostly they’re stories about who we’re not.

We are good enough. We are worthy. We’re all lovable to some extent, we all are. We might not be very likeable sometimes, I know I’m not likeable sometimes but I know fundamentally I am lovable and when we step back from those stories, release the beliefs, step out of the stories, we can look at our lives in a completely different way and we gain a new confidence in life because certainly if you’re going to lead others it helps if you have a confidence.

Yep, there’s the humility, you don’t want to be overconfident. You don’t want to be in your face confident, that puts people off but that confidence, that quiet confidence in yourself and in your own abilities so releasing beliefs we have that limit us, that hold us back, also hold back our inner leader.

With the forgiveness challenge, with the work that we were doing around our forgiveness, it became very obvious, this is said, that people needed to forgive self in order to step into their inner leader, among other things so that forgiveness of self because it helps release shame, the topic of so much of Brene Brown’s work.

There’s a real intertwining between shame, regret and not forgiving one’s self and when you forgive yourself for things that you’re ashamed of, then you stop being ashamed of them and they stop being a limit, a boundary, like, sometimes it’s almost like a manacle holding you back.

As a leader of myself leading my life, I want to lead a life of joy and one of the things that releasing old unforgiveness has done, whether it’s unforgiveness of others and unforgiveness of self, has really opened up joyfulness so when we do that, we have joy so a joyful leader’s so much nicer to work for than a miserable leader.

I was on the train the other day and the rubbish man was coming around with his stuff and he was saying, he said, humpf, he said, a clean train is a happy train. You’re all looking miserable, there must be rubbish to collect. I thought that was lovely. A clean train is a happy train. A joyful leader’s a leader we want to work for so how can you connect with the joy in your life? Well, by releasing the stuff that stops you from connecting with the joy in your life. It’s a good first step.

So, I hope that’s been interesting. I’d love to see your comments, your thoughts on the relationship between the inner leader and those things that hold us back, the beliefs and the emotions that hold us back.

If you want to release your inner leader, why not come to the Huna Live day, 23rd, 24th of February in Oxford. It’s a 2 day event. We do a lot of work on releasing those beliefs, we do a lot of work on forgiveness of self and others and we do a lot of work on energy and how to use energy to fire you because leaders who have no energy, it’s difficult to want to follow them but leaders who’ve got some zest for life, well, you want to hang around with those people so we do a lot of work with energy as well at the Huna Live so you can find out about that on secretartofhunalive.com slash, sorry, go back, secretartofhuna.com/live, you can find it there.

And for those of you who wanted to do the forgiveness challenge but for one reason or another couldn’t, we’re actually going to be bundling it together and putting it out so that you can buy it and you’ll have it, it’s going to be a 12 module programme but I’ll tell you about that when it’s ready because it’s very clear to me that that work is so precious, so many people have said what they got out of it and I want to be able to make it available to a wider audience, not just people who happen to have 12 days in February when they can do it.

So, take care, hope it’s been good. Have a great day, have a lovely Saturday wherever you are. Might be Sunday in some parts of the world. Anyway, I’m burbling so I’ll finish now and talk to you next week, bye.

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