Wisdom for your Week: Unique Self, Organizational Leadership, and the Destiny of Nations – Dialogue with Richard Barrett and Marc Gafni

Join these two exciting authors as they discuss the Uniquely purpose-driven life in a post-fundamentalist environment for the creation of a better world.  In this dialogue, Richard Barrett, author of What My Soul Told Me, The New Leadership Paradigm, and Building a Values Driven Organization, discusses the ways the soul gives us our direction in life. He gives an overview of the seven levels of the Barrett index and his personal values assessment and describes the soul’s role in connecting us to one another.  Dr. Marc Gafni, author of the recently published Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment and Radical Kabbalah (two-volume set), adds to their combined map the five selves from Unique Self development along with the three levels of evolution.  Marc also brings to the conversation the role of the Eye of Spirit or the Eye of Heart, which moves beyond the Eye of Sense and Eye of the Mind. When these frameworks are brought together, they create the context for a sturdy values assessment and a means for liberating individuals, organizations, and nations from entropy.  Richard and Marc conclude this dialogue with audience participation and two exercises that you won’t want to miss—one to discern Unique Self from separate self and one to find out what the Unique Self is inviting each one of us to do. Be sure to tune in for all three dialogues in this groundbreaking series:

Dialogue One, April 27 @ 10am PT (1pm ET):
“The Unique Self and Soul Activation: The Path of Personal Transformation”

Dialogue Two, May 18 @ 10am PT (1pm ET)
“The Unique Self and the Organizational Success: The Path of Organizational Transformation”

Dialogue Three, June 15 @ 10am PT (1pm ET)
“The Unique Self and Societal Development: The Path of Societal Transformation”

Richard Barrett (FRSA) is an author, speaker and social commentator on the evolution of human values in business and society. He is the Founder and Chairman of the Barrett Values Centre and an internationally recognized thought leader on values, culture and leadership. He is the creator of the internationally recognized Cultural Transformation Tools (CTT) currently being used in 60 countries to support more than 4,000 organizations and leaders in their transformational journeys. He is a Fellow of the World Business Academy, and Former Values Coordinator at the World Bank.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3C8XEHV6Zg

Marc Gafni: (starts at 43:15) The reason this matters is because we all live in a framework. Charles Taylor in one of the greatest books of the century says everyone lives in an inescapable framework. And, our frameworks are usually invisible. And, the way to shift reality, the way to shift the source code, the way to evolve love is to get the best framework possible. So, when we actually can work out a framework, which actually guides us, that we’re actually living in this framework, and it’s actually showing us what’s happening, we can actually expose the place where we need to untie the knot, we can expose the cultural entropy, we can do the fixing, the restructuring that’s necessary to actually move a person, an organization, or a society forward.

So, to be able to have the five selves and see how they play out in every organization, to see how they play out in the seven levels of the Barrett index, and to see how this takes place at every one of the three core levels of evolution actually gives us a gorgeous—and here’s where we get back to the beginning of the phone call—a post-fundamentalist framework. So, this is not a fundamentalist framework. We’ve now responded to Rick Warren as we set his framework up in the beginning. Rick Warren’s point is if you’re not in my fundamentalist framework, you don’t have a framework, and you’re kind of lost and adrift. Actually, what we’re saying is, “Wow, we deeply respect your framework, Warren, but actually it’s possible to create a world wisdom, a shared framework of meaning.”

—which is really, Richard, what we’ve just done on this phone call.  We’ve just put together—actually, it’s kind of shocking and exciting—we just put together the Barrett index, the three levels, the five selves, and actually created a post-fundamentalist framework which is sturdy. That’s exciting.

Richard Barrett: I would add, through what my soul told me, it’s measureable because we’ve been able to develop these values assessments, both for individuals, groups, like organizations, and nations to be able to measure where the individuals are, where the nation or organization is, and the evolution of their culture at this particular moment in time and where the people would like it to be, and so…. We can measure the false self of a nation, we can measure the false self of an organization.  And, you know, I’d just like to mention to our listeners that if you wanted to get an idea of your values and the different levels of consciousness and where they’re playing out, you can go to valuescentre.com/pva (personal values assessment), and you can do a free mapping of your values. Just pick 10 values that are really important to you, and a couple of minutes later, you’ll get some sort of feedback around, well, how does this look in terms of levels of consciousness?…

Marc Gafni:  Just two things: One is, Richard, what you said at the end is so important, and one of your many, but this one particularly I want to focus on—huge contributions to the great conversation is developing this very brilliant and creative way to measure false self or cultural entropy. And, it almost doesn’t matter how the measure, you know, exactly how the measure works. I don’t want to get into the metrics conversation. The point is the measure actually reveals things to people, and they do it, and it’s evidence based in the fact that it works. Evidence-based means 3,000 companies have used it, and have been able to kind of see, in a very deep structural way, something going on in the company in a way that was unable to happen before.

What we’ve done is we’ve exiled measurement. This brings the beginning and the end of the conversation together, and it really just sharpens the way we think about this and moves the conversation forward. It moves us forward in the way we think about this post-fundamentalist framework. What happened is we exiled measurement to the hard sciences. That’s what we said. We said, only the eye of the mind or the eye of the senses—empirical or rational-deductive—those are the only frames that you can actually measure in, but everything else is quote-unquote “merely subjective.” And, what we’ve said on this call, and part of my life’s work from my perspective and your huge life’s work from your perspective is, well, no, actually, the eye of the spirit, the eye of the heart, actually gives you real knowledge. It’s not fake. It’s actually real knowing. It’s not less knowledge than the eye of the mind. And, therefore, we can measure it. But, we don’t measure it using scientific measurement in the empirical sense. We measure using wisdom science. And, there’s a way to measure, to check—and measure doesn’t mean to add up, to count from 1 to 10. There are many different ways to measure. So, what you’ve done is really amplified this idea very beautifully of the eye of the spirit or the eye of the heart and said, “Oh, this really is a true form of knowledge.” Those three eyes I set up are actually implicit in all of your work. This is a true form of knowledge. This is a true form of knowing. This is a true reality. Therefore, we can measure it. And, by showing people that it can be measured in this way, you’ve actually brought it back in to the discourse as something that’s actually real and needs to be taken seriously. So, I just want to bow to that as a huge, huge, huge contribution, and then, today, as we put these two frameworks together—the three levels, the seven levels in the Barrett system, the five selves of Unique Self—we’re beginning to emerge with a very sturdy framework that can be measured, which just has enormous exciting implications.

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