We’re learning in these early days of the second Trump administration that shredding a democracy can move much faster than do the democratic institutions that protect it. Executive orders that fly in the face of constitutional norms, target vulnerable populations, and sow chaos across the federal government can be signed in moments, yet take months to challenge in courts. Elon Musk’s siege of the Treasury Department can happen overnight, while the slower process of curbing his coup has yet to play out.
Given that chaos can be created much faster than it can be stemmed and that, in this administration, it is more a feature than a bug, we’re in for a run of it. It will challenge leaders not only in navigating toward their goals, but in addressing the human reactions to chaos—from outrage to fear, to health issues, disengagement, depression, and division—in customers, clients, co-workers and leaders themselves. Zen Leadership provides grounding that can particularly support leaders in this challenge by expanding their presence and ability to settle others. It helps them be present in chaos and even pre-sense opportunities they can bring into the present. This is the visible (or semi-visible) side of Zen Leadership, but there’s an invisible side, too: a rootless grounding in absence or emptiness out of which this whole flurry arises. From such depth leaders can sense one unnamable process going on, taking ten thousand forms. Grounding in presence helps leaders face a world of chaos. Further grounding in absence enables them to be a resilient, compassionate and wise presence in its whirl.
Grounding in Executive Presence
Grounding in presence can mean several things. It can refer to the quality of energy we exude that others sense in our presence—what in leadership is often called executive presence. In my years of executive coaching, I’ve heard those with executive presence described as being bigger than the job, having others’ backs and acting calmly in a crisis. I’ve coached many leaders on how they can develop executive presence and, for sure, it doesn’t start in the head. Rather, drawing on the proving grounds of centuries of samurai culture and Japanese martial arts, it’s cultivated both physically and energetically in the hara—our umbilical to life itself.
Zen Leadership is grounded in hara centeredness, as written about elsewhere. Other activities that can cultivate executive presence, often engaging hara, include centering breathwork, vocal training or playing a wind instrument, martial arts, sports, embodiment practices, physical role play or acting.
The quality of presence manifests differently, depending on the nature of one’s leadership. For a military leader or change agent, it may manifest as a command presence that inspires trust and courage. For a counselor or healthcare leader, it may show up as a healing presence that conveys care and inspires confidence. As this grounding in presence arises from one’s inner connectedness, as one connects with others, it helps others feel safe—even if they can’t describe why—as they feel connected to someone who’s connected to something greater.
Grounding in Being Present
A second, related aspect of grounding in presence is the sense of being present and staying in the present moment. Since the present will serve up many moments we don’t like, this calls one to face discomfort without running away into a headful of thoughts or scrolling a phone. The chaos of these days offers many opportunities for practice.
Grounding in being present is developed in virtually all forms of meditation and mindfulness training. It’s cultivated through the senses, for example, in tasting an orange as if for the first time or listening so deeply one senses the undercurrent to the words being spoken. It’s cultivated through breath awareness, which cultivates awareness itself and spreads to awareness of thoughts and feelings, how they arise and fade away, and how quickly one can be led down rabbit holes of triggers and assumptions from the past or fears and plans for the future and—oops—away from the present moment.
Grounding in being present is excellent training for being present with people, hence the emergence of such disciplines as Presence-Based Coaching, mindfulness-based leadership or the Presence Care Project. Being present is also at the heart of such collective practices as Global Social Witnessing, where stories of suffering and dislocation are shared in a circle of support. In addition to being supportive of the person sharing, one is invited to notice when staying present becomes too difficult and one escapes into distracting thought. The noticing itself helps stretch one’s capacity for being present.
As with these other methods, Zen Leadership cultivates being present through breath and sensory awareness and then adds the Zen discipline to not move once a “sit” (i.e., meditation session) has started. For a beginner, this is difficult to do for even a few minutes. But it becomes much easier as one learns to deepen breath, energize posture and hone concentration. Moreover, one gets in the habit of facing discomfort without running away, cultivating a fierce spirit that remains present for whatever chaos is thrown at it.
Grounding in Presencing the Future
Building off the first two, a third sense in which we can ground in presence is by conducting an emerging future into the present, which some would call the very definition of leadership. This sense of presencing is the ability of a leader to resonate with subtle signals in the field, in the “zeitgeist,” of something ready to happen and conducting it into the present. It is, for example, the hallmark of the Presencing Institute in their Theory U process which casts forward to sense a possible future and then backcasts to the relationships and next steps that bring it closer. It is the way of Becoming Supernatural, in Joe Dispenza’s terms, by developing clear intention toward a desired future plus elevated emotions (e.g. the joy one would feel when that future is present) to re-wire oneself to create it. Zen Leadership draws on aspects of both approaches, attracting a future by imagining it and then feeling into how one needs to change to become exactly that future. In all cases, when a leader matches the leader they will be in their vision, that vision arrives in the present because that’s exactly where that leader lives. As do all of us.
In the whirl of today’s chaos, presencing the future is an invaluable skill. We see much that we thought was stable falling apart. But the opposite is also happening: opportunities that weren’t there yesterday are showing up today, both from a business perspective and a human perspective: opportunities to serve in new ways, to heal others, build community, or push back on injustices. Through grounded presence and being aware in the present moment, leaders are more likely to detect signals they can act upon—subtle signs of a future that could become possible through them.
Grounding in Absence
Leading at the cusp of an emerging future might be likened to coming out of a deep fog and starting to discern objects. At first, we see nothing, then we sense something we cannot name, then we can name it, with increasing clarity as the fog lifts: a person, a woman, my friend, Sally. Or in the fog of facing chaos one might see: confused people, grounded people who are less confused, a way to spread grounding. This quality of presencing the future opens one to the boundless field—the indiscernible fog—out of which presence emerges, something mysterious and beyond naming, but pointed to by many names: God, Source, universal Mind, emptiness or absolute absence. As the Taoist sage, Lao Tsu put it:
All beneath heaven, the ten thousand things:
It’s all born of Presence,
and Presence is born of Absence.
While many disciplines lead to better grounding in presence, the hallmark of Zen Leadership is its grounding in absence. Absence is not just the space between notes of a song or the space between two people. Penetrate the notes or the people themselves, trace them back to their source, and they, too, are emptiness. This is not only an Eastern truth, but Western science arrived here as well. For many centuries, we tried to get to the bottom of what constitutes everything that’s present. Thinking there must be a bottom to everything, the Greeks called it “atom,” meaning indivisible. But divide it we did, into subatomic particles that were more like waves—resonances in the quantum field—that only presented as particles in resonance with our own process of perception. In other words, the bottom dropped out, leaving us vibrating in a vast sea of vibrations, the subtle origins of presence in the vast sea of absence. That absence is also our own nature, and our own presence is born of it.
Grounding in absence, this unmoving, unborn and undying essence of one’s being, confers some invaluable qualities for leading in chaos. The first is deep resilience, which has been explored in other articles and even entire summits. In sinking beneath the surface turmoil and resting in stillness, one is no longer tossed about by the whirl. One is no longer afraid.
A second quality that naturally emerges is compassion, not because we become “nice people” but because experiencing our absence lets us feel one-with not only our present self but all present selves. We feel our interbeing as if all beings were arising within ourselves. Our personal self no longer gets in the way of our whole Self and compassion is the natural result. Most of the chaos being created today is the result of leaders whose personal selves are blocking the channel to compassion.
A third consequence of grounding in absence that is of particular use to leaders in chaos is creative wisdom. Wisdom can differ from knowledge in that it’s sourced and sensed from something deeper than a congealed “I” that “knows.” As we become more fluid selves—vibrations in a sea of vibrations—we can resonate with energetic signals that, as hard-shelled individuals, we wouldn’t be the antenna for. Creativity arises because, returning to the fog metaphor, in getting beneath the way things appear, one just might be able to pull a signal out of the fog that lets them appear differently. As the physicist Max Plank said, “When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.” Grounding in absence lets us enter the fog of the unnamable and we might get it to present in a creative new way.
Grounding in presence lets one be a presence that grounds others, be present in the moment, and be able to bring a new future into the present. Zen Leadership’s further grounding in absence supports these processes with resilience, compassion, and creative wisdom. A world in chaos is yearning for leaders who are grounded in both.