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LEADERS OF TRASH: Are you one of them?

How our civilized ideals of leadership trash the Wild with disconnection.

In the year 2013 the brightest men and women in the world worry about big words like sustainability, climate change and environmental pollution. Yet after all our thinking, talking and discussing, the real problems behind these words seem to be getting worse instead of better.

In her new, most heart-felt book yet, Pino Bethencourt Gallagher brings the big words down to the daily, Earthly reality of each reader. Provocative and full of unusual insights about leadership and personal growth, “LEADERS OF TRASH: Are you one of them?” pushes readers beyond abstract talk of world-size statistics, straight to the heart of the matter: how we each contribute personally to the waste, the trash, and the slow death of the living Planet Earth.

Like the spirals drawn on ancient walls of evocative caves by aboriginal nomad tribes, we are lured into the mysteries of Evolutionary design: if every animal on the planet instinctively cleans up its own waste to minimize predator threats, what went wrong with the Homo Sapiens Sapiens species?

Winning the race of Evolution made us leaders of every other species on the planet. Wanting to win the never-ending race of technological progress is distracting us from our collective responsibility towards the kingdom of Nature entrusted to us along with our regal crowns.

Hungry thinkers and passionate lovers of Nature are challenged to explore the rigid structures of thought, emotion and behavior that drive us to consume stuff we don’t need on a global scale. As we follow this innovative CONNECT spiral of leadership development and personal growth, we become aware of all the little things we do at work and at home every day that fill the world with trash.

Reminding us that leadership is a consequence of Evolution, Bethencourt invites us to relearn how to use the most perfect technology on planet Earth, our own Wild and unpredictable Human body, the way it was designed to be used. Thought provoking exercises and the latest advances in personal growth techniques tickle our civilized assumptions and tease us back into the Wild spontaneity we left behind us in human history.

If we are to leave a better world to our children, we are called to question our assumptions about civilization and leadership as we explore the secrets revealed through emotion: the true language of the Wild. By relearning the non-linear logic of the human mammal body, we may remember the wisdom or our earliest ancestors and recuperate a deep heart-felt connection to the living planet we emerged from.

“CONNECT is the journey into the unending spiral of who you are, why you are here, and how the Wild that is hidden in you can become the best and most beautiful essence of your contribution to a new TRASHLESS world. To CONNECT is to embrace the Wild within you!”

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LEADERS OF TRASH:

Are you one of them?

How our civilized ideals of leadership trash the Wild with disconnection.

Pino Bethencourt Gallagher

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Dedicated to the New Warriors of the Wild.

May we all find the courage and strength to embrace the Wild in our lives like true heroes.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE. Planet Earth calling Humanity: is anybody there? ............................................. 6

1.1 Born to be leaders ................................................................................................................... 7

1.2 Are you a leader of trash? ..................................................................................................... 11

Self-check exercise: Are you a leader of trash? .......................................................................... 11

1.3 Leaders who try too hard ...................................................................................................... 12

1.4 Unaware of bias .................................................................................................................... 13

Self-check exercise: measure your trash output ........................................................................ 15

1.5 Biased against the Wild ......................................................................................................... 16

1.6 CONNECT!.............................................................................................................................. 18

CHAPTER TWO. Leaders full of trash ......................................................................................... 20

2.1 Biased towards the top ......................................................................................................... 21

2.2 What is your bias? ................................................................................................................. 24

Self-awareness exercise: which is your key bias? ....................................................................... 25

2.3 Wasting time ......................................................................................................................... 28

Self-awareness exercise: Where does your time go? ................................................................. 29

2.4 Life as one big filthy theatre .................................................................................................. 31

2.5 Consumed by anxious denial ................................................................................................. 34

Self-awareness exercise: the drivers of your trash ..................................................................... 37

2.6 Willpower over everything .................................................................................................... 39

2.7 Fooled by the certainty of mechanics ................................................................................... 40

2.8 Way beyond sustainability .................................................................................................... 44

2.9 Spirals in the Wild.................................................................................................................. 46

2.10 The body is the new battlefield ........................................................................................... 50

Self-awareness exercise: explore your battlefield ...................................................................... 52

CHAPTER THREE. Into the Wild: exploring the jungle of our disconnections ........................... 54

Self-awareness exercise: What is your biggest ambition? .......................................................... 54

3.1 Leadership bias is the result of disconnection ...................................................................... 56

Self-awareness exercise: What are your patterns of disconnection? ......................................... 58

3.2 Interrupted experiences ........................................................................................................ 59

3.3 Unaware of disconnection .................................................................................................... 63

Self-check exercise: How do you breathe? ................................................................................. 67

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3.4 Who doesn’t have chronic tension? ...................................................................................... 69

Self-check exercise: Where do you hurt?.................................................................................... 71

3.5 The power of NOT now ......................................................................................................... 75

3.6 Infinite layers of leadership ................................................................................................... 77

CHAPTER FOUR. Ancestral disconnections ................................................................................ 82

4.1 Family rivers of unresolved emotion..................................................................................... 83

Self-awareness exercise: what do you know about your family’s history? ................................ 84

4.2 Stop trashing our parents...................................................................................................... 85

4.3 Spontaneous synchronization among mammals .................................................................. 86

4.4 Designed as members of a pack ............................................................................................ 88

4.5 Releasing interrupted pack dynamics ................................................................................... 91

Self-awareness exercise: Your pack dynamics ............................................................................ 94

4.6 The untold story of Humanity ............................................................................................... 96

CHAPTER FIVE. Patterns of CONNECTion ................................................................................. 101

5.1 Different journeys, same underlying patterns .................................................................... 104

5.2 The language of the Wild .................................................................................................... 105

Process of emotional release: READ AS MANY TIMES AS NEEDED! ......................................... 108

5.3 A self-healing machine ........................................................................................................ 113

5.4 The magic of involuntary movement .................................................................................. 114

5.5 Patterns of the Wild ............................................................................................................ 118

5.6 No logic. No planning. No time. .......................................................................................... 120

5.7 Key principles of CONNECT ................................................................................................. 122

5.8 Your calendar of invitations ................................................................................................ 124

5.9 Critical tools of CONNECTion .............................................................................................. 126

5.10 About gurus, professors, shrinks & coaches ..................................................................... 129

CHAPTER SIX. CONNECT: Embrace the Wild within you! ........................................................ 131

Getting started! ......................................................................................................................... 132

Atis Tirma! ................................................................................................................................. 136

Disclaimer .................................................................................................................................. 138

My sources ................................................................................................................................ 139

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CHAPTER ONE. Planet Earth calling Humanity: is anybody there?

Michael is an entrepreneur in the recycling industry who dreams of cleaning up the oceans and making the world a better place for future generations. He has dedicated his life to building a global company that will change the way people consume and discard stuff in their lives. His plan is ideal.

It’s so ideal that realism is a little bit absent. Michael tries really hard to make the right choices, choose the best employees, target the most committed clients. But he loses money. He kills himself raising capital and then he runs out of money again. He puts so much effort and resources into materializing the vision he has in his head that he keeps running the company into the ground. Unintentionally, of course. Just imagine his frustration and exhaustion after repeating this pattern for so many years!

Michael is the ultimate leader of trash. He applies everything that business schools and expert gurus can teach him. But he unconsciously wastes way more resources than his business ventures ever manage to clean up. He walks with his head hanging in the air and his eyes go blank when he gets distracted out of most conversations with everybody he knows. Handsome, smart and conscientious, he is like a hot air balloon full of wonderful ideas that can’t stay on the ground long enough to discern the reality and feasibility of each quest. And so, there may never be enough money or resources in the world to make his ideal plan a balanced reality.

In his heart he wishes to clean up the world. The problem is that reality never falls into place the way his meticulously prepared business plans predict. The same problems keep coming up again and again in different shapes and sizes despite his effortful attempts to learn and improve. Manufacturing operations and ad campaigns cost more than budgeted because Michael seeks optimum quality service, only to find fewer, less motivated clients than promised. Many market players come looking for his excellent products, negotiating him into doing all the work and taking all the risk. It’s like he attracts employees and allies that lean on him more than he can ever lean on them.

Michael tries hard to pace himself. He knows that in the past he has rushed into apparently great business opportunities in far too much haste, while he secretly hopes that the bad times are over. Michael truly wishes not to fall into the same old mistake, and that this time his company will thrive beyond all memory of financial scarcity. Something powerful inside him, however, pushes insistently for speed. He can’t stop himself when the big, strong, shiny sharks of the market swim over greedily to the scent of his tempting, yet only budding creations. He never sees it coming: he falls prey to their pin-striped elegant power traps, their well-practiced promises of grandeur luring him easily into their hungry jaws.

Suddenly he is lost in a whirlwind of endless work and activity: more risk, more money, more speed! Motivated by the glorious images of future shark-size success, he marches on ignoring fatigue. By the time the sharks move on to their next unsuspecting prey, Michael and

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everything he has built have been bled to near exhaustion. Any slightest breeze can topple everything over. Again.

Life is not easy for Michael! Still, he can’t quite put his finger on the exact moment in which his strategy blasts him through the stars and his vision takes off into space, leaving planet Earth and its negative, opinionated colleagues behind in a trail of magical silence and smoke. It isn’t just one single moment, you see, but many unseen warning signals in daily operations, millions of ignored or unheard words in conversations and meetings, and infinite repetitions of basic process mistakes that melt together into a growing fog of blindness to reality. Everything becomes unused and unwanted trash when blindness leads to failure.

Planet Earth is calling Michael, and though his mind tries to respond to the tiny little voice that makes it through the deafening noise of his own circular activity, his body betrays him into blind, compulsive generation of trash. Michael can’t hear the call of the Wild because, like all severely civilized people, he no longer lives inside his body. He is floating in the blissful stars of future income, profitable cash projections and global recognition to compensate his seemingly endless battle against the odds. Michael lives only in what his mind projects.

Humanity is so wrapped up in virtual clouds of clutter and intellectual problem-solving, that we abandon our physical bodies with their pains, unhealthy symptoms and unpleasant sensations. We can’t hear the calls of Nature, having disconnected ourselves from the unpredictable discomforts of Wild emotion in our bodies. When planet Earth calls, none of us are really here to answer.

1.1 Born to be leaders

Michael is only one of thousands or millions of bright business people and executives who are seriously giving it all we’ve got to make the world a better place. Born into a globalized culture of success and happiness at all cost, we try our hardest to reach what we’ve been told will make life worth living.

We study at top-ranking colleges and business schools. We climb corporate ladders, start up new ventures and get involved in non-profit work. We work out to keep our bodies fit, we worry about looking good and building a reputation for ourselves. We seek interesting friends, explore gastronomy and culture around the world, and do our very best to be good parents. We constantly strive to better ourselves in everything we do. Humanity may never have been so optimistic about what could be accomplished in a lifetime before this generation. We all want to be heroes!

But we’re fighting the wrong battle: the more we pursue ideals of leadership, success and personal perfection, the more trash we actually spew upon the world. The fact that world trash is increasing rather than decreasing, despite the amount of bright people like Michael who have invested their lives in ecologic adventures, is a subtle hint.

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That we are called to be heroes is not in dispute. That, we are. We are the first worldwide generation with the freedom to think beyond today. We worry about the global problems we will face tomorrow because our needs for today are basically covered. This was not the case for our parents, our grandparents or the rest of our ancestors.

But we’re not called to be heroes of glamour, success and pretty-perfect magazine covers. Our destinies are about something much deeper, more significant and all-encompassing to human history: WE are to become warriors of the Wild.

Like most truly heroic adventures, this sounds super sexy. It’s just a little harder, uglier and scarier than what we have in mind right now. Well…a LOT harder, uglier and scarier. The real battle in front of us, the battle that will clean up the trash on planet Earth, is unlike any other battle Humankind has ever fought.

Every human being is born to be a leader. This is something we forget because we are so busy comparing ourselves to other human beings who are above us in the ladders of power. To the rest of the species of the world, however, we are the leaders. We are the most dangerous predators, the biggest menace to the survival of entire ecosystems, and the most destructive force manipulating their Natural environment on a global scale. Anywhere a human being goes, he will be treated by all other species as ‘one of the leaders’ of the world.

Evolution made us leaders by preparing the human body for perfect adaptation. The Homo Sapiens Sapiens technology, appearing about two hundred thousand years ago for the first time, is the most sophisticated machine in the world. Millions of years of Evolutionary trial and error slowly molded a prototype superior in intelligence to any other species before it. Equipped with split-second, whole-body synchronization capacities, extra-sensitive situational sensors, and an uncanny ability to interact spontaneously with its wild environment through instant perfect adaptation, the Wild Human Body is unquestionably the most amazing machine in the world.

Who would believe that we drive our sublimely accurate vehicles as if they were cheap, run-of-the-mill commodity cars? Like all of our predecessors in the Hominid and mammal varieties, we were designed to leave no trace of our passing behind us for hungry predators. Yet we’ve somehow come to make it truly impossible for any species in the world to ignore our disgustingly trash-full presence!

Some say that Humanity is inevitably designed to generate trash. But the real problem is the lack of Humanity we’ve grown accustomed to: the paradigm of civilization and leadership we have created by rejecting the Wild in all its forms. To believe that trash is part of human nature may sound like a fun concept to some, but it is too basic to live with. And it’s certainly not an excuse for heroes to buy into.

Indigenous tribes, from the most ancient to those who still live in the Wild today, don’t leave any trash behind them. No other animal in the world leaves any avoidable trace of its presence. Only civilized humans, severely biased leaders that we have become, contaminate the world with trash. Trash is the symptom of how biased Humanity has become against the Wild: the not so fun and the definitely not basic.

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In our very impressive race towards civilization, intellectual development and technological progress, we discarded the Wild Nature that invests our bodies with the wisdom of evolutionary design. Our current society’s obsessive pursuit of unrealistic ideals of beauty, eternal youth, endless consumption and evermore wealth shows just how far into the future our mind runs, leaving the reality of our body, and its physical sensations about our Natural context, far behind. Forgotten.

We’ve become disconnected from our wild selves: distanced from our unruly emotions, doped against our unpredictable symptoms of sickness and protected from annoying sensations of physical discomfort. In becoming more intelligent, we discarded our innate, aboriginal wisdom.

We drive our bodies as if they were cheap imitations of the real thing because we feel so little that we can’t tell the difference. Our bodies, originally designed to adapt perfectly to each challenge, spontaneously responding with supple, agile twists to each curve on the road, are now rigid, tense, conflicted and hopelessly biased. We react to situations with chunky, awkward moves that go too fast or too slow, too this or too that…we lack grace and spontaneity, and we miss our target all the time.

We each exhibit different biases in our response patterns: Too much conflict or too little, too much networking or not enough, too much giving or too much taking, too big an ego or too small a one, too risky or too conservative…on the full range spectrum of any leadership skill we analyze, we each exhibit a bias that consistently inclines us towards one side or towards the other. Our bias is the excess or the lack of skill we repeat in patterns of error across situations of all kinds. Our bias is our biggest weakness as leaders, and the source of all our trash.

Somewhere along the history of Humanity, we stopped driving our bodies with the wild, instinctive spontaneity of our earliest indigenous ancestors. The intellectual sophistication of humankind led us to develop warfare in a way that broke a lot of the Evolutionary survival principles built into our bodies. As we got smarter we interrupted delicate circuits of wild mammal wisdom which were the key to our superior fluidity in the face of uncertainty.

Emerging formal rules of increasingly intellectual civilizations dominated and imprisoned old invisible (and mostly unwritten) principles of intimate communion with the mysteries of Nature. Discipline, willpower and individual intention became the new Gods of a species that got more disconnected with each interruption of tens, then hundreds, and then thousands of human lives. Each interrupted experience imprinted patterns of disconnection on human bodies which later trickled down from generation to generation. All the way down to us.

Today the patterns of disconnection we carry inside our bodies are so layered in complexity, that we have lost all spontaneous connection to the Natural environment that keeps us alive. We no longer understand the language of wild emotion our body uses to tell us what it needs. Oblivious to the mammal body’s pack-centric survival logic, and ignorant of the unconscious family secrets our bodies carry out of loyalty, we only see what our intellectual minds accept. Enclosed in modern technological civilization, we reject the notion that our body is, and always was, a wild animal.

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In our professional lives many of us waste an incredible amount of resources in patterns of disconnected behavior like Michael’s. Fooled by our minds into forgetting our bodies, we pour endless resources and efforts into faulty business ventures and repetitive corporate errors that become trash when they fail.

In our personal lives we create trash by consuming lots of stuff we don’t need, and hoarding useless clutter we can’t even store in our homes anymore. We buy stuff to fuel many dreams of the future that never materialize. We buy stuff to disconnect us from anxiety and negative feelings or sensations. We buy stuff to help us keep up false acts of happiness, both for ourselves and for our peers, even though the increasing disconnection from our bodies is actually making us numb. We identify an absence of real emotion with “feeling fine”. And there is no shortage of products and services promising to make us “feel fine” again every time we don’t.

We have become afraid of chaotic emotions and unintelligible symbolic messages, included in our bodies to guide us through uncertainty. In rejecting the Wild that lives within us, we have also rejected the Wild living planet outside our civilized cities, beyond the growing piles of trash we keep generating through our endemic disconnection.

THIS is the true battle we are destined to fight. This is the deep ancestral history we are asked to unravel. These are the mysteries that await us if we dare to look into the wild essence of our technologically superior human bodies. This is the kind of adventure that makes life worth living. This is the myth that will fill our hearts with pride of belonging to our people.

The heroic battles awaiting us are not outside. They aren’t in abstract strategic statements about planetary waste or in prestigious rankings. They aren’t in other people’s opinions about us and they aren’t about the products or companies we build while we are here.

Our unique quest is to become true warriors of the Wild. By learning to look inside our bodies we may again speak the language of wild emotion, and become aware of impulsive reactions that bias our response away from perfect adaptation to the context. By daring to feel deeper and more than we ever did before, we can rewire the old interrupted experiences encoded into our flesh as rigid patterns of disconnection.

By releasing the hidden wounds passed on to us, down the river of instinctive family loyalty, we may finally reconcile the wrongly driven with the unfairly wronged among our ancestors. In recuperating full connection to our emotions and physical sensations we will embrace the Wild within us. Like the most courageous heroes of all time, our conquests will give meaning to the painful sacrifices made by all those who lived before us, and gave us our lives.

I found myself fighting this battle since the beginning of my time. With each ambush and every loss I slowly sculpted this CONNECT approach for truly meaningful leadership development and personal growth. Having played every game of success, power and leadership in the book of technology-driven civilization, I was called to play no more.

I’m not smarter and I’m not better than anybody else. I just started fighting a lot earlier than most. I hereby invite you to read through “LEADERS OF TRASH: Are you one of them?”, my most meaningful book yet. Let my questions annoy you and my statements provoke you. Let

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my exercises help you get closer to the body you’ve been driving as a mechanical machine, instead of riding it like the finest, most loyal wild stallion…

…and feel the Wild silently seduce you until disconnection melts and heart-felt passion fires up: Abandon the ways of today’s leaders of trash, and join the ranks of the new Warriors of the Wild!

1.2 Are you a leader of trash?

The more we try to clean up the world with our current understanding of what it means to lead humans and other species, the more trash we generate. It really doesn’t matter if we work in recycling or we create music. It is the way we approach work, life and the very consumption of each minute of our time which promotes waste. From Fortune 500 CEO to best-paid fashion model of the year, the people who lead our world today consume many more resources than needed for the simplest tasks in their lives. Because most of us copy what they do, we collectively trash the planet even when we think we are trying to clean it up.

Self-check exercise: Are you a leader of trash?

Here is a simple self-check questionnaire to test the way you lead and live. Just answer yes or no to the following ten questions:

1.) Do you always strive to succeed?

2.) Do you try very hard to be a good person in everything you do?

3.) Do you race to tend to all your obligations every day and be as productive as possible?

4.) Do you defend yourself from any external menaces to you and what is yours?

5.) Do you have more clothes than you ever wear, more music than you ever listen to, more things than you ever need?

6.) Do you consume your free time in as many parties, entertainment offerings, gatherings and family & friend games as possible?

7.) Do you spend a lot of time planning ahead and envisioning the future?

8.) Do you apply discipline to your life, your job and your wellbeing with willpower and adequate control of negative emotions?

9.) Do you define yourself as a happy person and analyze the reasons for or against your happiness often?

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10.) Do you often try to help other people around you become better or feel better in their lives?

How many of these questions did you reply “yes” to? How does that make you feel about yourself? Please write down the thoughts and emotions that come to your head on a piece of paper or in a notebook somewhere. At the very least just make sure that you focus your attention on what is happening inside your head and body right now and you record it somewhere.

Most of us will answer “yes” to many of these questions, if not all. These ten behaviors reflect a collective mindset that has become prevalent in our internet connected world. As we each play the crudely competitive game of civilized leadership, we push these behavior patterns to outperform our equals. What’s more, we push everybody else to apply these principles as well if they want to integrate into our culture and be a part of our lives.

Twenty-first century civilization is so messed-up: We keep consuming amazing amounts of products we don’t need and can’t even fit into our homes or digest through our bodies, while we worry constantly that the Economy is shrinking and soon there won’t be enough to go around. We fight with ourselves about reducing calories or carbs when we eat, we force our bodies to exercise like obedient pets and we go to increasingly questionable extremes to maintain an image of youthful attractiveness. And we think that anybody who is not living like this really needs our help to get with the plan!

The ten questions above, which most educated people from around the world would reply “yes” to, portray a way of leading and living that excludes the body and its chaotic, unpredictable emotions and outbursts. And while we try to improve our leadership skills, we innocently assume that our leadership behavior is separate and different to the response patterns we exhibit in our personal lives. Yet we use the same body at work and at home.

We presume to control or isolate everything about ourselves that is not professional, that is, rational, planned, convenient. Leadership training in many corporations slowly degrades into a bunch of procedures, evaluations and word games so lacking in authentic emotion that they perpetuate mediocrity and a shared lack of humanity in the face of human-wide dilemmas. Fearful behaviors on every level of the hierarchy build shields against potential consequences of precisely such dilemmas. An alarming majority of first line executives in the world’s largest organizations don’t even train or get coaching.

Is it any wonder that our brightest and smartest executives ran our global financial industry into sheer transnational chaos by fearlessly crunching ridiculous numbers on sophisticated excel sheets that symbolized millions of lives, homes and family futures? Michael isn’t the only one with his head in the clouds! Disconnected minds are endemic in the twenty-first century.