Last night I dreamed that a young woman wanted to meet with me about transforming her life, and others also wanted to talk to me. I realized that being able to make internal changes, changes everything about how management is carried out. It is such a threat to past styles.

Before I learned how to do internal transformation work to help people make the changes that they wanted to make in themselves, I was never a threat to the old guard, to the old way of doing things. I was an annoyance because of my creativity, but not a threat. After I was trained and discovered how to assist people in their inner change work, I was fired by management in all my jobs on 3 different continents. The people I worked with always gave me glowing evaluations, but the management consistently attacked me.

You cannot control people in the same old ways if they have control over the inner landscape of their lives. As long as people are incapable of making changes the authoritarian ways will be secure and lasting, but as the ability to have control over the internal space grows,so also are old authoritarian ways crumbling.

To authoritarian leaders keeping people in a state of fear is essential to enacting what they want to have happen. When people learn how to overcome fear and go their own ways, authoritarian leaders essentially have no more authority. When the people who were formerly on the bottom, have the power of changing their own lives, they can simply choose not to be a part of the authoritarian schemes. It seems to me that the Baby Boomer generation first opened the doors to change, but they got stuck in looking for strong leaders. Generation X, people in their mid 40s, early 50s, was the first group to stop looking for the central authority or the one big star to make things work.

The days of a super CEO or a super governmental leader, or a big star for a team to do well, are dying if not totally dead. The best leadership for the coming era, now that people are learning how to control internal environments, will be based on cooperation with others. The one big star mentality that will save us still has a bit of air, but the rising style is more team oriented that encourages internal change.

Those of us who were discovering the dynamics of internal change suffered a lot in the past decades at the hands of self-interested leadership, but the small price we have paid for the longer term has been well worth it. The new doors are flying open. Change is accelerating.