Of course I’m taking about Boris. With each step on his journey he’s found to be wanting, he’s found to be lying, he’s found to be incompetent, he’s found to be making poor decisions, he's found to be out of touch, confused, passing the buck, over promising and under delivering, should I go on?

And yet millions of citizens in the UK voted for him to lead this country, to lead us into a pandemic of epic proportions, with an epic death toll, that is still rising every single day.

We gasped when even one person died from COVID19 and now we don't even bat an eyelid when the death toll totals 96 (on 20 July 2021).

Leadership in government globally has been the worst in decades, but how do we know this? We only need to look at Gareth Southgate, the England Football team manager or Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister. Why can they be outstanding leaders but our governments can’t?

It all comes down to our conditioning throughout life, how our parents and our teachers treated us when we did things wrong. Did they punish us, did they counsel us, did they support us through our fears and questioning of knowing the wrong from right? How did our teachers treat us in school, did they support us or did they punish us when we did things wrong? And what is wrong anyway, who decides what is wrong or right, is it society?

Society shows us how we treat individuals when they do things wrong. You only need to read Twitter and you will see millions of people venting and ranting about individuals, governments, corporations, friends and many others who in the opinion and the conditioned mind of the author do things wrong.

How does this relate to the invincibility of the U.K. government. Well Boris has been conditioned by his upbringing, by his parents and teachers, just the same as all of us, you can see it show up in his personal life, in his public life, in his speaking and presenting. He will be unable to change, to expect something different from him is our own delusional mind hoping for a different result from someone who has been conditioned.

They suggest leaders are not born, leaders are made. I would change that saying to leaders are conditioned. It is totally conceivable that many of us, just do not want to embrace leadership and what happens then is that the possibility opens up for individuals who are not suited to being in a leadership role, we only need to remember what happened in the USA with Donald Trump. Do I need to explain? I don’t think so, you know exactly what I’m talking about, Trump was a gift to the world, a gift to all leaders in governments and corporations to show them how not to lead.

But did they actually take the example? Did anyone of them change their style? Did men change their behaviour after 'Me Too'? Did any bad leaders get sacked and replaced by more empathetic and authentic leaders?

The answer to all those questions could be, maybe and yes in some cases, but I highly suspect and it's just a hunch that most leaders whether male or female I must add, haven't changed their ways at all. It's not their fault, it's the fault of their conditioning and therefore our collective fault as parents, teachers, leaders in business or government and society at large.

But there is help, there always has been help. One of the best pieces of help I came across was by David Rock, who published in the NeuroLeadership Journal 2008 a model called SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. The SCARF model involves five domains of human social experience: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.

Download the article PDF

Furthermore anyone with an internet connection and a mobile device can interrogate Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and many more platforms where the rhetoric is disastrous for the enquiring mind. Remember or in case you didn't know the juvenile brain, the frontal lobe, also called the executive doesn't fully form until around the age of 25.

This by The National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI):

"It is well established that the brain undergoes a “rewiring” process that is not complete until approximately 25 years of age. This discovery has enhanced our basic understanding regarding adolescent brain maturation and it has provided support for behaviours experienced in late adolescence and early adulthood."

Full article via: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648
Download the article PDF

All this means that our brain has encountered 25 years of conditioning, just as well that the brain is plastic, which means you can un-condition it and form new pathways, create new conditioning, but that won't happen automatically by just deciding, you have to become aware of your, not so pleasant, responses and consider them carefully, so you can notice them next time and the time after and the time after that. The more you notice them, the more you will undo them and replace them with different conditioning.

Tony Robbins, one of the masters of human development, calls it neuro-associative conditioning or NAC for short.
Here's a short article to explain: https://www.tonyrobbins.com/personal-growth/neuro-associative-conditioning/

So where is all this taking us?

Well, I would say to leaders in the world, get educated on leadership, your conditioned mind is not helping you or the people and countries you believe you are leading. Resources are a plenty, philosophies, teachings, lectures, writings and much more exist all over the place. The difficulty though is to pick out what is right for you, what will work to help you un-condition your mind.

I will just leave you with this final thought, a little saying I wrote back in 2004.

"Our thoughts make us do, when we do we become, when we become we stop doing and then we just are."

Enjoy the journey towards the unconditioned mind.