ISD Personal Leadership Workshops

Structure:

Duration: 2-hour sessions

Format: Interactive workshop blending teaching, reflection, group dialogue, and applied exercises

Audience: Professionals, coaches, and aspiring leaders seeking to cultivate mature, self-aware, and integrated leadership

Facilitation Style: Experiential, psychologically informed, compassionate, and systems-oriented

Session 1: The Inner Landscape of Leadership

Theme: Self-Leadership as Internal Integration

Objectives:

Introduce the concept of self-leadership as being your own internal leader

Map the psyche as a system (parts, subpersonalities, and the “inner boardroom”)

Explore how inner dynamics mirror leadership in organizations and teams

Activities & Practices:

Guided reflection: “Who leads within me?”

Systems-mapping of internal roles (e.g., The Critic, The Rebel, The Caretaker, etc.)

Group dialogue on leadership maturity and “being the adult in the room”

Takeaway Practice:

Daily 5-minute check-in with the “inner team”: noticing which aspect is leading and whether it serves the whole

Session 2: Self-Awareness and the Path to Self-Actualization

Theme: From Self-Observation to Self-Actualization

Objectives:

Explore Maslow’s hierarchy as a living developmental process rather than a fixed model

Identify personal growth edges and authentic motivators

Deepen multi-level self-awareness (cognitive, emotional, somatic, and systemic)

Activities & Practices:

Self-actualization mapping exercise: “Where am I operating from?”

Somatic awareness practice to identify internal signals of alignment/misalignment

Group reflection on the relationship between authenticity, growth, and leadership presence

Takeaway Practice:

Self-actualization journal: track moments of alignment and contraction

🜃 Session 3: Compassionate Discipline — Empathy and Internal Boundaries

Theme: Leading Your Inner System with Both Love and Strength

Objectives:

Cultivate empathy toward your inner experience while maintaining firm internal leadership

Learn how to set and maintain internal boundaries with unhelpful habits, patterns, and voices

Explore “the adult in the room” as an archetype of internal authority

Activities & Practices:

Inner dialogue exercise: The Compassionate Leader vs. The Inner Saboteur

Visualization: “Taking your seat as captain of your internal ship”

Group discussion: balancing empathy and accountability in self-leadership

Takeaway Practice:

Internal leadership protocol: 3 daily questions (“Who’s driving?”, “What’s needed?”, “What serves the whole?”)

🜄 Session 4: Leadership as Service

Theme: From Self-Leadership to Systemic Stewardship

Objectives:

Reframe leadership as a form of service and contribution

Explore how internal integration translates into clearer systemic leadership

Identify your personal “zone of genius” and its relationship to service and flow

Activities & Practices:

Guided reflection: “Where do I naturally lead through service?”

“Zone of Genius” discovery worksheet (based on Gay Hendricks’ framework)

Group dialogue on ego-transcendence and leadership maturity

Takeaway Practice:

Acts of Service experiment: apply inner leadership in one external context between sessions

🜅 Session 5: Being the Captain — Integration and Embodied Application

Theme: Flow, Presence, and Embodied Leadership in Action

Objectives:

Integrate all previous work into a coherent internal leadership model

Apply inner leadership tools to real-world organizational and relational systems

Anchor the embodied sense of “Being the Captain”—steady, creative, and in flow

Activities & Practices:

Embodiment exercise: The Captain’s Seat (anchoring flow state through posture and breath)

Peer coaching triads: apply internal leadership principles to current challenges

Closing ritual: articulating personal leadership commitments

Takeaway Practice:

Create a personal “Leadership Charter” summarizing values, boundaries, and purpose