The sovereign is anything but people’s absolute master (…).
In fact, he is just their servant.
They have clear, wide-open eyes. When they enter a room, their presence shines brightly. Nobody gets past them easily. You know such people, the ones who are especially alert, from the media or even from your personal environment. Very often, they are individuals who always have this “je ne sais quoi”. They have never lost the inner connection to themselves, mostly thanks to their parents. They have a goal. They know exactly what they want. Consequently, they do what they want to do. They don’t pass on an exploitative empire, but instead provide some service to society. For those who are connected to their own genius, the world stands open. That’s what separates the energetic from the powerful entrepreneur.
Intrigue and other games, such as exploiting weakness, playing people off against each other, the principle of “divide and rule”, in which others always have to take the fall for damages: Niccolò Machiavelli’s writing “The Prince” still serves as a legitimate instruction manual for entrepreneurs today that come and stay in power. The young Prussian successor to such a “prince”, Elector Frederick of Prussia, reacts in disgust to such manipulations and, together with his friend and Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, writes his “Antimachiavel” because he does not consider himself a ruler over the people, but rather their “first servant” (and thus their preceding idol). This distinguishes the genius from the man of power. There are three words for almost the same thing, some of which mean the opposite of each other. Machiavellian power is defined as power over others. True “power”, on the other hand, is what we call “energy flow”.
High-Performance-Leadership is power fed by energy. Leaders are people who draw energy from the eternally bubbling source of their genius.
In his Ethics, Friedrich’s contemporary Immanuel Kant quoted his prince’s bon mot of the “first servant” – in the context of his core message that every human being is an “end in itself”. Here “end” means “goal”. We all have our own goals, and a right to achieve them for ourselves. On the other hand, no one has the right to use people themselves as “means to an end”. This is Kant’s manifest of freedom. His ethics are the opposite of Machiavellianism, and the guiding principle of High-Performance-Leadership-Coaching. Leaders in this sense are people who pursue their goals, following only their brilliance, their intuition.
People who follow their inner destiny are called “geniuses”. However, these are not people who are ahead of others, but only ones who are lucky enough to be in touch with their very own brilliance, their inner destiny. Several factors for happiness are decisive here. For Mozart, the determining factor was that he grew up in an environment where music was the dominant feature of his life. It was then his intuition – as was the case with Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – that made it possible for him hear his compositions before he put them on paper. Just like Einstein’s conviction that space and time are not the ultimate categories conceivable; he spent his life proving this thesis.
Nothing has as much power as creativity
and High-Performance-Leadership.
By additionally downsizing expectations, high performance means reflecting critically on oneself instead of crawling over one another like shrimp in a basket. Even with racing drivers like Michael Schumacher, the environment was right to begin with – in his case, his father’s muddy go-kart track, where little Michael developed his talent lap after lap out of pure joy, out of his own drive – and the unconscious knowledge that he had found his “thing” in life. Within this context, the Schumachers and others are not pushing their careers forward in order to defeat others, but merely in order to be the fastest. Geniuses are in touch with a universal genre: music, sports, art, nature, it doesn't matter which genre. In Germany, the creative gene has been particularly dominant for centuries.
From Luther and Goethe and Schiller to the numerous poets and thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries, the creative source never seems to run dry when it comes to big ideas and concepts that encompass not only art and literature, but also other fields from medicine to philosophy. You could also say that, when creativity is combined with leadership, a Porsche sees the light of day ...
Visionaries see something in things where others see nothing. They do not look at their competitors, but have a purpose given by their higher self. This is what separates the high-performance leader from the run-of-the-mill one.
„On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, ‘Okay, this is the limit.’ As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.“
Genius is not a privilege reserved for only a few people. Every single person is inspired, sustained by their spirit. Most of them have just lost touch with it. It is a question of whether you still emotionally remember what it was that once made you float as if on clouds. In countless trainings, Sonja Becker has “empowered” people by leading them back to their genius. Yes, you read it correctly: “back”. Because genius does not correspond to an ideal of certain people, but is given to us at birth, unfolds in childhood and is only lost to most people as they march through a very wide range of different stages of life and systems. The retrieval of this personal brilliance then unfolds a kind of power, releasing huge amounts of energy. Physical “power” used to eliminate competitors eventually depletes, while a person’s very own energy seems to know no bounds. It is this energy that makes you spring out of bed at dawn, giving you (positively) no peace until dusk. Suddenly there is something that feels like being completely at one with yourself, a healthy restlessness, a dynamic feeling.
With Sonja Becker, the participants themselves are able to perceive their change. As soon as they get back in touch with their original goals, they feel their original freedom and their completely different energy, easily recognizable in the coach herself – Sonja Becker – and in the facial features as per Charles Spielberger’s famous trait anxiety model. The only difference is that, after High-Performance-Leadership-Coaching, curiosity dominates. After this transformation process, coachees feel that they are now following themselves like their own shadow, as high-performance leaders – they transform into self-actualizing people according to Maslow, who live from their own resources, lead a creative life, alert and at inner peace with themselves; such people do not act against others, but only for themselves. They do not want to conquer anything, but act in humility, considering their destiny. They do not act with manipulation, but organically, in keeping with the laws of nature and creation. Such people do not work for their ego, but as “first servants” of society. Their goals are not wealth and success (which are side effects), but a deep, inner satisfaction. If you find your way back to your genius, it will be hardly possible to stop you.
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