soulful organisations

How I Show Up Matters

A Reflection Inspired by the ReSource Series session with Alan Seale & Leon VanderPol

At Back to Source, we created the ReSource Series as an offering of service and remembrance. It’s our way to build awareness around Building Soulful Organisations and to gather a community of leaders, coaches, and seekers who sense that workplaces can be far more than engines of output. They can be landscapes of emergence, fields of presence, ecosystems where human consciousness is nurtured, expanded, and expressed.

Our third session in this series was titled Presencing as Leadership, and we were graced by two luminous teachers – Alan Seale and Leon VanderPol, whose life’s work has shaped the evolution of transformational leadership and human potential. Their presence, wisdom, and depth held the space with a tenderness that felt both grounded and transcendent. And yet, what moved me most was not merely what they shared, but what awakened within me in response.

The session was held on November 18 – a date that rests tenderly in my heart. It is my mother’s death anniversary. For the last couple of years, I have taken the lead to ensure that our family come together on this day. We light a diya, share stories, laugh gently, cry softly, and hold each other in remembrance. It’s a ritual that brings comfort and continuity.

This year, I chose to host this session instead. It wasn’t an easy choice. I felt the ache of missing her, of not being with my family, of breaking a rhythm we had created to honour her memory. And yet, in a way I cannot fully explain, I felt her with me as if she knew that this conversation mattered. That my presence here mattered. That this work – this mission to support the flowering of human consciousness – is also a way of honouring her legacy.

The more I tuned into the conversation, the more I began to sense presence not as a practice to master, but as a life force – a quiet, intelligent aliveness that pulses beneath everything. When I am truly present, I feel myself aligned with this deeper current of life; when I am absent, I can sense how I begin to resist the very flow that is trying to carry me. Presence then becomes the meeting point between myself and the moment, the place where life’s intelligence and my own awareness recognise each other.

This is why how I show up is never a small thing.

Life is always in motion – subtle, fluid, responsive. It is constantly speaking to us, offering signals, insights and invitations. It communicates through our bodies, our emotions, our tensions, our ease, through the synchrony and friction of our relationships, through the unexpected openings and the gentle closures. Life is always offering direction, but only if we are willing to attune to it.

The question then is not, What should I be doing? But rather, Am I listening? Am I available to what life is guiding me towards? Or am I so preoccupied with my own plans, my own timelines, my own preferences that I overlook the subtle currents that are already shaping the way forward?

So often, we meet tension and try to resist or overpower it; we feel uncertainty and instinctively attempt to regain control within our circle of influence. Yet soulful leadership invites a different response – an invitation to partner with life rather than direct it. Life is infinitely wiser, more creative, more spacious than anything we can architect through effort alone. When we stop gripping and begin listening, when we stop resisting and begin sensing, we discover that life is not asking us to manage it, but to join it.

To lead soulfully, then, is to walk with life, not ahead of it; to trust its intelligence, not just our own; and to recognise that the deepest form of leadership is a partnership – a co-creation between our presence and the vast, unfolding wisdom of the moment.

There was a moment in the session – a simple, spacious, almost unassuming exercise that Alan guided us into where everything that had been shared until then suddenly dropped from insight into embodiment. He invited us to slow down, not just intellectually but somatically, to sense not from the mind but from the deeper intelligence that lives beneath the narrative. We were asked to tune inward, to meet ourselves without commentary, without performance, without preparation – to simply stand in the quiet truth of our own presence.

As I allowed myself to follow his guidance, something shifted in a way that was both subtle and unmistakable. I realised, with a clarity that felt less like understanding and more like remembering, that presence is not something that can ever be delegated, outsourced, or even taught in the traditional sense. No one can hold presence on my behalf. No one can “do” presence for me. And I cannot teach presence merely by speaking about it, describing it, or framing it in elegant concepts.

Presence is something that must be lived. It is an orientation of the whole being. It is how I inhabit the moment, not how I explain it. It is how I walk into a room, not the words I speak once I am inside it. It is the state from which action emerges, not the action itself.

Sitting there – eyes closed, breath deepening, awareness dissolving from the head into the heart, I felt the truth rise through me: that presence is not what I teach through instruction, but through transmission; not what I model through ideas, but through the quality of consciousness I bring into every interaction; not what I perform for others, but what I embody in myself.

This realisation did not arrive as a dramatic epiphany, but as a quiet, steady recognition – the kind that settles into the body long before the mind catches up. I understood, with a softness that felt both humbling and liberating, that the world does not experience me through the frameworks I design or the concepts I articulate, but through the field of presence I generate. And it is for this reason that how I show up matters so profoundly.

In that moment, soulful leadership revealed itself to me with greater clarity than ever before, not as the art of doing more, achieving more, or managing more, but as the art of being more deeply, consciously, and unapologetically who I truly am. It is a leadership rooted not in performance but in presence, not in effort but in alignment, not in the pursuit of perfection but in the courage to inhabit myself fully.

The journey Back to Source – the inward turning, the wholehearted commitment to our own transformation, is the only true doorway to understanding who I am beneath the layers, and from that recognition, learning to live and lead from essence. When I operate from that quiet, unshakeable core of being, I begin to understand what presence truly is. It is not a stance I assume, nor a technique I apply, but the natural expression of a Self that is anchored in truth.

The inner disciplines of presence are therefore not rules or prescriptions, but invitations – invitations into devotion, sincerity, and a deep commitment to our own inner unfolding. They call us into dedication, because presence asks us to return again and again to ourselves. They call us into diligence, because the refinement of consciousness happens through attention, not accident.

These qualities shape the inner landscape from which all leadership arises, so that presence becomes not an occasional practice but a way of living – a way of listening to life as it moves through us, a way of sensing the world with a more open heart, and a way of moving through our days with awareness rather than autopilot. In this way, presence becomes the lived pulse of our becoming.

As the session drew to a close, I found myself profoundly moved by the collective field we had created. There is something almost alchemical that happens when human beings gather with intention – a shared intelligence awakens, possibilities widen, and the space itself begins to breathe with a coherence that none of us could have generated alone. It reminded me that we are not designed to evolve in isolation. We are meant to co-create, to reflect, to resonate, to learn from one another’s presence. It is within the community, held in sincerity and openness, that consciousness truly flourishes.

In that shared field, I was reminded once again that leadership is not held in titles, roles, or accomplishments. It is held in presence – in the quality with which we meet ourselves, others, and the world. It is my presence that shapes the field. It is my presence that influences what becomes possible. It is my presence that determines how deeply others feel seen. And it is my presence – far more than my words or my methods that carries the truth of who I am into the world. Not in an egotistical way, but in a soulful, humbling, deeply responsible way, what Leon refers to as Light upon Light – for as we expand our capacity to be with Light, we begin to recognise the Light that we are, and in doing so, we naturally illuminate the Light in the other.