Wake Up! Leveraging the Power of Awareness in Leadership & Life

I’m five months into a growth experience that has me leaning hard into my edge.  Since January, I’ve been on a transformational journey at HEROIC—a place where thought leaders and kind, determined, courageous humans gather as a community to create life changing speeches. It’s been an inspirational adventure, so much so that I feel compelled to share about it here. 

We just wrapped 3 months of script writing and have now shifted gears to in-person performance mastery sessions on stage as a cohort. The HEROIC team is made up of an incredible group of leaders in their craft of writing and performing that have been challenging us in the best way possible.  

You have no idea what you don’t know, until you are exposed to mastery at the highest levels. And holy cow, it’s been humbling, beautiful, and awesome all at the same time! The human beings in my cohort are sharing insights and lived experiences that are raw, powerful, and moving. I couldn’t be more excited, and frankly a bit intimidated (there’s my inner troll at work) to be sharing the stage and this experience with this group.  

While my speech is still very much a work in progress, I wanted to share a sneak peek of one small section:

It’s taken years… for me to understand. To recognize that I had been living and leading on autopilot.

And honestly? Most of us are. We’re highly skilled at it. So skilled, we don’t even realize we’re doing it. But there are real consequences to living this way.

So—what do I mean by autopilot?

We listen on autopilot—thinking about something else while someone speaks. Our minds wander or plan what we’ll say next. All the while, we miss nuance, innuendo, and often– what another person needs or really means– in the exchange. We even interrupt and hijack the conversation, steering it in a certain direction, which may or may not be the direction they wanted the conversation to go. 

We judge on autopilot—the situation, the client, our partners, kids, coworkers, parents, politicians, the girl on TikTok, the barista at Starbucks, the cute bartender at your favorite restaurant.  

We judge ourselves! Without pausing to notice the inner critic, to question our assumptions, to notice our narrative, our bias, to expand perspective or tap into Empathy. Compassion. Kindness. For ourselves and for others. 

We overschedule on autopilot—racing from meeting to meeting, task to task, with zero space to breathe, reflect, or consciously ask: What did I just learn? What’s needed right now?

We blame, catastrophize, get defensive, overwork, overconsume—on autopilot. Food, alcohol, news, social media. 

My favorite autopilot example is the time that I hopped in a cab heading to O’Hare Airport. Long before the days of Uber or Lyft, the cabby picks me up and I immediately make his taxi my office—papers spread out, head down on my blackberry responding to emails. I hop on a call with my boss and then with one of my direct reports who’s meeting me for our big meeting in a few hours.

We get to O’Hare. Cabby asks: What airline? 

I look up and see United, and I say: Southwest. And in that moment, the anxiety hits. OMG. Southwest is not at O’Hare. It’s at Midway—on the exact opposite side of the city.  

Ashley: OMG…can you take me to Midway as fast as you can???
Cabby: Sweetie, it’s gonna take us 2 hours at this time!

This guy just hit the jackpot with me… And off we race to Midway Airport. Needless to say, I missed the big meeting. Autopilot.

We replace our presence with distraction, again and again. And where does this all lead? To a constant state of reactivity.

Which has very real effects on our physical health. Our emotional resilience.  Our spiritual connection. And our financial success.

This isn’t just philosophy. It’s science. And it’s real. 

Chronic stress—the kind fueled by our automatic patterns—leads to disease:
Cancer.
Heart disease.
Autoimmune conditions.
Cognitive decline—Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Mental health disorders—anxiety, depression, OCD, eating disorders, insomnia.

Seventy million Americans suffer from sleep disorders. Roughly 70% of people between 20 and 40 sleep with their phones in bed—using them during sleep time. If that’s not autopilot, I don’t know what is!

We are running.
We are distracted.
We are stressed.

And we’re asking ourselves:
Amidst all this noise… how do I figure out what actually matters?
How do I connect more—with family, colleagues, and myself?
What am I even doing?
And… what if I don’t know the way forward?

Autopilot impacts everything:
Our health.
Our joy.
Our relationships.
Our purpose.
Our ability to effectively lead.

So what’s the way forward? Awareness.

This is just a small slice of a 50 minute keynote on, you guessed it: Waking Up in Life & Leadership! Getting Out of Reactivity and Leveraging The Power of Awareness. Stay tuned this fall for news on the finished product and the professional circles I’ll be sharing it with, live and in-person!  

Mindfully yours,
Ashley