How To Rise Like a Phoenix

If you know someone who has hit a rough patch in life and worrying about the future — it is worth considering the `phoenix path to progress’.

The fable of the phoenix first appears in ancient Egypt and in Classical antiquity as a fabulous bird associated with the worship of the sun. The Egyptian phoenix was said to be as large as an eagle, with brilliant scarlet and gold plumage and a melodious cry. Only one bird existed at any time and lived to be at least 500 years.

But as its end approached, the phoenix is said to have fashioned a nest of aromatic boughs and spices, set it on fire, and was consumed in the flames. From the pyre miraculously sprang a new phoenix in a transformation from death to life.

So the phoenix path to progress entails a dualistic approach.

It begins with a self orchestrated sabotage/self sacrifice that results in a dramatic immolation of the old ways of existence.

But from the ashes of this psychological catastrophe rises a new transformed self that is stronger, kinder and more powerful in bringing positive change in the world.

Take the story of Andre Agassi.

In 1995, Aggasi was ranked the number one tennis player in the world, but a tumultuous personal relationship, a nagging wrist injury, and poor performances on the court sent him into a gaping abyss of depression. By 1997 his world ranking had plummeted by a stunning 140 notches. But he reimagined himself and soared back up through the rankings until, in 2003, he became the oldest player in history to reach number 1 again.

At his lowest point, Andre had an epiphany.

In his own words, “But I got to a point where I realised that just because I didn’t choose my life doesn’t mean I can’t take ownership of it.But epiphanies don’t change your life. It’s what you do with them that changes your life.I realised you had to plan your work and work your plan. That became my mantra.”

But a deeper transformation was unfolding. He was finding the strength of unconditional love and compassion through the process of experiencing loss.

In his autobiography Open he says,“you can’t spread who you are without being broken first. Sometimes, when you’ve been broken into pieces, you come back and give much more to people.”

The beauty of the phoenix path of progress is that if you can bear the pain …you get gifted with a light of unconditional love that grows inside you and slowly manifests in different forms into your life.

It’s this light that attracted his soul mate Steffi Graf into his life. Listen to his speech while recognizing her for being inducted into the tennis hall of fame to hear the depth of his love for her. It’s hauntingly tender.

Another fascinating change that he experienced was in his relationship with tennis. It was always a love-hate game for him. Even at the height of his fame, he is famous for saying he hated tennis. But through this phoenix reinvention, he started to see tennis as a vehicle for his cause which was to help kids to get a great education which he had started through his foundation.

“That’s when I saw children whose lack of choice was far worse than mine. I found myself feeling pretty blessed but compelled to confront the unconscionable reality of these kids — which is that, without education, there’s no hope, no choice, no breaking the downward spiral. Once I started to focus on that, tennis became a vehicle for me. I started to appreciate it.”

Another person who I think experienced a phoenix rising was Carl Gustav Jung.

Few have gone further in the exploration of the human psyche than the late Carl Gustav Jung. Indeed, between the ages of thirty-eight to forty-five Jung, himself, suffered his own phoenix pyre and purification.

In 1910 Jung was the blue eyed boy of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. Freud went as far as to call him “his adopted eldest son, his crown prince and successor,”

But after Jung published his book Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912 he faced a complete rejection of his thinking by Freud. Letters they exchanged show Freud’s refusal to consider Jung’s ideas. Jung broke permanently with Freud and resigned from his teaching position at the University of Zurich. In 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, Jung experienced a horrible “confrontation with the unconscious”.

When Jung emerged from this period of crisis, he brought with him the prototype of his most important contributions to psychology — the theory of the existence of a collective unconscious common to all human beings that affect all our lives through various universal “archetypes” (conditions that represent our inmost needs, desires and fears). This was encapsulated in his 1921 release of Psychological Types, one of his most influential books.

This was also the period when he focussed his clinical attention in the second half of life and on the process, he called individuation. (A psychological harmonizing process of all aspects of the self.)

What Jung achieved for himself was a degree of individuation that allowed him to recreate himself and recast his mould in service of a greater good of humanity.

The phoenix path is an augmentation of the model of Transformational leadership with an added under layer of transformational self-renewal.

Traditionally T.L is when leader behaviors influence followers and inspire them to perform beyond their perceived capabilities. Transformational leadership inspires people to achieve unexpected or remarkable results.

On the knotted flip side of my Crochet carpet in the clouds… I do confess it may not be a path for everyone.

1. It’s a path that assumes a crisis before a resurgence.

It’s a path that demands pain be a welcomed precursor.

Brent Gleeson in his Forbes article `9 Ways Crisis Makes You A Better Leader talks about his Navy SEAL career and how crisis drives leadership to shine.

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“As we used to say on my rugby team in college: Pain is weakness leaving your body. It strengthens your resolve and ability to bounce back. That is if you have the courage to get up, dust yourself off, lead and find new ways to win.”

2. It’s a path that demands more than reinvention —

It demands a reintegration of all your past resources and rewiring them into a new purpose.

It’s a path that demands you search and find your purpose from the encyclopedic volumes of your past under a new calling. A new purpose greater than the ones you have already achieved.

Marc Freedman in his HBR article sums it up well.
“After years studying social innovators in the second half of life — individuals who have done their greatest work after 50 — I’m convinced the most powerful pattern that emerges from their stories can be described as reintegration, not reinvention. These successful late-blooming entrepreneurs weave together accumulated knowledge with creativity, while balancing continuity with change, in crafting a new idea that’s almost always deeply rooted in earlier chapters and activities.”

3. It demands crossing three horizons.

A) relentless reimagining of the status quo self

B) melding with an emergent future

C) the courage to lead the realization of the blueprint.

It requires the creation of a new hybrid self that can not only imagine the future but also want to actively contribute to its realization through the light of creativity and compassion.

Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson in their book Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI outline the need for what they call “the missing middle” — a huge, dynamic, and diverse space in which humans and machines collaborate to achieve exponential increases in business performance. Here humans and machines are symbiotic partners, exploiting what each party does best and pushing each other to higher levels of performance.

This path has the potential to create a new breed of leaders that have the depth of technical and emotional expertise melded with a high degree of human love and compassion gained through drastic self-investigation to tackle the global pandemic crisis as well as assisted machine intelligence opportunities.